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           TEACHING UNDER POST-INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM:
     Exploring the Space Between Gutenberg and the Internet

     This is  a rather scattered and unfocused musing on the
conditions under which we work now and will work in the future. 
I do not pretend that it is scholarly, careful or systematic,
though I do not think that it is uninformed.  And I do believe
that the issues I hope to address ought to preoccupy us much more
than they normally do.  This talk was originally meant to 
focus on the topic from the perspective of my discipline--the teaching 
offilm.  My musing grew out of observations in several quite
disparate quarters--areas which have no necessary connection
except that my life touches in some way upon all of them.  And my
interest in all them has been fired by my concern with film, by
my experiences in thinking about budgets and resources in the
college, by my involvement in the Internet as a moderator for one
of the academic lists in the H-Net group, and in my attendance at
a couple of meetings of the Northwest Association of Schools and
Colleges.

     Take the first case.  As a film person, I have been
following the avalanche of media mergers in the last few years
with at least mild interest and unease.  In the space of a few
months, mainly in the summer and fall of last year, Time-Warner
(already a multi-media giant) merged with Viacom, bringing
together print media, film production and a cable television
market under one roof.  Disney merged with Cap Cities ABC,
joining a major film production company and one of the major
television networks.  Rupert Murdoch acquired 20th Century Fox
and Metromedia.  Westinghouse (a major electronics manufacturer
and defence contractor) bought CBS.  Sony had bought Columbia
Pictures the year before.  And Stephen Spielberg, David Geffin
and Jeffrey Katzenberg had joined forces to create Dreamworks. 
As this was happening, Congress passed and the president signed
the telecommunications bill which eliminated a number of
regulatory barriers to the accumulation of media power.  And in
fact these mergers themselves had been made possible by a process
begun under the Bush administration but continued by the Clinton
adminstration whereby the FCC abolished what were known as the
fin/syn rules adopted in 1970, rules which were adopted
specifically to prevent common ownership of film production
studios and television networks.  We have, in the last year and a
half, witnessed a consolidation of media power that is arguably
unprecedented in this century.

     Take the second case.  When I was back in Maryland at the
fall meeting of the Literature/Film Association in Nov./Dec. of
1995, a great deal of hallway conversation had to do with events
then taking place within the Maryland higher education system. 
The chancellor of the system, facing the same kinds of budget
constraints that public higher education has faced nationally,
had concluded that technology offered effective means to achieve
budget reductions and greater efficiency.  Under the scheme he
was advancing for discussion, many courses, particularly lower
level courses in the first two years, would no longer be taught
at the state college and community college campuses.  Instead, a
single course would be taught at the University of Maryland and
that course would be beamed out, via satellite, to the other
campuses.  Faculty at the secondary campuses could then be
replaced by what the plan called Subject Matter Experts
(hereafter SME's).  SME's would turn the television on and off,
lead discussions and grade papers--rather the job that graduate
assistants perform in many places.  In essence, technology would
allow the state to buy down the cost of labor in a relatively
obvious way.  You can imagine the reaction the scheme was getting
from faculty at the Maryland campuses, particularly those faculty
not from the University.

     Take a third case.  When I attended the meeting of the NWASC
just a couple of weeks after the fall LFA meeting, the hot topic
was distance learning.  We had multiple presentations on distance
learning schemes in the Northwest--schemes which relied on the
Internet, on satellite transmission, on faxes and phone
connections often in concert with video to deliver instruction to
students remote from the campus.  Thinking in this area was most
advanced among the schools east of the Cascades, where the
relative lack of concentrated population made schools look for
markets among students unable to live on or near a traditional
campus.  Although the presentations did not suggest anything
quite like the Maryland scheme, I was curious to see if there was
any evidence of obvious budget competition between the university
and the other schools in the system resembling the situation in
Maryland.

     One of the presenters was Jane Jarvis, the president of
Evergreen, and I approached her after her presentation.  I told
her what I had heard of the academic politics in Maryland, and
asked her if she felt that anything similar was on the horizon in
Washington.  She said that she hadn't heard of any schemes like
that in Washington, but she suggested that she had been at a
meeting just a few weeks before at Boeing that I might be
interested in.  Boeing had invited a group which included her to
a presentation of a new market scheme they are developing.  They
have long been interested in education, since they must provide
initial and continuing education for a large group of employees,
and they feel that they have learned how to do it well.  They
have developed courses, delivered primarily through video, which
they plan to market for profit.  It is unclear to me whether the
courses that they are discussing might be credit-granting
courses, but conceivably they could be, if they were accredited. 
And it should be apparent to everyone that Boeing is not
necessarily likely to be the first, and certainly is not the only
major corporation to be thinking in this direction.

     And a final case.  In June of 1995, the Western Governors
Association began to discuss the sharing of resources to develop
a Virtual University.  The idea was born out of the fact that
distance learning courses are capital intensive, and require
substantial funding upfront to produce, although they can be
delivered eventually at relatively low cost to large numbers of
people.  Therefore the governors decided that collaboration would
eliminate expensive duplication and allow for coordination of
efforts.  They drew up a quite detailed plan and timetable for
implementation.  It would include the development of a virtual
catalog of courses drawn from a wide variety of resources
throughout the region--colleges and universities, both public and
private, as well as other providers of instruction as well.  It
would be an accredited, degree-granting institution, which they
describe as market-oriented.  They see the virtual university as
a kind of broker, bringing together the universities and the
corporate world.  So, the plans for accrediting courses like
Boeing's are already moving ahead.
 
     Now let me step back from these cases a moment and draw a
few kinds of connections.  Clearly we are witnessing a very rapid
consolidation of several parallel technologies--photography,
cinema, sound reproduction, radio and television transmission,
telephone communications systems, traditional print media and
finally electronic data processing (which is now manifesting
itself as the Internet and the World Wide Web).  Our culture, at
least apart from certain specialized areas of the academy, has
continued to think and to speak of these as if they were simply
devices for reproducing visual and aural stimuli--as if all that
they did was to transmit the world from a remote location to us. 
The web, people say, brings the world to our fingertips.

     But of course (and this is what much theoretical writing has
been pointing out for at least 20 years), this sense that these
media merely reproduce the real world for us is a dangerous
illusion, and these devices present us not with reality, but with
a similacrum of reality.  The commercial cinema, for example, as
Jean Baudry and many others have reminded us, is based upon the
systematic suppression of awareness in the audience of the signs
of its own production, concealing evidence of how the image is a
construct, rather than an accurate and direct impression.  Yet
film, and the artifacts of these other forms of data
transmission, have always been presented to us a vehicles for
making experience available that was not available before;  the
cinema and television claim to give aural and visual evidence of
experience that most people could never have directly, and they
suggest that they capture on film and tape the sounds and images
of ordinary and extraordinary experience.  Thus their producers
would claim that they allow ordinary people to see and hear what
it would have cost enormous amounts of money to experience in
person, whether it be the faraway lands of the travelogue, a
canned play, or a performance by Kathleen Battle on film, video
or CD.

     As the general argument goes, the effect of these inventions
has been to enrich the lives of ordinary people by making
available to them things that were once the province of a much
more privileged class in previous generations.  Whereas new
dramatic talents arriving on the theatrical scene before the
cinema developed would only be seen by a relatively small and
privileged elite who had access to productions in major cultural
centers, the cinema could make these talents into international
stars--like Orson Welles, or Lawrence Olivier, or Emma Thompson.

     But an inevitable and simultaneous effect of this sort of
work was also to alienate the individual from the production of
culture and to turn cultural expression increasingly into a mass-
produced commodity to be marketed for profit, a subject that has
been ably discussed by a host of (primarily Marxist) critics and
theorists, most notably Walter Benjamin, in his essay "The Work
of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."

     Thus the very forces which were supposedly enriching the
lives of working class audiences with the arrival of mass-
produced forms of expression like the movies only did so by
forcing a wedge between individuals and the production of
culture, by substituting carefully crafted and controlled central
production for eccentric local production.  When the movies
arose, they displaced local theater companies, local opera
companies, burlesque and vaudeville houses.  Similarly, after The
Jazz Singer marked the end of the era we mistakenly refer to as
the silent era in the movies, another level of locally produced
culture disappeared.  The movies had never been silent, but the
sound was locally produced by theater musicians.  In Japan, a
tradition of verbal commentary upon the image on-screen developed
through a class of performers known as the benshi, who proved to
be a bigger draw for audiences than the films themselves in many
cases.  Both were driven out by recorded sound. 

     But these displacements were not the only ones caused by the
cinema, if we continue with the example drawn from my own
discipline.  The rise of the cinema meant a decline in all forms
of locally produced entertainment--informal dances, amateur
music-making, family story-telling all declined, especially in
rural areas, during my parents' and my childhoods.

     All of us have personal stories to tell of such
displacements within our own experience.  For me, the stories
have had much to do with the slow but steady decline of a
regional folk culture, so that by the time that I was entering
school at the middle of the century, I already felt a rift
between the world I perceived and the world my grandparents
perceived.  For me that world was defined by a larger national
identity mediated by formalized mass education and a national
media defined in the first instance by radio networks, national
news, and mass-marketed popular music. My grandfather, who was
born in the hills of Virginia late in the nineteenth century, had
limited experience with public schools.  He had been displaced
from the Virginia hills by the depression, and he spent much of
the last portion of his adult life in Boise, Idaho; he was in not
entirely voluntary retirement, unable to adjust to town life, but
unable to recover the life he understood in the country.  He was
deeply suspicious of public education, of the national government
and expressions of mass culture, and thus disapproved of and
suspected the very forces that shaped my life.  And in fact, that
disapproval, insofar as some of it was shared by my parents, kept
me from experiencing the movies at all until I went away from
home to college.

     And these displacements--of my grandfather and a generation
of farm people like him in the 30's, of whole classes of local
producers of culture displaced by the movies, for example--are
but the modern reworkings of similar displacements that were
produced by Gutenberg's invention in the 15th century, when his
printing press relocated the production of knowledge from the
sacred and diverse world of the monastery to the secular world of
early industrial production, moving the manufacture of books from
the dispersed and labor-intensive copying of illuminated
manuscripts to the more efficient, centralized location of the
new cities like London and Paris.  The result was an explosion of
production--more than 35,000 books were produced between 1437 and
1500 in Europe.  The shift marked a change in the set of
standards for evaluating knowledge and even a change in the
character of what counts as knowledge, since what counted as
useful and productive information within the context of the
monastery was not necessarily the same as what counted as useful
and productive knowledge in the rough and tumble world of the
medieval towns.  Thus the character of learning changed rapidly
after Gutenberg.  

     The expansion of the modern university is also linked to the
decline of monastic influence.  And it is worth noting here that
the same technology which made the printing press possible--an
iron industry and early industrial employment of water power--
also characterized other industrial developments of the day,
revolutionizing cloth manufacture and restructuring agricultural
production by raising the value of sheep and encouraging the
enclosures that forced the peasants off the land and into the new
industrial centers.  At the same time these developments
encouraged the closure of the monasteries and the seizure of
their lands by monarchs who now saw their power as principally
dependent upon the support of the new merchant class embodied in
the clothing manufacturers and printers.

     Seen in the light of these previous developments, the
replacement of the silent theater musicians, of the local
theatrical traditions, and of the benshi (and I would argue if I
had time, my grandfather) are merely another stage in the same
industrial revolution, another place where mechanization
substitutes for human labor in the name of efficiency, or in
another light, as one more step in moving the production of
cultural artifacts, whether they be articles of clothing or
books, from a dispersed, labor-intensive artisanal system to a
system of mass production where the value of an item is
determined by market forces and not by the individual
expressiveness of the artisanal creator or by the direct use
value of the object itself.

     To return to the subject of film particularly, once the film
industry began to stabilize and to become self aware in the late
1920's, the studio system arose and began true mass production
based on formulas developed through past successful sales.  Only
under the pressure of seriously declining film revenues in the
late 1950's and early 60's, partly as a result of competition
from an infant television industry, did the market forces
encourage and allow more independent production and a breakdown
of the old genre formulas which had ruled Hollywood throughout
the 1930's and '40's.  This period allowed the rise of the modern
"art" film and the creation of an allied form of cultural
production, film criticism, which was now necessary to explain
these new and confusing cinematic forms.  And the newly
burgeoning universities, fresh with post Sputnik-era funding,
could afford to expend capital in these new areas of inquiry.

As the tale is usually told, the pressure of competition created
a new and vital form of aesthetic expression in the work of
Bergman, Kurosawa, Fellini, Godard, Antonioni, and all the other
cultural heroes of the European art film.  But as we shall see
shortly, that was only part of the story.

     Ironically (and we could undoubtedly develop an interesting
set of reasons for why this is so) the initial theoretical
defense for film study within the academy was a movement known as
auteur criticism--the idea that a film could be understood best
when it was considered to be expressive and artisanal, the
product of an individual artist.  But this justification was
being developed to explain precisely the era in which film had
become most industrial under the Hollywood studio system, in
order to vindicate the work of directors like Hitchcock, Welles,
Ford, and Hawks.  Thus many of us in the film criticism game
began playing the game with an ideological perspective that
concealed this primary cultural shift that the movies
represented.  Just as the publishing industry thrived and
expanded partially through the development of the novel--a mass
produced cultural artifact which presented itself as a work of
art (and thus as an extension of artisanal values), the cinema
now presented itself as an art form too, thus helping to conceal
the way in which it only further developed the split between
cultural production and the general public--the turning of
production over entirely to an elite handful of persons, while
the rest of the population was converted into cultural consumers,
a mass audience.
     
     I offer this last detour into the eccentric vicissitudes of
the discipline of film partly as an example of the genius we in
the academy often have at missing the forest for the trees.

     Perhaps I have jumped around far too much here; it is
undoubtedly time to try to pull some of this back to where we
began.  What I mean to suggest is that the displacements which
our colleagues in Maryland are fearing are undoubtedly going to
come and to be apparent throughout much of the world of higher
education.  This increasingly interconnected web of information
technology will undoubtedly be used to buy down the cost of labor
in higher education.  Likewise, I think it is no longer a matter
of speculation that education is increasingly going to be invaded
by private enterprise and to become a venture for profit. 
Boeing's plans and the plans of the Western Governors Association
virtually assure that this will happen on an increasingly wide
scale.

     Increasingly we will see corporations develop courses to be
sold for profit but which are taught by a small, hand-picked
elite of star professors--the Kathleen Battles or the Placido
Domingos of the educational world.  Their courses will replace
local work done by faculty across the world, just as the CD has
replaced a great deal of local music production.  And as the
companies which deal with information technologies continue to
merge and consolidate, the choices about who will produce these
courses (in short, who will produce much of what will count for
knowledge in upcoming years) will be left to an increasingly
small number of very powerful individuals.
     
     But substitution of a centralized, mass production of
knowledge for the less efficient, decentralized production of
cultural knowledge that we have come to know is probably not at
all different in kind from the historical displacements I have
been discussing already.  The monks in the monasteries facing
closure under the Tudors after Bosworth in 1485, the
vaudevillians thrown out of work by the rise of the silent
cinema, the theater musicians and the benshi thrown out of work
by recorded soundtracks, and university professors facing
redundancy or the buying down of their position to the sort of
responsibility they had when they were graduate TA's--all these
people are links in a chain, in the same chain, in the same
historical process of centralizing and controlling cultural
production and of turning the mass of people merely into cultural
consumers.

     But why am I hammering away on such a gloomy scenario?  Are
we already as irrelevant and doomed as those monks facing the
Tudor budget axe?  Or are there things we can do, things we can
consider, which might moderate or alleviate these changes, even
if we can not prevent them from occurring?

     I think that we can and should be making some changes which
might help.  In the educational system which produced us, a
system devised and produced, by the way, at least largely by the
very forces which now threaten to make us redundant as a class,
Gutenberg has always been seen as a kind of cultural hero.  After
all, it was his invention which helped decentralize the power of
the clergy and to make the Reformation (and ultimately even the
American Revolution) possible.  That is true, of course, so far
as it goes, but it is the version of the story that the forces of
ownership in the society want to be told as well.  But there is
another sadder story--the story of what happened not only to all
the displaced monks and priests, but also of what happened to the
countless peasants lower down on the economic scale who suffered
terribly in the displacements which followed.  

     We need to tell their stories.  And we need to recognize
that the story we have been telling enshrines notions of a free
press to the point that collectively we can no longer see that in
our society the greatest danger comes from the opposite
direction.  Now the danger is far less that the government will
undermine the press than that the forces of investment capital,
operating through an increasingly centralized "press," have
already undermined our freedom by controlling the choices we
think we have available to us.  

     In my original version of this talk, I turned at this point
to talk about how I thought we needed to revise the way we teach
literature and film, and to stop emphasizing only what they say
to the exclusion of what they do.  The printed media, the visual
media, the modern electronic media do not merely create signs
which stand for something else in the world; they also function
as social forces operating directly in the world, and we talk
very little about those forces.  

     When I was preparing for this talk, I read extensively about
the recent media mergers in Fortune magazine.  The handout that I
have distributed comes from one of those issues.  The Fortune
account of the history of cinema represented visually there does
not talk about the art of film.  It talks about the Justice
Department antitrust campaign of the 1940's which forced a
separation between film and television; it talks of deregulation
during the Reagan years which began to make the major mergers
possible; it talks about rising sales of Hollywood films abroad
which made it profitable to make increasingly violent and less
articulate films.  But when I paged through the last four or five
years of Cinema Journal, or Film Quarterly, or Wide Angle, or
Literature/Film Quarterly, I found fewer articles dealing with
these kinds of issues than you can count on the finger of one
hand.  We are still in danger of missing the forest for the
trees.

     The system in which we work will not thank us nor support us
if we give evidence of thinking hard about what is happening in
higher education.  The people who aspire to own the system which
distributes what passes for knowledge are after profits, but in
this setting, they do not wish to be perceived that way.  And
since they aspire to control the system for profit, they will
resist efforts to make the media, the universities, the Internet,
the society more truly democratic.

     Consequently they applaud the fact that our textbooks tend
to canonize Gutenberg for his contribution to intellectual
freedom, for he certainly contributed greatly to theirs, just as
the Internet has been a democratizing influence, enhancing the
freedom of a certain class of people.  But I am suggesting that
we have been far too slow to challenge their argument that a free
(always read that as unregulated) media and educational
establishment is the basis of democratic and egalitarian
politics.  It is not quite so simple as that--and the side of
Gutenberg's revolution that we have tended to ignore is about to
reach out and fetch the class of professors a hugh clout up
alongside the head.

     Our textbooks tend to canonize Gutenberg for his
contribution to intellectual freedom.  Clearly he made such a
contribution in one sense, just as the Internet has been a
democratizing influence in the world in certain limited ways. 
Likewise, we have always tended to see an unregulated (read that
as free) media and educational establishment as the basis of
democratic and egalitarian politics.  But I think that it is not
quite so simple as that--and the side of Gutenberg's revolution
that we have tended to ignore is about to reach out and fetch the
class of professors a huge clout up alongside the head.

     But it is not merely the content of what we teach that could
bear some reconsideration; we need to recognize the ways in which
the forces of ownership are expressing themselves in the
university as well.  Let me take one example, though the number
of these sorts of issues facing us is increasing rapidly.  Last
week, one of the subscribers to H-Film, the list I moderate,
wrote in to complain of what seemed to him to be an outrageous
breach of his academic rights.  He had developed, with great
effort, a web page upon which a good deal of his academic work
was displayed.  He had suddenly become aware that, unbeknownst to
him, an associate dean (always watch those associate deans) at
his institution had ordered the removal of his page.  The page
had been down for a period of time without his knowledge, and
when it was replaced, it was replaced in a different format
within the confines of a general university page.  He was calling
for the formulation of new academic understandings to prevent the
arbitrary exercise of such power.  

     Two days later, I received a message from a someone (not a
member of H-Film) who worked outside of the academy in the
computer industry.  He had received the earlier message in the
mysterious ether of the net, and wrote to ask if I would allow
him to respond to the earlier post.  He indicated that legal
rights in these matters have already been clearly established in
the business world.  There, he argued, everything stored on an
operating system is owned by the owner of the system, and the
user of the system has no legal rights to anything stored on the
system.  None.  Period.  

     The poster of the original message to H-Film argued that
academics need to be considering legal questions of ownership and
forging with universities a set of policies about intellectual
ownership in an academic setting.  That may be so.  But I find it
interesting to note in this networked university of ours, that
property rights immediately come to mind for both sides.  Instead
of simply choosing sides in that dispute, we might profitably
work toward fashioning a more searching critique of the metaphor
of intellectual property and the marketplace of ideas within the
institution of the university as we have inherited it. 

     I suspect that we can do nothing to prevent the massive
substitution of capital intensive, mechanically reproduced
courses for labor intensive, individually delivered education.  I
do not believe that it will happen very widely at Willamette; in
fact, I suspect that it will be a mark of the excellence we like
to associate with a Willamette degree that we will not stoop to
such practices, at least not for some time to come.

     But the changes in the academic marketplace will change us
greatly.  For one thing, they will push us to become an
increasingly elitist place, an institution where children of the
privileged can still afford to get a customized education.  If we
are to resist those pressures, we have some very hard choices in
front of us.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the
years between 1980 and 1992, the cost of new cars rose nearly
50%, the cost of houses rose fully 50%, the cost of food rose
about 60%, the CPI rose about 70%, medical care zoomed entirely
out of control , increasing by over 150%, and college tuition
rose 200%.  It is not hard to see why administrators at state
institutions are attempting to buy down labor costs.

     Generally, the usual argument goes, tuition has been driven
by rising academic salaries.  That is undoubtedly true to some
extent, for salaries were abysmal when I entered the profession
in the 1960's.  But anyone who works with higher education
budgets these days will tell you that the two areas of college
budgets everywhere with runaway inflation are technology and
financial aid.  Now financial aid is, properly understood, not a
cost in the same sense that other items in the budget are; it is
in fact an index of the shortfall between our charges and the
ability of some of our customers to pay.  And the crisis in
financial aid, this rapidly expanding gap in the difference
between our charges and the ability of our customers to pay, has
been paralleled right along by rising technology costs.  It is
difficult to avoid the conclusion that the two are substantially
linked, along with expansions in a variety of other areas of
service offered by the modern campus.

     And what can we do about this?  I suggest that we can begin
to talk more as a faculty about priorities.  That is a very
difficult thing to do, because we have no institutional channels
for doing so.  In fact, the university has been specifically
designed to prevent us from having an institutionalized space to
do so.  If we had one, we might have a clearer voice in setting
budget priorities, and administrators have traditionally seen
this area as their private preserve.

     Now to be fair, they have had some reason to do so.  Since
we have no way to express priorities, except in bits and pieces,
faculty have done what people always do in such circumstances--
ask for everything they can get in each specific area where their
input is requested.  Do you need more computers?  The answer is
always yes, particularly when it seems that if you don't ask,
somebody else will get them.  Do you need more faculty?  The
answer, when posed to the positions committee, is nearly always
yes, since a lower student/faculty ratio is both a direct
assistance to one's work load and an index of excellence within
the academy as a whole.  Do you need higher salaries?  The
Faculty Council, charged with speaking for the interests of the
faculty as a whole, will always argue yes.

     In the administrative world view, then, the faculty look
rather like children who want everything they can get.  Of course
we do, if we are asked in that way.  But we need to insist that
we be asked in other, more comprehensive ways.  And if we are
asked, we need to begin to join the discussion as to whether we
should continue to invest in technology so heavily as we have
been doing in recent years, or whether we need to continue to
expand the size of the faculty and faculty salaries at the same
time, if the effect will be to drive costs beyond the means of
many of the students we wish to teach.

     These are questions that are vital to the definition of the
university we will inhabit in the next few decades.  We are not
in a position to discuss these questions effectively now.  We
must try, either through the operation of new formal structures,
or through the development of our own informal structures, to
develop a collective vision of priorities which will help us
steer the best course we can between the Scylla of mass-produced
learning and the Charybdis of elitist education.

     As professors, we have traditionally seen ourselves as the
custodians of what counts as knowledge in our culture.  The
displacement we face as a class reveals clearly that we are not
the only (and perhaps finally not the most influential) players
in that game.  But our role as custodians, insofar as it ever
existed, was only a sacred trust if a) the knowledge we pursued
inquired equally into the experience of all peoples, and b) if
the knowledge we dispensed was available to the whole family of
man.  The university, as it has been constituted since Gutenberg,
has failed on both counts, offering selective knowledge to a
selected audience.  At this moment in history, perhaps, we can
see anew the daunting challenge of living up the ideals we
profess.
^Z