BY STEVE BUTTES

Last week the AAUP launched its Faculty Anti-Privatization Network (FAN) week of action and shared new resources 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. This blog post by FAN member Steve Buttes highlights how faculty intellectual property can easily become a casualty of for-profit practices in higher education.

It’s a big price cut, but Purdue administrators are confident that a lower-priced online offering will attract many more students to the program and offset any potential loss.

This is a statement from a recent Inside Higher Ed article on the announcement that Purdue University, along with other institutions, is expanding its online course offerings through a partnership with the online non-profit edX.

This move is somewhat surprising. Two of the three degrees are already available online through Purdue’s system based in West Lafayette, Indiana. And just last year Purdue acquired the failing for-profit entity Kaplan University. The idea motivating this acquisition was for Purdue to receive assistance from the for-profit corporation Kaplan Higher Education to deliver Purdue courses to nontraditional students, a service that Purdue itself was unable to develop or chose not to develop.

According to Purdue officials cited in the above article, the online engineering programs to be offered through edX never thrived at Purdue. Similarly, the acquisition of the online for-profit entity last year resulted in the creation of Purdue Global, which operated at a loss in its first year as enrollment did not increase to offset expenses.

However, rather than directing its attention to strengthening the institution, Purdue’s administration is pursuing yet another partnership that aims to do exactly what they said they planned to do when they created Purdue Global. Some consultants cited in the Inside Higher Ed article speculate that “Purdue is seeking a quick win through partnerships rather than taking a deeper look at why [their] online engineering degrees were not successful.” Perhaps more sobering is the article’s mention of an investment banker and higher education consultant who was reported as saying “there is little data to support whether the economics of these low-cost online degrees work.”

Why is all this important for members of the AAUP who are not working at Purdue?

Ostensibly these moves are motivated by a desire to expand the footprint of Purdue in delivering education to lower-income students in the United States and abroad, working adults, and older or parenting students. Many if not all faculty and staff share aims such as these, which are similar to those exhibited by dozens of universities across the country.

The problem is implementation in general and, more specifically, the administration’s view that it must take control of the curriculum away from faculty if it is going to be successful in achieving these goals. This is the point of concern that faculty across the country should share with Purdue faculty.

Let me explain.

Colleagues in AAUP’s West Lafayette chapter are organizing this year to advocate for a new intellectual property policy, one that clarifies the status of instructional intellectual property.

As higher education is transformed by online offerings and student socialization within the so-called “free-conomy” of the web, universities are looking to instructional materials created by faculty—video lectures, online quizzes, scaffolded learning modules, innovative templates for active learning online—to supply adjunct instructors, part-time instructors, or graduate student instructors (who earn a fraction of faculty salaries) to assemble and administer online courses with “content” often created by full time and tenured faculty.

The mechanism for doing this is to assert university ownership of a royalty-free license to use faculty-created instructional materials.  What this means is that the university can do what it likes with a faculty member’s instructional materials (“Instructional Copyrightable Works”) without additional compensation for that faculty member.

This is a problem not because of the need for additional compensation. Equity in salaries is a completely different question, which the AAUP has weighed in on recently.

Instead, the problem is that this has become a tool for the administration to implement a radical power grab that would see them take control of the curriculum away from faculty.

Here’s how it could potentially work:

The university could enter into a “Course Development Agreement” with a part-time or contingent faculty member, giving him or her access to all instructional materials that Purdue faculty from across the university system created and placed in a learning management system like Blackboard. The contingent faculty member would then use this content to assemble a course through a variety of modules, thus fulfilling the “Course Development Agreement.”

However, something happens when the contingent faculty member signs that agreement and uses those instructional resources: those “Instructional Copyrightable Works” become “Commissioned Copyrightable Works,” which only the administration control.

For example, someone might use a faculty member’s video lecture on, say, recent innovations on testing water quality in order to assemble a course on industrial waste management. The faculty member may be well-known nationally or internationally for her or his research used in efforts to ensure industrial polluters are held accountable. However, if the assembled online course were licensed or sold to a company widely known to dispose its waste improperly and often cited for evading regulations and testing, the faculty member would not be able to remove her or his video lecture from the course. The university asserts that it is an integral component of its “Commissioned Copyrightable Work” even though the professor did not collaborate in making the course or give approval for the lecture to be used in this new context, which profits the university in a way that directly contradicts the professor’s research, teaching, and professional work.

In other words, once a faculty member has created an instructional material and put it online, it becomes simply a “component,” raw material that can be used by poorly-paid temporary workers to convert instructional materials into “Commissioned Copyrightable” gold.

It is plausible to conclude that increasing enrollment is less of a priority than the instrumentalization of instructional copyright in developing “cut-rate” higher education programs. The strategy is to use ambiguous intellectual property policies to reduce faculty labor and faculty control over the curriculum to the status of a “widget” that poorly-paid workers in the new online education “assembly line” can use to assemble the degree programs like those Purdue Global offers.

The administration has already hinted that this is the case. In his response to a May 2019 editorial by three of my Purdue AAUP colleagues, Purdue’s chief financial officer implied that the model they have in mind for the future of Purdue is Amazon, which, while known for innovation, is perhaps better known for its exploitative working conditions and its destructive impact on local communities.

Indeed, under the current intellectual property policy, a poorly-paid worker could assemble a course with parts taken from across the Purdue system, which administrators could then sell or license to, for example, Purdue Global, which actively competes with programs at Purdue’s own regional campuses.

Purdue’s situation is instructive for other campuses across the country. Faculty need to demand through shared governance structures a review of instructional intellectual property policy. It is a key tool that administrators across the country are using to implement privatization plans within public institutions.

Addressing this issue—ensuring faculty control of the curriculum—is vital not only for the public good or to ensure dynamic and vital disciplines and institutions for future scholars in our fields. It is also an opportunity for faculty to question and turn back neoliberal projects for higher education in this country. By fighting against privatization of faculty-created instructional materials in schemes that enrich the few, we can build a higher education system that actually does work for all.

Guest blogger Steve Buttes is an associate professor of Spanish at Purdue University Fort Wayne and a member of his local AAUP chapter.