Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Eduction

This is an amazing book. Along with the works of Walk Whitman and Emily Dickinson, it has profoundly changed my life and reshaped my values.Though the title essay appeared in 1998, which in terms of the digital evolution of higher education seems ages ago, it captures perfectly the direction education has taken in the electronic age. While much praise can be heaped on savvy innovators in higher education, too much has happened to ruin education and undermine the position of even those innovators in the past twenty years.Online "education" is probably the the most pernicious trick that "management" has played on educators since the current assault on higher education began last century. As David Noble writes, "universities are not only undergoing a technological transformation. Beneath that change, and camouflaged by it, lies another: the commercialization of higher education."Read this book. Take some action. Your education, your children's, our future's depends on it. But as Noble writes, it really may be too late: "a dismal new era of higher education has dawned. In ten years, we will look upon the wired remains of our once great democratic higher education system and wonder how we let it happen. That is, unless we decide now not to let it happen."

I read Digital Diploma Mills back when it first came out, and since then, I have seen many of the things Noble prophesied come to pass. As the face-to-face classroom is replaced more and more by its very poor cousin, the "on-line" class, the largest piece gets taken from the educational puzzle: real-time human interaction. Things will get worse before they get better, but either during the rebuilding of the American college education or while we are sitting amidst its ruins, Noble will be seen as the prophet who foresaw it all.

David Noble effectively makes the case against online education. He points out that the rush to "clicks" means not only the replacement of "bricks" but also the replacement of people (or, more accurately, replacing many people who think with fewer people who count, but don't think.Noble is a first-rate essayist-his "In Defense of Luddism" (in Progress without People) is wonderful. One problem is that Noble will have persuaded many readers after five pages, but won't have persuaded others after reading five volumes. A second is that readers could skim the basics of Noble's argument for free online (currently at [URL) and send a donation to the Monthly Review Press (a worthy cause). The book contains some added prose, but doesn't add much to Noble's argument.

I am neither a Marxist nor of the P.C. Left, but I taught dozens of on-line courses for various schools at all collegiate levels and to all kinds of students. Noble's assessment hits the bullseye. He wrote this book back in the early 2000s, and in the ensuing four years when I taught on-line, I saw his observations and predictions amply confirmed. It's why I don't teach on-line anymore. Sadly during this time, the abuses that Noble warned about became the norm, and pre-processed 'McEducation' came to be what on-line college students expected.