No, it will not replace teachers. We will always need teachers, but will the full-time, tenured, profession be replaced by temporary appointment faculty? Perhaps - it is difficult to predict the future but here are signs that the tenured profession is being eroded. According to data released by the National Center for Education Statistics in March 1998, part-time faculty currently make up 42 percent of the faculty overall with a ratio of 64 percent in the two year colleges. If you add in the graduate teaching assistants the percentage of people teaching that are not tenured increases another 10 percent in the four-year schools (see slides 2-4)
Other workers have been replaced by technology, in agriculture and manufacturing, for example. Drucker, in an article in Atlantic Monthly titled: "The Age of Social Transformation," notes: Industrial workers are being replaced by "knowledge workers," (a term first coined in 1959 by Drucker in Landmarks of Tomorrow). By the turn of the century one third of workers will be in jobs that require "a formal education, and the ability to acquire and to apply theoretical and analytical knowledge. And they require the habit of continuous learning." (Drucker p. 62, Nov. 1994) Charles Kerchner in his book, United Mind Workers: Unions and Teaching in the Knowledge Society, makes the case that teachers are knowledge workers and gives the education unions a challenge: How can you organize and represent knowledge workers?
"Education will become the center of the knowledge society and the school it key institution" What knowledge must everybody have? What is quality teaching and learning? "For the last 300 years (and perhaps 1700 or so in the West and Japan) an educated person was someone who had a set body of knowledge. In the information economy the educated person will be somebody who learned how to learn, and who continues learning." (Drucker, p. 66)
Robert Reich, former secretary of labor, notes:
America has the choice of two paths in the global economy ----the first path is toward stable mass production that requires cutting labor costs, through massive layoffs, wage concessions, and part-time work with no benefits. The second path involves increasing the value of labor, investing in training, and giving workers a stake in increased productivity. It means restructuring work from the hierarchical arrangement to work that is done collaboratively in teams. It also relies, above all, on a work force capable of rapid learning and critical thinking (Reich, 1988).
But the second path toward higher-value production requires reforming education. "[S]tudents must be motivated to love learning, to be able to work collaboratively in teams, and to relearn as their careers change. If education is modeled after a long list of facts that 'every adult should know' and standardized tests, we run the risk of producing robots adept at Trivial Pursuit, but unable to think for themselves and to innovate for the future." (Reich, 1988)
One of the books we have been reading this year is the 500 Year Delta: What Happens After What Comes Next by Jim Taylor and Watts Wacker.
These authors believe we have moved beyond the information age into the information economy. The economy of the last five hundred years ---- since the collapse of feudal states, and the rise of nations, and the discovery of the New World --- was a market with a "simple premise and a single goal . . . the creation of mass consumer markets." "At the end of the twentieth century, the new reality of economic organization has become obvious and the only way to survive and prosper in this new market is to satisfy individual consumer demands." (p. 9)
This in turn has created what Jeremy Rifkin calls the "just in time" workforce where workers are hired on a contingency basis where there is a demand for the products. (see slides 5-9 for Unreal Realities and other facts about the economy.)
Jeremy Rifkin, in his new book The Biotech Century takes a longer view. He posits that the "industrial epoch marks the final stage of the age of fire which began around 3000 BC in the Mediterranean and Near East when "people shifted from the exclusive use of muscle power to shape inanimate nature to the use of fire." It is through fire that human beings "began the process of recycling the crust of the planet into a new home for themselves." (p. 7).
After thousands of years of putting fire to ore, the age of pyrotechnology is slowly burning out. Fire conditioned humankind's entire existence. Now that we have fashioned our new home we face three crises simultaneously: a "short supply of fossil fuels necessary to keep the economic furnaces afire," a buildup of global-warming gases, and a decline in biological diversity.(8)
He describes the "operation matrix" that creates the framework for a new economic era.
At the NEA, we study the future and try to understand the changes that will happen to our industry. For the last four years we have been working on a future's project that has included dialogue sessions with faculty, staff, and students; with our leaders and staff; and with futurists, economists, demographers, policy makers, and legislators; reading books and articles; and teaching ourselves to think the web. We are now producing an interactive CD-ROM on the future of higher education to be used on campuses to continue the dialogue with students and faculty (the CD-ROM will be available in September 1998). One of the areas we are exploring on the CD-ROM is what we call "attack of the corporate mentality." What kind of future will we have if decisions are made solely on the basis that higher education is a private good and should not receive public support? We have envisioned campuses such as "Wired U," "McCollege", and "Warehouse Tech". We have also envisioned a future where society decides that higher education is in the public interest and that financial means should not dictate who attends college.
Now let's look at distance education in higher education today (see slides 8-26).
There are two important issues that arise as a result of increased use of technology in higher education. The first is quality. As Kerchner notes, we must take control of the levers of quality and one of these levers is control of the curriculum. It is the faculty that are the best judges of the content and quality of courses in their discipline. Faculty must be the ones to determine what is worth three units of math or science or history or what is needed for a BA or MA. We are in the midst of an explosion of new knowledge --- the Hubbell telescope, the Mars path finder, cloning, and DNA mapping, --- all are changing long held theories. New discoveries in education, psychology, sociology, engineering, and the sciences means the curriculum has to be revised at all levels of education.
A few years ago the chancellor at the University of Maine wanted to offer a full range of courses through distance education, but refused to bring the proposed courses to the faculty curriculum committees. It was a major issue in bargaining. The chancellor left the university over this issue. The union won the right to have faculty review of the distance education courses. There is some very good distance education offered by the University of Maine and it is controlled by the faculty.
The second issue is Intellectual Property. This is the unions' issue. (see slide 21.) It is NEA's policy that faculty own the rights to their intellectual property and they control their professional work. The market is hungry for courseware and while lecture notes may not have had much value, course materials on CD-ROM and on the Internet do have value. Our units at Florida State University and University of Hawaii have negotiated very good language on this issue. Right now there are legal exemptions for educators and for fair use in the area of copyright. The issue being reconsidered in Congress in light of new technological development.
Let's consider what our earlier authors have to say on this subject. Kerchner in United Mind Workers notes that: "Unions out to make it possible for teachers and groups of teachers to create and own educational technology. . . . And unions ought to fight the corporate take over of technology. If one looks historically at the textbook field, teachers once played a much greater role in the development, authorship, and control of textbooks than they do now. . . The capacity of the knowledge society suggest that teachers again need to become the creators of the materials they work with.. (p. 60)
In Biotech Century, Rifkin looks at developments in the area of "life patents."
These activities are being increasingly scrutinized by Congressional and religious leaders and the philosophers are busy with the ethics questions. You know that higher education faculty members are right in the middle of this research.
In the 500 Year Delta Intellectual property is defined as the data about ourselves. An economy based on individual customers rather than mass markets needs information about the customers-the information becomes valuable. And so, intellectual property, is personal information such as buying habits, home ownership, hobbies, religion, travel habits ---- your DNA (your genetic make up is valuable). A couple of weeks ago the Washington Post did a series on efforts to maintain personal privacy in a digital environment. "As privacy becomes rarer and rarer, it will assume greater and great worth, and privacy management will become one of the great growth industries of the twenty-first century." (p. 122)
In closing, I would like to challenge Harvey Mudd College to continue this exploration of technology issues in higher education. The next conference should focus on quality issues related to the utilization of distance education. Help us define quality in this area.