Open Access or Open for Business? | Peer to Peer Review

When corporations jump on the "open" bandwagon, we should check our wallets

Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN -- Library Journal, 03/04/2010

I read an article in EDUCAUSE Review this week that gave me whiplash. Every time I started to nod in agreement, the sentence would round on me and smack me in the face with something that seemed completely wrong.

The authors, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, offer a critique of higher education arguing for more collaboration, more engagement of students with their learning, and greater access to information. Sounds good to me; libraries are all about encouraging students to join the conversation, about helping them interact with ideas, about creating spaces for collaborative learning. But these authors think higher education today is a failure. To make the transition to collaborative learning, the market value of a course should be determined by student rankings—ow!—libraries should be closed so funds can be redirected to improving technology infrastructure—ouch! And higher education has to start acting more like a business.

More like a business? Ow, ow, my neck! Hang on while I get an icepack.

Do you want some neo- with your liberal learning?
As I was saying . . .

Given the meltdown of market economics into a flood of debt that has wiped out jobs and put people out of their homes yet has miraculously failed to extinguish a sense of entitlement among those responsible for the problem, I’m amazed that so many people still think public servants and public institutions are by nature inefficient and selfish and that business leaders are innovative and wise.

The problems higher education faces aren’t due to stodgy tradition, they largely come from applying market economics to something that should be a public good, not a commodity. Faculty feel they have to produce more and more research because productivity, not profundity, defines their worth. Students are coveted tributaries to the tuition revenue stream that grows more important as public funding is withdrawn. The courses those students take are being assigned as piecework to an increasingly contingent faculty who have neither offices in which to hold office hours nor living wages—all in the name of greater efficiency.

Libraries have been reduced from owning information they can legally share to renting it, and now that we’re having trouble scraping up the rent, we solve the immediate problem by buying one disposable unit of information at a time. As Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out in Nickel and Dimed, poverty means you’re forced to pay more for less. Talk about inefficient!

This is not the traditional university, this is the neo-liberal version of Higher Education Inc. Thinking more like a business is not the solution to the problems that treating education like a business has caused.

Tapscott and Williams are credited with writing many books, including Grown Up Digital and Wikinomics, and also run what the article calls a “think tank,” though when you go to the website, it appears to be a software company with a sideline of workshops and webinars. They argue that “governments should terminate their subsidization of academic journals in libraries and shift funding to building the digital infrastructure.” They quote David Lewis, dean of the University Library at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, who argues that scholarly communication is a public good and, as such, requires subsidy. "The most effective way to use the subsidy is to support open access, which funds the infrastructure and gives away the works to everyone," he says. But he also acknowledges it’s hard to get libraries to shift from paying for finished goods to supporting the creation of them.

Old wine in new bottles
From what I can tell, Tapscott and Williams don’t seem to think what libraries collect is very important, anyway. What needs to grow is broadband capacity and access to collaborative teaching software. The purpose libraries and scholars serve in creating new knowledge is also due for change; journals and textbooks will be swept away as knowledge production becomes—what a novel concept—collaborative! I guess they never heard Newton’s famous comment about standing on the shoulders of giants, or perhaps they thought that’s a tagline Google invented. They also believe that face-to-face instruction is an outdated one-directional broadcast channel, unlike Web 2.0, which fosters interaction.

Professors who want to remain relevant will have to abandon the traditional lecture and start listening to and conversing with students—shifting from a broadcast style to an interactive one. In doing so, they can free themselves to be curators of learning—encouraging students to collaborate among themselves and with others outside the university. Professors should encourage students to discover for themselves and to engage in critical thinking instead of simply memorizing the professor's store of information. Finally, professors need to tailor the style of education to their students' individual learning styles.

Critical thinking, learning styles, student-driven research projects, and discussion are hardly innovations, and offering technology as the answer won’t satisfy students who, year after year, report they prefer face-to-face learning and only want a moderate amount of technology used in their courses. These authors make a common mistake—they confuse the container for the content when they critique face-to-face learning as lecture-based and offer online learning as a naturally collaborative alternative. A lot of collaborative learning happens in traditional classrooms, while online learning often replicates the lectures-and-exams model. As one of our faculty members said back in 1997 when we were holding focus groups about the direction the library should go, “it’s not about technology, it’s about pedagogy.”

For love, not money
I’d like to return to what Lewis said: we need to change the way we subsidize scholarship. I looked up some of his work (which fortunately is open access) and read a 2004 article in which he offers the sensible advice that libraries free up their organizations and abandon old class distinctions, take risks, and operate on trust that colleagues can try new things without botching things up. He offers a short test to see if we’re prepared for disruptive technology.

1. Can you consider buying half as many books as you now do and investing the money in other ways of providing information to library users?
   [Since most of us already buy half as many books as we did a few years ago, I’d up the ante. Let’s get really dangerous and cut back on electronic journal packages and use the money to fund open access publishing initiatives in concert with our university presses. Now that would be risk-taking!]
2. Can you act on what you learn from freshman when what they teach you runs counter to what the faculty say they want?
   [I think libraries already do this; we spend much more time talking to freshmen about the library and how it works than we do to the faculty. What if we redirected our instruction efforts from freshmen to faculty? That could be seriously transformative for faculty and freshmen alike.]
3. Can you trust small groups in your library to develop products and services, or does everyone on the staff have to buy in to everything?
   [Excellent point—and there’s a fascinating article on how future leaders in the field prefer adhocracy to hierarchy or to internally-focused clannish organizations that crave consensus.]
4. Are you prepared to spend money to develop exploratory projects knowing that one in three will fail?
   [Since we already spend a fortune on OPACs that famously suck and commercial databases that are barely useable . . . what was the question again?]

In a more recent presentation Lewis points out some of the available Web 2.0 tools and how they could help us include users in doing what needs doing. He draws on Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks to point out that money is not always the ultimate motivator; people will do things for love. And he goes on to suggest that Web 2.0 tools allow us (in Clay Shirkey’s words) to “do big things for love.”

That seems like a more honest and appropriate motivation for making change in higher education. The problem is not that we are too traditional, so not responding to market conditions. We’ve bought into market economics entirely too much. We’re over-conditioned to think in terms of productivity gains and brand-recognition, too little rewarded for selflessness and sharing. Libraries and scholars have core values that could serve higher education well in an environment where big things can be done for love, not money. And that could be truly liberating.

Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her next mystery, Through the Cracks, will be published by Minotaur Books this year.

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