It’s always embarrassing when an institution founded on hyper-exclusivity, on the imposition of degrading, sometimes fatal, initiation requirements on desperate wannabes, begins to be shunned. It’s like that painful scene from Apollo 13 where NASA is breathlessly beaming capsule footage to no one cuz the nation has lost interest in the whole space thing. Only here it’s like What if they gave a lethal overdose and nobody came?

George, a UD reader, sends her the absurd, unsurprising disciplinary statistics on frats and sororities, for instance, at Indiana University. This headline captures it nicely:

Vast Majority Of IU Fraternities & Sororities Disciplined Since 2016

So, you know, having written about Greek dégueulasserie on this blog for years, I don’t need to revisit the abattoir here; I just need to update you on the faltering fortunes of these freshman fatality factories. As in, they’re faltering.

But here’s the thing. No one will ever actually kill them. They will stagger on, rotting brick Colonials inhabited by rancid remnants financed by hedgies who used to be members.

Or, as its originator put it, There’s no there there.

How do you make a university disappear?

In the age of the simulacrum, there are many ways.

There’s the process this blog has long called Online Makeover. You phone it in. You put it all online. You go the University of Phoenix route. Plenty of respectable universities are well on their way to this form of disappearance. Their professors outsource their grading to a drudge in India. They outsource the actual running – call it teaching – of the course to for-profit vendors under contract to their university. Vendor-provided “facilitators” do everything, and professors do nothing; they merely clock in to their online course occasionally to satisfy their supervisor that they’re doing something … For, as the language of an AAUP draft report on online changes notes:

Online teaching platforms and learning management systems may permit faculty members to learn whether students in a class did their work and how long they spent on certain assignments. Conversely, however, a college or university administration could use these systems to determine whether faculty members were logging into the service “enough,” spending “adequate” time on certain activities, and the like.

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And speaking of professors as supervised clockers-in, reason number two for the disappearance of the postmodern American university can be understood by considering what’s going on lately at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill: mandated spot inspections of classes.

To prove the legitimacy of classes, administrators have fanned out to hundreds of classrooms to verify that students and professors are present. Some departments even discussed bringing in photographers to document classes, according to one professor, Lew Margolis, a faculty member in public health.

As the real university ceases to exist (in UNC’s case, under the weight of hundreds of no there there courses for athletes and assorted others), professors must do their bit to persuade accrediting agencies their university does actually exist…

We DO believe in UNC! We DO we DO we DO we DO!

See, here’s what they’re up against:

[One University of North Carolina student took a class] in the fall of 2005 on Southern Africa that never met. He was a Florida native and undergraduate student paying out-of-state tuition at the time. He wrote the university seeking a tuition credit to make up for the education he did not receive.

[Julius] Nyang’oro was the professor…

“I visited (Nyang’oro) once, when he approved my topic and told me we would not have any scheduled meetings or talks, only that I could contact him if I had a problem,” Ferguson wrote.

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Universities aren’t universities because they can show that they have coaches; they’re universities because they can show that they have professors. Thus professors, at the postmodern American university, become – symbolically – the most important group on campus, routinely wheeled out to show the world that their university exists. While contract facilitators gradually take over the teaching, it will be the postmodern professor’s job to pace the campus pensively, ideally wearing an academic gown, as the professors at the College on the Hill, the central location in Don DeLillo’s iconic postmodern American novel White Noise do.

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Even when the postmodern American classroom exists, it may not really be anywhere in any meaningful sense. I’m talking about professors who do meet their students, human being to human being, but then instantly turn out the classroom lights, fire up the PowerPoint, put their heads down, and read out loud, while their students gaze at sports and porn on their laptops, play on their smart phones, or take advantage of the setting to get much-needed sleep.

The sleep thing goes to a third significant way in which universities disappear: They go from party schools to party businesses.
A professor at simulacral University of West Virginia explains the shift:

[T]he party school is [now] a business, and alcohol is part of the business model. Schools lure students to attend their schools with the promise of sports, other leisure activities and overall fun. Part of this fun, whether schools like it or not, is drinking. Thus, even as university officials want to keep students safe, they also need to keep their consumers happy. This means letting the alcohol industry do what it does best – sell liquor.

There have always been party schools; the new thing, the thing that makes the party school go from partying to disappeared, is the university as party business, the recruitment and retention of students largely as a function of the provision of alcohol. Places like the University of Iowa, which are basically already distilleries, have had to weather a little dissent from students and faculty, but you can’t argue with the revenues, and UI is clearly recruiting students big-time on the basis of its alcoholic rep. So the synergy here is hung over students plus PowerPointing professors… At the distilleries, there’s really no reason to hold any non-virtual class. These schools will go, or are going, online. The one surviving form of human to human contact at these schools will take place in their stadiums.

Gail Collins does a little sniffing around the online education trash heap. She notices that better-off kids get physical schools with human teachers and other students in them, while poor kids get for-profit onlines with grading done God knows how and by whom. One program outsourced its grading to India.

Does full-time online learning really work for disadvantaged kids who may be alone at home all day?

Dig: Full-time online doesn’t work for anyone, least of all, obviously, poor kids home alone. But let’s dump online on poor kids whose parents don’t know any better and let’s make a mint by trashing their education.

K12 Inc. is a big private online education business. It was founded by a former Goldman Sachs banker and by William Bennett, the Republican writer and talk-show host, with an infusion of cash from the former disgraced junk-bond king Mike Milken. Its teachers generally work from their homes, communicating with their students by e-mail or phone.

What teachers? Who are they? Are you sure they’re the people teaching the course? Are you sure the student is the person signed up to take the course? No. You have no idea, and there’s no way you can know. But you don’t care, do you? Here’s the deal: “[C]ompany profits have been soaring.”

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Here’s the skinny on for-profit online education for American kids:

As long as customers don’t care about learning anything, the model will work well. Profits will soar, and students will appreciate not having to go to school. As word gets around that you can get a high school diploma while doing jackshit in the comfort of your own home, the thing will grow like wildfire.

The model’s risk lies only in the possibility that more than a few online customers will at some point after they graduate sense a connection between their failure in life and their lack of an education. It’s not just that they can’t think. They don’t know how to be in a work setting, having spent the last ten years in their pajamas.

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A good summary of the scandal. With links. If you have any predisposition toward depression, do not go there.

Instead of selling PhDs in a snap through online for-profit outfits – the way we do in the States – the Germans take the cumbersome “doctorate consultant” route:

… The consultants demand anywhere from 10,000 to 30,000 euros to help aspiring doctorate holders with all the formalities and contacts needed to be accepted into a Ph.D. program – and more.

It’s the “more” that can cause problems, however. Doctorate consultants specialize in providing assistance in labor-intensive areas such as research and writing – tasks Ph.D. aspirants are normally expected to master on their own.

… [The firm] ACAD Write …employs around 250 staff and serves a customer base of 1,500. “Our clients are mostly managers, lawyers and others in the medical profession, who have little time. We help them optimize their time to earn a Ph.D….”

Well, the Germans will figure out that there’s a better, cheaper, quicker way to do it, and these firms will go under.

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It’s strange to think of a long, totally simulacral academic career, isn’t it? You buy all of your undergraduate papers; someone writes your doctoral thesis; firms like DesignWrite do all your publications; you outsource your grading to India… What am I forgetting? Is there any degree or activity associated with being an academic you can’t now just buy, or fob off on someone else, or onto some machine? Teaching? Teaching is showing films, having guest lecturers, organizing the kids into in-class discussion groups, having them present papers… And, if you really can’t avoid actually physically being in a room and talking, there’s always reading off of PowerPoints.

We don’t know who will write the definitive book about academia for our century. But we know what its title will be: She’s Not There.

The important thing is not so much the technological details, but the synergy between professor and student.

Professor: Grading is outsourced.

Student: What’s being graded is outsourced.

Almost all of it’s going to India. An emerging tertiary education sector in India is made up of people learning lucrative new things by way of playing the parts of American and Australian students and professors.

Expect stories to come out pretty soon featuring American professors who have outsourced their entire online teaching classes to Indian graduate students and professors.

Back when UD was a hippie, Theodore Roszak’s book, Where the Wasteland Ends, was an enormously influential attack on technocracy.

Technocracy won, of course, and, in the case of universities, we now see, in both the for-profit and non-profit realms, a move toward the onlining of most higher education.

At the moment we’re in a transition phase, with rapidly increasing numbers of face to face classes featuring laptop use by students and PowerPoint use by professors. More and more professors also make lecture content available online.

A moment’s thought about this in-class arrangement tells us it cannot last, that it’s only a matter of time before everyone realizes you can accomplish online exactly what’s being accomplished in laptop/PowerPoint/downloadable content classes.

If you’re right now in a class of this sort, it will in a few years disappear from the physical realm and become part of the metaphysical.

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The problem with online is that practically everyone cheats. Short of constant video surveillance of you in your home, it is impossible to determine that you are taking the course, and not someone else. It’s equally impossible to determine that the professor assigned to the online course is teaching it.

It is easy to envision a time when low-salaried drudges will play the parts of professor and student in this transaction – the professor-simulacrum will get a cut of the actual professor’s salary, while the student-simulacrum will receive a stipend from the actual student. One can also anticipate formal enterprises growing up around these needs. There is already a business professor at George Washington University who charges professors for outsourcing their reading of papers and exams, and their grading, to people in India.

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Let’s estimate that, with several years of popular and easily available online courses behind us, we now have ten thousand Americans walking around who received A‘s in statistics courses in respectable American universities but who did not themselves take the courses. That means ten thousand Americans who do not know the difference between a statistic and a spastic colon.

Off they go to the workforce.

What we’ve done, see, is we’ve mainstreamed the old diploma mill problem. The old embarrassing disreputable diploma mill problem — it’s a problem schools as burnished as UC Berkeley will soon be up against. No one taught the diploma mill course; no one took the course. Money was exchanged, a degree was awarded. Now you’ve got this person working for you who doesn’t know shit – you begin to realize – about anything.

Same thing with lots of online courses.

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Is this where the simulacrum ends? With the online high school statistics instructor who doesn’t know what statistics is, teaching statistics to students whose parents pay someone to take the statistics course for them?

No. It could go on like that forever. There’s no end to simulation.

Chandru Rajam is a business school professor here at George Washington University.

He manages a business — a grading outsourcing business.

Rajam stands ready to take all of my students’ papers and exams and send them to India for grading, thus relieving me of the burden of reading my students’ work. Which in turn removes the burden of my worrying about whether they’re learning anything.

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When I think of Chandru Rajam, I think of a spa. A spa where I lie down on one of those narrow firm beds and get a nice long hot rock treatment. The rocks feel funny when they first set them down on your back, but gradually — with the help of softly piped in music — you feel an all-enveloping warmth… Your muscles begin to relax… And somehow — it’s hard to put this into words … plus maybe it’s not the prettiest thought … But somehow your total relaxation is intimately related to your knowledge that while you are lying on this quiet table, breathing in smoke from gently guttering lavender candles, a harried Indian housewife is sweating through thousands of papers and exams — among them yours — that have been emailed to her from America.

And you think, “I deserve this. I deserve the guest lecturers who teach my classes for me, the ghostwriters who write my papers for me, the PowerPoint slides written by someone else that I read to my students, and all the other “edupreneur” innovations that allow me, as an American university professor, to be treated in the way I should have been treated all along. I’m a citizen of a wealthy, successful, first-world country. Since when should someone like me dirty her hands with grading? … I know my students understand this, because while I sit back and read the PowerPoint slides to them they sit back and watch films on their laptops… Bottom line: I really don’t need to teach; they really don’t need to learn. We have servants for that. At some point the students will check the slides, just as I’ll … you know… maybe scan the grading the Indians have done for me… Make sure they’re doing a good job. Meanwhile… ah. Another rock….”