May 12, 2003	Monday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 9, 1424

University education in Pakistan is becoming a valuable commodity and a major source of revenue generation and universities are giving affiliations to private institutes like foreign companies giving franchise in return for huge fees. Universities and many institutes of higher learning are becoming the chief source of intellectual capital and economic activities. They are the life blood of knowledge-based industries.

This focus of attention upon intellectual capital has turned the attention of many of our industrialists as its chief source implicating universities and higher institutions of learning as never before in the economic machinery. As a result, there has been a proliferation of new business alliances, industrial partnerships and new proprietary arrangements among industrialists to exploit the economic opportunity.

Industrialists and their campus counterparts have been busy inventing ways to socialize the risks and costs of creating this knowledge while privatizing the benefits.

Commoditization of university education has resulted in the reallocation of university resources towards its research function to meet the new types of demand which has further resulted in transforming courses into course wares, the activity of instruction itself into commercially viable proprietary products that can be owned and bought and sold in the market.

Since university function is being rapidly commoditized, and is turning into intellectual capital and economic activity, universities have become too important to be left to the universities. In view of the new development like the commoditization of university education, many industrialists have created their own institutes of higher learning exploiting the new technology of education for commercial gains.

Commoditization of education and the new technology are not without economic consequences. On one side universities are becoming chief source of revenue generation but on the other side they are posing a great threat for the qualified faculty. The activity of faculty members is being restructured, via the technology, in order to reduce their autonomy, independence, and control over their work and to place workplace knowledge and control as much as possible into the hands of the administration.

As in other industries, the technology is being deployed by management primarily to de-skill, discipline and displace labour. Although the faculty and courses have gone online yet administrators have gained much greater direct control over faculty performance and course content than ever before. As a result, the potential for administrative scrutiny and supervision has increased in recent years.

Since the technology entails an inevitable extension of working time and an intensification of work, the faculty struggles at all hours of the day ad night to stay on top of the technology and respond, via chat rooms, virtual office hours, and e-mail, to both students and administrators to whom they have now become instantly and continuously accessible.

Corporate managers enrolled at the Lahore University of Management Sciences can download their assignments during their official travels any time any where they want. Experienced company executives do not have to attend classes with the younger lot regularly. They are part timers mature managers, not fully dependent on the faculty as the institute provides on its site adequate learning material for research and exercises for executives. It has all been possible due to the new technology of education.

There are implications of the new technology of education also. We have entered a new era of education which is rapidly drawing the halls of academy into the age of automation.

The new technology of education also allows for much more careful administrative monitoring of faculty and availability, activities, and responsiveness. Once the faculty put their course materials on line, the knowledge and course design skill embodied in that material is taken out of their possession, transferred to machinery and placed in the hands of the administration.

The administration is now able to hire less skilled, and hence cheaper workers to deliver the technologically prepackaged courses. It allows the administration, which claims ownership of this commodity to peddle the course elsewhere without the original designers involvement or even knowledge, much less financial interest. Buyers of this packaged commodity, meanwhile, other academic institutions, are able thereby to contract out, and hence outsource, the work of their own employees and thus reduce their reliance upon their in house teaching staff.

Once the faculty converts its courses to course ware, their services are in the long run no longer required. They become redundant, and when they leave, their work remains behind. To day the brilliance of faculty is broadcast online to millions without their participation. What they do is automated. What ever the loss in educational quality and whatsoever the consequences, education is bound to be automated and commoditized.

The new technology of education like the automation of other industries robs faculty of their knowledge and skills, their control over their working lives, the product of their labour, and ultimately their means of livelihood. The faculty has no choice but to dutifully or grudgingly place their coursework—ranging from just syllabi and assignments to the entire body of course lectures and notes — at the disposal of their administration to be used on line without asking who will own it much less how it will eventually be used and with what consequences.

At the York University, the untenured faculty have been required to put their course on video, CD ROM or internet or lose their job. They have been hired to teach their own now automated course at a fraction of their former compensation. A school in New York now routinely hires outside contractors from around the country, mostly unemployed Ph.Ds to design online courses.

Designers are not hired as paid employees but are simply paid a modest flat fee and are required to surrender to the university all rights to their course. The new school then offers the course without having to employ any one, university labour or knowledge workers or the so called faculty are under great threat of losing their monopoly of keeping knowledge as a secret.

Knowledge is no more a secret. It is a technology which can be standardized for large scale efficient production of graduates. Some companies around the world are doing detailed study what professors do breaking the faculty job down in classic Tayloristic fashion into discrete tasks, and determining what parts can be automated or outsourced. Course design, lectures, and even evaluation can all be standardized, mechanized, and consigned to outside commercial vendors.

The new technology is presenting a highly personal human mediated environment. The potential to remove the human mediation in some areas and replace it with automation—smart, computer-based-network-based system—is tremendous and it is bound to happen towards this end.

University administrators are coercing or enticing faculty into compliance, placing the greatest pressures on the most vulnerable—untenured and part-time faculty and entry level and prospective employees. They are using reward incentive and promotion structure to reward cooperation and discourage dissent.

At the same time they are mounting an intensifying propaganda campaign to portray faculty as incompetent, hide-bound, recalcitrant, ineffective, inefficient, and expensive. In short, in need of improvement or replacement through instructional technologies faculty are portrayed as obstructionist standing in the way of progress and forestalling the panacea of virtual education.

The new technology of education, if and when used, should be able to contribute to a genuine enhancement rather than a degradation of the quality of education. The economic implication of the new technology is that commoditization of instruction involves the transformation of the university into a market for the commodities being produced.

Administrative propaganda routinely alludes to an alleged students’ demands for the new instructional products. In fact, students want genuine face-to-face education they pay for and not the cyber counterfeit. Many institutes are desperate to create a market and secure some return on their investment in the information technology infrastructure.Thus they are creating a market by fiat, compelling students (faculty) to become users and hence consumers of hardware, software, and content products as a condition of getting an education whatever their interest or ability to pay.

The new technology of education is leading us towards the rather old era of mass production, standardization and purely commercial interest. What is driving headlong rush to implement new technology of education with so little regard for deliberation of the economic costs and at the risk of student and faculty alienation is the incessant pressure of progress and the fear of being left behind.

Universities are not only undergoing technological transformation, they are secretly pursuing the goals of commercialization of higher education as they have in recent years identified the university campus as a significant sight of capital accumulation by systematic conversion of intellectual activity into intellectual capital.