From the Associated Press: The robot economy emergent. How long until the Rise of the Neo-Luddites? I’d be willing to wager $100 that within 5 years, we will see at least one case of someone’s vandalizing a robotics company headquarters (or some other place of high-tech employ).
In academia, the MOOC represents the first significant intrusion of technology into the academy’s stagnant, bloated labor structure. Colleges want to cut costs; students want to pay less for courses. MOOCs score on both accounts, so how can they be resisted? They won’t be. But from whence do the collegiate cost cuts come? In great part, from adjunct labor. MOOCs won’t hurt the tenured members of the academy. The Neo-Luddites in this sector will rise from the adjunct class, the class that will be affected by MOOCs. The California State University is now allowing students to enroll in MOOCs for their basic mathematics courses. If half of Cal State students opt to take College Algebra online, that spells doom–not for professors, who don’t teach general education courses–but for the hundreds of adjuncts who drive from San Bernardino to Dominguez Hills three times a week in order to teach five sections of College Algebra at a few grand per section. What once required thirty adjuncts now requires a single MOOC.
As the AP article makes clear, once these jobs are cut, they won’t return.
And I’m glad they won’t. The adjunct labor system is abhorrent and exploitative. It needs to go away. Though the MOOC means serious life-altering consequences for many adjuncts–ending in Neo-Luddite reaction–these consequences are merely penultimate. The fade-to-black is the end of (or, at least, the serious curtailing of) the adjunct labor system full stop. No adjunct jobs, then no more lop-sided supply of MAs and PhDs into disciplines that cannot absorb the supply. Students in these disciplines will transfer their creative potential to other, more productive sectors instead of being led on by low wages and the dangling carrot of a tenure track position. Academic departments will contract in accordance with demand for their product–fully employable MAs and PhDs–instead of in accordance with demand for laborers in an exploitative labor system.
Mathematics suffers first because mathematics is pure quantifiable content. It can be delivered en masse and student work can be graded easily with a few algorithms. However, because academic writing is highly structured and “already-mechanized,” it’s very possible for robots to grade student writing, as well. English departments won’t suffer second or even third, but they will suffer eventually. Writing instruction can surely be delivered en masse, so the only way for adjuncts to save their jobs (the only way for writing studies to contract modestly instead of totally) is for the discipline to make its content impossible to quantify.
