William G. Bowen. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013; 192 pp; ISBN: 978-0-69115-930-0, cloth $26.95 USD.
Review by Derek Briton
In his Ethics (I.3,) Aristotle notes: “a well-schooled man is one who searches for that degree of precision in each kind of study which the nature of the subject at hand admits.” Accordingly, the opinions of economists and administrators, who typically impose a rationalist calculus on all matters, can be easily dismissed as ill conceived. But in Higher Education in the Digital Age, William G. Bowen, who is both an economist and administrator, offers an argument that is not so readily dispatched. Bowen’s arguments are not only eminently readable, eloquent even, but also carefully constructed and well supported — he provides close to 160 endnotes, a compendium of information related to technology’s penetration of higher education, and his conclusion exudes an aura of benevolent inevitability, such that even those troubled by it will find it difficult to reject — more on that later.
As its dust jacket attests, Bowen’s monograph is based on his Tanner Lectures on Human Values, delivered at Stanford University in 2012. In addition to the lectures, the slim text includes the views of four respondents — two supportive of Bowen’s conclusion, two less so. Bowen’s hesitant embrace of technology is foreshadowed by an absence of hi-tech graphics on the book’s cover, signaling he is not a technology evangelist of the like of Clay Shirky, but nor is he a cynic of the ilk of Evgeny Morozov. The book can be characterized as a response to the pervasive demand (largely economic but increasingly political) for the “disruptive innovation”† of higher education. The solution Bowen poses is a guarded technological remedy, albeit while striving to avoid a simplistic “technological solutionism”‡ of the sort Morozov decries. The book’s focus is the U.S., but its implications are international, as recent developments in Canada, the UK, Europe and Australia attest.
Bowen’s initial concern, as that of many educators, is that technology-assisted learning is necessarily inferior to traditional classroom learning. This fear, as many of my distance education colleagues will attest, is completely unfounded. Even courses completed outside the confines of the classroom, whether reliant on print materials (as was once the case), or digital (as is now primarily the case), can provide learning opportunities that differ from but are comparable to those offered in traditional classrooms. That said, such courses can, without careful preparation, planning, and due regard to the pedagogical and communicative constraints imposed by their medium, degenerate into inferior learning experiences. But the same can be said of traditional classroom environments that are simply expanded to accommodate several hundred students (lecture halls), without regard to the pedagogical and communicative constraints of the new setting.
Persuaded by an extensive study that reveals technology-assisted learning to be no less effective than traditional classroom learning, Bowen abandons his reservations about technology and proposes its judicious application to reduce the spiraling cost of higher education. The challenge, as he sees it, is to bring productivity yields of the sort experienced in manufacturing and other industries to higher education. The problem is that higher education (as the performing arts and health care) remains a labor-intensive practice that resists mechanization, automation and digitization. Bowen cites the performance of a string quartet as an example: it takes just as many players and just as long for a performance today as it did a century ago, but the cost is much greater because performers’ wages are commensurate with those in other industries that have experienced dramatic reductions in labour and enormous gains in productivity due to mechanization, automation and digitization. This is where the inevitability of Bowen’s argument surfaces. In fact, it’s a conclusion Karl Marx (Capital, Vol 1, Chapter 25) himself would, and did, draw in his writings on the organic composition of capital: as industries mature, their organic composition of capital must increase if they are to remain productive; that is, the amount of capital devoted to labour must decrease, as that invested in the means of production (mechanization, automation, digitization) must increase. New technologies typically facilitate this shift: the water wheel, the steam engine, the loom, and more recently, computing algorithms. But Marx was writing explicitly about industries, and this begs the question of whether higher education is or should be considered an industry.
Bowen, as an economist, simply assumes higher education is an industry, sharing the same purpose and amenable to the same logic as the industries of finance and commerce. It’s a deft slight of hand, one the total edifice of his argument rests upon, and once the premise is accepted, the conclusion inexorably follows: the composition of higher education’s capital must be “corrected” if it’s to have any chance of survival. Such a correction makes complete sense for industries whose function is ever-greater yields through ever-greater efficiencies, but to simply impose this function on higher education is to overlook and frustrate the function it has long served: the transmission, inculcation and revision of values, traditions and obligations essential to the continued stability of society.
The problem is that this transmission and refinement of fiduciary obligation is not readily apparent (Talcot Parsons designated it “latent”), and proceeds through a process of value-based reasoning (what Max Weber described as Wertrational), a logic that, itself, is not immune to the judgments and critiques it generates. This stands in stark contrast, however, to the very readily apparent function and logic of those institutions whose function is to secure the material needs and improve the comfort of society: business and commerce. In this arena, there is no discussion of “why,” or “to what end” (value judgments), the question of “how” reigns supreme. “More” is always the goal as opposed to “less,” and a value-free, instrumental reasoning (what Weber dubbed Zweckrational) fast tracks the process. The function of industry and commerce is, of course, extremely important and essential to the future well being of society, but other institutions (government, administration and banking) have long functioned to temper untrammeled production in accordance with broader societal goals.
Jürgen Habermas characterizes the two distinct realms within which these diametrically opposed societal functions proceed as “Lifeworld” and “systems world”: the former comprises institutions tasked with a stabilizing and integrative function and a value-based, “communicative” reasoning; the latter comprises institutions tasked with a productive and goal-setting function and a value-free, instrumental reasoning. Habermas’ crucial insight is that many crises in contemporary society arise from using the systems world’s value-free logic to resolve problems in the values-based institutions of the Lifeworld (finance-dictated “austerity programs” that decimate public welfare and pension plans, for instance). As a consequence, the legitimacy of governments around the world is being challenged increasingly as they seek to impose the value-free logic of the systems world on the institutions of the Lifeworld — greater efficiency, increased productivity and balanced budgets, but to what end?
It’s ironic that Bowen, in a lecture series on human values, is completely oblivious of his efforts to impose a value-free logic on an institution whose task it is to provide society with stability through reflection on its values, traditions and obligations, a move that can only serve to exacerbate the “legitimation crisis” Habermas identifies. Bowen does express a commendable concern to maintain the quality of higher education (and this is another factor that contributes to the allure of his text), but with a Fukiyamian turn — “quality” is identified with existing forms of campus-based, residential provision, the apotheosis of liberal democracy, and it is the survival of this form of learning that he conscripts emergent learning technologies to secure — there is no consideration of alternate forms of quality higher education, especially online, that provide greater access or seek to further democratize learning. This is a serious shortcoming. Nevertheless, Higher Education in the Digital Age remains an engaging and informative text, one that is well worth reading, if for nothing else than the wealth of resources it provides on technology’s penetration of higher education.
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Derek Briton is an associate professor in the faculty of humanities and social sciences at Athabasca University and chair of the faculty’s centre for interdisciplinary studies.
Endnotes
†“Disruptive innovation” is a derivative of the term “disruptive technologies,” introduced by Christensen and Bower (Bower, J.L., and C.M. Christensen. “Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave,” Harvard Business Review 73, No. 1, Jan–Feb 1995: 43–53), and popularized by Christensen (Christensen, Clayton M. The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, Harvard Business School Press: Boston, MA, 1997).
‡The act of defining problems solely on the presence of an immediate technological solution. See Morozov, E. To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, Public Affairs/Perseus Books: New York, NY, 2013.