BY AARON BARLOW

One of my biggest fears for higher education brought on by the coronavirus crisis is that the confluence of forced online learning and a casualized faculty will be grasped by cash-strapped administrators to create a new and cheaper model for both course offerings and faculty employment. The new model makes tremendous sense from a neoliberal viewpoint and may have been coming anyway, hurried along, though by the pandemic. I hope we can avoid it but am afraid not.

Residential colleges and universities, so many of them reliant on and saddled with dormitories and expensive campus offerings, will still want students on campus. But they can save lots of money by converting classroom space to other uses, attracting students to activities beyond the classroom (an extension of what is already happening). This makes online classes attractive so long as other things will keep students on campus, everything from sports facilities and events, laboratories, cultural events, and the ability to mingle with peers. Oh, and the chance to interact with the more famous professors on the faculty.

To save money, this model is perfect. Faculty salaries can be greatly reduce by dividing them into three categories:

1. Marquee names;
2. Course creators; and
3. Course facilitators.

The first (and most expensive) will provide the draw and can be paid particularly well though only a few of them need to be employed at any one time. The second, a permanent faculty with few teaching responsibilities, will design the curricula right down to the syllabi for specific courses and will be paid at current levels though their numbers will be small. The third will be casual (gig) teachers employed on a per-course basis just as adjuncts are today. The beauty of this system is that it is, in part, in place right now so would cost little to implement.

The beauty of keeping large numbers of classes online in this scenario is that it will save money by reducing reliance on classrooms and will allow those buildings to be remodeled for more spacious labs and offices for the remaining full-time faculty and might even allow for greater office space (although no one would really care about this) for the casual employees involved in courses requiring an on-campus lab. Some classrooms could be converted into lecture halls, increasing their number and allowing more students to be packed into performances by the marquee names. Others could become digital labs where students could work alone or in small groups under the eye of the permanent faculty whose offices would be place strategically nearby.

The beauty of keeping the permanent faculty small is that questions of academic freedom for the actual teaching faculty could become moot with a little careful massaging. The third group, the teachers, would not be expected to be involved in research or in course design so would have no reason, in this line of thinking, for the protections of academic freedom. Their role would be as facilitator, carrying out what a permanent faculty member had programmed for them.

The beauty of retaining an on-campus focus is that the highly profitable sports business (and other profitable campus activities) could be kept steady and the identity of the school as an experience distinct from simply online education could be maintained in other ways.

The beauty of reliance on gig employees for the bulk of the teaching is not only that it saves money but the process is already well along. All that needs to be done to further it is to create a freeze in hiring of tenure-track faculty and, even more, of temporary full-time lecturers. This is particularly excusable at the moment for most colleges and universities are facing severe budget shortfalls. Hire no one but gig employees, refuse to renew contracts for lecturers and even tenure-track assistant professors, and the permanent faculty will reduce quickly, saving a great deal of money. All that would be needed, anyway, are enough to design the courses and administer the majors.

What campuses might offer, as a result, are MOOC-like structures for the current large lecture classes—but larger still and with the celebrity lecturers anchoring them live on campus so that students will not be taking all of their courses remotely. Gig teachers would handle the real work of managing these classes, of course, in smaller sections. They would also be responsible for overseeing the lab courses which would also be used as a means of drawing in additional students, especially as new types of labs are developed with the intent of keeping students on campus.

The majority of classes would be taught by gig teachers under the supervision of the course creators, somewhat akin to what happens today through online universities. These creators would be expected to teach some of the higher-level courses in person, further tethering the undergraduate experience to campus, but their teaching load would be minimal, leaving time for them to serve the institutions in more administrative capacities, another money saver.

From administrative viewpoints, all of this probably sounds simple and attractive, and I expect we will see campuses trying some variation of it quite soon. The problem is that, though it is seductive to the neoliberal mindset, it further reduces colleges and universities to simple business entities and turns education into manufacturing.

The real beauty of American undergraduate education is that it introduces students to as many as forty different professors over a four-year period, each professor an advanced—or at least fairly advanced—specialist in a particular field. The personal contact with these professionals allows students to learn about different career paths from people who know them intimately and areas of interest from the very people who are moving knowledge forward in those areas. This can result, among other things, in the development of avid learners. It also helps individuals understand more fully the web of knowledge in all its strengths and weaknesses in a way that processed education cannot.

The terrible beauty of extensive use of this model will be that the great American experiment in higher education will be over—and concentration on profit will move forward without impediment.