BY MONICA OWENS
Happy Halloween! For a real scare, check out the spooky stats from our survey of faculty about their perspectives on online program management companies.
This week we launched the Faculty Anti-Privatization Network week of action. It’s a week to raise awareness and build faculty solidarity around the increasing risks that online programs are posing to the academic freedom, shared governance, educational quality, and reputation of public and private institutions across the country.
We have two asks of faculty organizers and activists.
First, will you share this Faculty Anti-Privatization Network infographic on social media? You can link to our anti-privatization resources at https://onefacultyoneresistance.org/privatization/ or share our Facebook post.
Our goal is to recruit ten AAUP chapters to introduce and pass resolutions this semester about online education and privatization. Faculty everywhere see how corporate-run online programs are being developed rapidly, without shared governance. These online programs are often born out of contracts with for-profit, third-party online program-management companies, also known as OPMs. Some of the largest OPMs that you may have heard of are Academic Partnerships, Wiley, and Pearson. Unfortunately, in many of these OPM-run programs, faculty oversight of core academic functions is not as strong as it should be.
Additionally, administrators frequently emphasize increased access to higher education as a core value of these initiatives. When this happens, emphasis on the quality of education sometimes gets lost. In response, faculty are now stepping up to ask: If online programs focus simply on increasing the number of students, without real consideration for quality, are students really being well served?
Neoliberal forces are coordinating to defund and destabilize public services, and higher education in particular. That’s the purpose of the Faculty Anti-Privatization Network: to help facilitate a coordinated, faculty-led effort across the country to protect the rights of faculty and students in the online classroom and preserve higher education as a public good.
Please review the model resolutions here and consider introducing one this semester.
Thanks for your commitment to protecting the public good.
Monica Owens is the AAUP’s issue campaigns organizer.
The author misinterprets the technology ramifications. Technology may be a faculty disintermediation phenomenon, but it also has the power to be an effective pedagogy tool, and market growth factor, if thought through carefully and managed professionally. The UK is rather far ahead of the US in such higher education applications and development, and that may be worth exploring. The AAUP generally advocates a somewhat anti-technology, and traditional organized labor policy position vis-a-vis pedagogy. That is unfortunate, for at least two reasons: one, it resists inevitable change and cognitive development dynamics; and two, it robs students of experimental and related technology-mind extension opportunity. See UConn’s Susan Schneider, “How Philosophy of Mind Can Shape the Future,” and her “AI: Artificial You and the Future of Your Mind” (PUP 2019). Regards.
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