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This post is authored by  R. Thomas, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There’s a lot of talk these days about university reform, and coursing through it I see a beautiful and tragic dream of the future.   Dreams, of course, meld idiosyncratic images and mine blends Detroit, Mad Men, and the great speeches of Samuel Clemens.  We all know the story: Boosters of online education suggest that American higher education should rely upon a small group of superstar lecturers, computer-based grading systems and thousands of adjunct graders to deliver content to the masses. To benefit from economies of scale, some say we ought to have centralized national committees that decide what gets taught and who gets to teach it. Advocates claim online education will cut costs, improve educational outcomes, and bring higher education to underserved populations. Such efforts carry the excitement of novels for me. As in Mad Men , the details of work and visions of the ...

These days, every education reform movement seems to generate profit for multiple partners.  Take No Child Left Behind, the latest testing and accountability regime. As many scholars have documented, billions of dollars have flowed to corporations providing the tests, textbooks and "supplementary education services" required by that federal policy.  Advocates say this is appropriate since it means the market is functioning freely to provide high quality services, while critics note that absent government regulation (carefully limited under the law) public goods are quickly becoming private ones. In recent blogs about MOOCs, I questioned their business model, asking why supposedly cash-strapped universities (like mine) would choose to engage with them when there is no evident monetary return?  I received little response from MOOC advocates on that question. But the answer is becoming increasingly clear. Many universities have stated that MOOCs are the kind of innovative ...

Milton Friedman must be dancing in his grave at the moment.  In every economic crisis there's an opportunity to impose change, he professed, and no smart leader let such an opportunity pass by. Especially when it comes to undermining public goods. Leaders of MOOC movements across the nation, including here at home in UW-Madison, are telling us that this is simply the right time to take the leap into a transformed  space in higher education, one enabled by technology.  I have absolutely no doubt that they sincerely believe this.  And I have equally little doubt that most are entirely unaware of their place in history, and the degree to which they are acting out a narrative written many decades earlier. MOOCs are not primarily or even secondarily about bringing open, no-cost education to the masses. Instead, these efforts created by private elite institutions and for-profit businesses squarely aim to outsource traditional governmental functions in education, and d...