In an August 12 Op/Ed piece in USA Today Martin Cole and Stephen Rohleder touted the "fresh opportunity" government has "to re-evaluate its core mission and thereby develop a plan to use technology to do a much better job." The headline above the article read "Moving @ speed of government," a play on the e-commerce favorite, "moving @ Net speed."

The headline was clever, and had me at first believe the article was about the relationship between government and citizens in terms of the speed of communication. But it had little to do with the latter ("speed" is simply a synonym for "service" these days, it seems) and as I continued to read I ran across a curious version of the government/citizen relationship. The items that first struck me were ones based in business and Net jargon. "Core mission" (I hadn't realized there was one in any government, and I didn't think Cole and Rohleder meant self-perpetuation), "value proposition" (this one still has me puzzled -- I continue to think about something like a trickle-down line-item veto, a means by which I can direct every one of my tax dollars to only those endeavors I wish to support, effectively creating a hyper-democracy via cash, being lobbied, wined and dined by special interests -- but I digress), "repositioning" (this one was clearest given how often they play musical offices in D.C., but I don't think that's what they meant), "electronic government is cheaper" (my favorite).

What struck me most forcefully was the utterly consumerist thinking behind the model of government Cole and Rohleder believe we should create. Their piece is littered with "factoids" like, "citizens of Spain are tapping into their unemployment and disability benefits through the Internet." This is a good thing? They single this out? Might there be something else citizens could do with the Internet instead that might be a little more empowering in terms of their relation to government? And what does "tapping into" mean? Spending? Checking balances? In what ways does this make a difference for citizens? Or is our interaction with government supposed to be like that with any other bureaucracy, as it is with banks, or educational institutions?

Indeed, the language Cole and Rohleder use should be familiar to anyone working in an institution of higher education in the U.S. or in many other places around the world. The Internet has been mobilized to reinforce free market philosophy using rhetoric that draws on particularly deep-rooted American notions of enterprise, speed and customer service. Carey and Quirk's "rhetoric of the electrical sublime" has become the Internet's debased articulation. It happened to notions of online community (think of the trajectory from the WELL to eBay), it is happening to social institutions generally. Such rhetoric infiltrated U.S. higher education in the late 1980s, when it became clear that public funding would decrease and institutions would have to find alternative means of funding not only special programs (research institutes, centers, etc.) but mundane operations. Administrators looked to the corporate world for strategies to help them manage this shift in funding, and latched on to prominent (and in many ways offbeat and idiosyncratic) concepts like total quality management, re-engineering, customer service, and responsibility-centered budgeting.

But none of these concepts seem to ever be fully implemented. If they were, we would likely see how idiosyncratic they are, and move on in search of other solutions (though the problem still isn't quite clear, unless it's simply a need to have more money, which isn't a problem, but a passion among administrators). My personal favorite of these strategies is responsibility-centered budgeting, which, on most U.S. campuses, means that a department is responsible for spending its own budget, and to which my usual reaction is: No kidding? But on the revenue side of the equation, departments are given virtually no opportunity to bring in money apart from the traditional (and typically obscure when it comes to actual calculation) method of generating tuition revenue from the usual run of course offerings. Should one raise money in another fashion, it quickly becomes apparent that others will seek responsibility for the budget. For example, indirect costs are charged at well over 50% at most research institutions, but departments rarely see more than a mere fraction of those when grant monies come in. And never mind being "entrepreneurial" -- most departments literally don't have a means in their budget to account for money they take in. As I was told in a memorable meeting with an associate dean, in response to my tongue-in-cheek comment during a budget talk that since my department (Communication) receives so many misdirected phone calls from people trying to reach Telecommunications Services that we should hire someone who can fix phones, have them go out on service calls and charge the university's standard service fees, and in so doing we'd more than cover the cost of the new hire, "You don't have a deposit account in your budget." Moments later, when I lamented that I needed to have the budget increased to be able to pay for expenses imposed across the board by the university's physical plant, I was told "Those problems are squarely in your lap." It was then that I understood responsibility-centered budgeting: Whatever the budget situation, it's my responsibility to pay.

typical scenario: The scene: a basic university department main office. We see a desk, some shelves with books and phone directories, chairs. A lone work-study student sits at the desk. The phone rings. Student picks it up. Student: "Communication department, can I help you?" Voice on phone: "Hi, yeah, um . . . our phone's not working right, could you have someone come out and take a look at it?" Student: "Well, we're the Department of Communication, we don't fix phones." Voice on phone: "Uh, yeah, but you can fill out the work order and route it to your service guy, right?" Student: "No, you want Telecommunications, that number is 7-8888." Voice on phone: "Oh. Okay. Thanks. Um, you sure you can't help me out with this?"

So it is with the mindset most administrators have toward their university's adoption of the Internet across administrative and educational processes, though they view it strictly from the revenue side. The goal is not simply to "use technology to do a much better job," as Cole and Rohleder inveigh, it's to generate new revenue, find new customers, and it has little to do with existing educational endeavors or, more importantly, the existing student population the institution reaches without technology.

The expense of these efforts is viewed, quite incorrectly, as necessary (if not entirely inevitable) and largely one-time. Money is being spent on infrastructure, on the computers, networks, etc. (little of which is campus-wide, most of which is limited to the particular online programs being planned). But it is not infrastructure that will fuel the entrepreneurial engine of higher education, it is the labor of educators that will do so. It is our work, our courses, notes, illustrations, lectures, conversations with students, texts, pictures, voice and image that will be digitized and commodified for network use. What will our labor be worth? And who will own it? How will it articulate with our existing efforts to work with our students and with one another? What will happen to it when we leave one institution and go to another? I have long been the recipient of others' generosity in these terms -- when a colleague leaves or retires, for instance, and I am to teach a course they have taught for many years, they are almost always willing to share notes and other course materials. I do the same when I move on, or when a colleague takes on a course I taught last term. Who owns a curriculum or course anyway? An institution? I don't even believe a single individual does, no matter how long or how often they've taught a course. They are ours, collectively and individually.

Higher education seems to have taken up Cole's and Rohleder's challenge to "transform itself," but it has become mixed up along the way. Our educational institutions are not only in service of students, they are also in service of ideas and knowledge, and they do not own ideas and knowledge, no matter that they think they do. In the high-tech hunt for more students, we increasingly work for institutions that line up various "styles" of education (in the form of courses and degrees) to attract "customers" they can "serve." As Kevin Barnhurst and Diane Mutz point out in relation to journalism history:

The old journalism market had many newspapers competing for readers, whose purchases responded to particular stories hawked on the street corner. The writing needed a story line to carry the reader through to the end. The new long journalism developed as monopoly news markets became the rule in the U.S. . . . Journalism then becomes a reference tool, and consumers use the paper not by reading entire narratives but by scanning and collecting bits of information. The transfixed and captivated reader changes into a captive but autonomous consumer, and the news event changes from a compelling story into one of a line of goods in a department store. The market thus produces news meant to be referred to, not read. (1997, p. 48)

Teaching and education thus similarly become less about learning and more about choosing, less about effort and more about service ("Just tell me what I need to know," as I have heard more than one student ask of a professor). Cole's and Rohleder's views are, sadly, shared by far too many administrators in higher education. Though distance education initiatives often seem, well, distant, insofar as they often don't immediately impinge on anyone other than those who choose to become involved in them, they nevertheless involve us all. Unless we can build a critique of the structural transformations being brought about by the embrace of technology by administrators, we will see that distance education can also mean finding ourselves at a remove from the connections to students, ideas and knowledge that brought us to education in the first place.

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REFERENCES

Barnhurst, Kevin G. and Mutz, Diana (1997). "American journalism and the decline in event-centered reporting." Journal of Communication, 47(4), 27-53.