David Noble’s work on “digital diploma mills” is compelling—though, as Steve Brier and Roy Rosenzweig note in their review of the volume in which Noble’s 1998 essay was republished (largely without any alterations or updates to the text), Noble’s arguments fail to entice nearly twenty years after their generation. That said, his conclusions—about tuition and faculty labor—remain powerful despite their apparently flimsy foundations.

Noble insists the campus is “a significant site of capital accumulation” for two reasons. The university’s changing “research function” as one centered since the late 1970s on “research products” patented specifically for “the market” has commoditized the university’s output and external relevance, while a commoditization of “the university’s research function” affects “instruction itself.” By transforming instruction into a “commercially viable proprietary procuc[t],” he writes, “courses” turn “into courseware.”

This careful rhetorical distinction usefully illuminates the proto-Newfieldian argument Noble prefigures—but, as isn’t the case with Newfield, Noble relies too much on this courses-into-courseware maxim without elaborating on how the faculty he positions as chief agents of this switch or “conver[sion]” are perhaps much more compromised than he makes them out to be—in other words, Noble’s insufficient attention to adjunct labor makes the “courseware” refrain ring hollow. Not that adjunctification of the university is necessarily a bigger problem and therefore merits more discussion, mind you—I’m just suggesting that the retrospective privilege that history affords to our current moment allows the adjunct crisis (and it is a crisis—it’s much more than a simple shift, as Noble and others, including myself, might be inclined to argue) to dwarf his fixation on “courseware.” Noble’s pithy summary of malicious softwares and “courseware[s]”—“while [students] are studying their courses,” he writes, “their courses are studying them” (!)—is absolutely still the case. The adjunct question is more pressing and more urgent, in short, than the “courseware” one, which still healthily exists.

To be fair, the adjunctification problem wasn’t as acute for Noble and his moment than it is for us in ours. But this trend, though slightly different from the one Noble seizes, nonetheless suffers nearly all the same ills. Students prefer in-person classes over online work, and students prefer professors instead of barely-trained graduate students. Noble, to his credit, recognizes the profound irony in students’ preference not to take online courses. This negative preference is a prime example of just the same market-style approach to education he describes in his second description (of the university as a “commercially viable proprietary produc[t]”; see above), rejection being, of course, “the definition of effective demand, i.e., a market.”

Despite these comparatively minor oversights, Noble’s piece is still useful. Some of his powerful ending questions are worth quoting in full:

If students are taking courses which are just experiments, and hence of unproven pedagogical value, should students be paying full tuition for them? And if students are being used as guinea pigs in product trials masquerading as courses, should they be paying for these courses or be paid to take them?

I’ll respond to these questions with a provocation, as is the mandate of these posts: I’m barely twenty-three, my B.A. just a year old—how am I at all qualified to teach—not just to tutor, but to teach—college classes when my ears still ring from my own? Furthermore, if it’s the case that, as the GC’s career counselors and placement officers have advised me time and again, my teaching experience has trained me exceptionally well to handle the classrooms that come with a tenure-track job (for this, of course, is still their aim: to place Ph.D.s in prestigious tenure-track positions as a way less to aid its doctoral graduates and more to demonstrate the program’s robust health and to better its own reputation etc.), then isn’t my teaching more for my benefit as a future scholar-teacher than for my students’ benefit?

If this is the case, then this makes my work the very kind of “experimen[t]” Noble’s above questions argue against. The experiment, in short, of “[p]roven pedagogical value” to me, of course, but “unproven” still to my students, given that they’re the “guinea pigs in product trials.” If learning to teach is part of graduate schools pedagogy of “professionalization,” then my classroom is more my playroom than my students’. And if this is the case, Noble’s point about tuition is still pertinent even if the thing being tried or trialed isn’t “courseware” and but my teaching. Invoking Noble, we might now ask: Should my students be paying for my education? for the privilege to be “guinea pigs,” the chief objects of my course in professionalization? And shouldn’t my students be compensated for their labor in the classroom—for their willingness, in other words, to put up with me while I figure out how I best navigate the classroom “experimen[t]” I’ll face for the rest of my career?

(((This paragraph pushes this meditation’s prevocational limits—usefully, I hope.))) Indeed, when we think about it, classroom teaching isn’t all that labor-intensive. It takes some setup and forethought, to be sure, and a lot of time responding to student writing, which can (but doesn’t have to be) particularly labor-intensive, and some office-hour guidance. But most of the work in a class is done by students. Even if one student “puts in” “as much” “work” as an instructor, the sheer volume of student labor time far eclipses the instructor’s total hours. In an ideal sense, classroom labor is equalized: whether you’re Freire—who insists that instructors divest themselves of the transactional model of the student-as-bank-to-be-filled and instead engages in an as-equal-as-possible dialectical relation–or you’re Milton—whose “hillside,” which is “laborious indeed at the first ascent” but “full of goodly prospect,” can only be hiked on one’s own, even if “one’s own” means hiking in a group of individuals who all carry their own weight, instructors included—you can’t deny that the primary demand of all teaching is learning, is teaching-oneself-to-teach-others.

Yet this is a dangerous argument to make because its central premise—that instructional labor is only a tiny fraction of the total labor the classroom demands—is liable to malicious reappropriation in service of arguments in favor of increasing adjunct and contingently-laboring instructors. We might imagine this dangerous refrain: “If it’s the case that instructors don’t labor and/or are their classroom’s primary beneficiary—as this one seems to be saying here—, then why are we paying adjuncts at all?” But this refrain might also rely on the age-old assumption that leisure is necessary to learning—that, in other words, one must possess enough preexisting capital to “risk” two or four or however many years’ worth of forfeited income—why else would students come as “guinea pigs”? The “reward” that motivates this “risk” is, of course, the possibility to exploit what Noble might consider to be a third category of neoliberalist commoditization of the university—precisely that same body of students whose collective avoidance of online courses evidences market practices. And/but, of course, paying students instead of charging them might actually reproduce this neoliberal market-based view of the university we are (speaking more broadly now) trying to dismantle (or at the very least interrogate). And so on.

I’ve been overly slippy here at this meditation’s end only to make a point—a provocative line of inquiry that is, I hope, more useful than not. Thanks for making to the end, and thanks also for thinking with me.

In addition to the “receipts” discourse necessary to the dissertation’s genre, Molloy’s effort to disentangle “access” from “instruction” meshes obviously well with some of the other issues our course has considered. We’ve thus far spoken a lot about admissions as a gatekeeping mechanism—one, to be sure, Molloy says drove much of CUNY’s midcentury changes. It seems to me—and this is the first time I’ve thought this thought, so I’m not sure if it’s (1) particularly good or (2) particularly novel—that posing the admissions question/threshold/barrier/whatever in terms of “standards met” means we’re missing a key potential indicator of college success—one that’s probably more valuable a heuristic than SAT scores, grades, class rank, or recommendations combined: intention (or “will,” or “motivation,” or “drive” or whatever you want to call it).

This thought occurred to me most clearly for the first time during Molloy’s discussion of Berger, Ballard, and Sohmer’s review of “eligible candidates” (68) for the early SEEK program. This passage specifically prompts my point:

On June 14, 1965, Levy reported a large “reservoir” of applicants, from which he expected to find one hundred “qualified students” […]. But the several hundred applications received through CUNY’s admission processing centers produced only a few dozen acceptable candidates. “The rest could not qualify by any standards we contemplated” (Levy & Berger, 1965, November, p. 19). Instead, Ballard, Berger and Sohmer recruited students through community agencies […]. These efforts produced 500 more applicants, “half or so of which had to be rejected on economic grounds. […] From the remaining pool of about 250 qualifying students, Berger, Ballard, and Sohmer […] selected the first class of 113 students[.] (67-68)

Presumably, hopeful matriculants who submitted applications but “could not qualify by any standards [the board] contemplated” (67) had some intention to go to college. (If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have submitted applications in the first place!) But while the “““standards””” discourse is, as Molloy argues, “a respectable proxy argument for resistance to integration” (85), motivation and intention can’t be similarly argued away.

In a previous blog post, I gestured towards the obfuscatory role the “““standards””” thesis takes in order to point towards an irony: Columbia’s earlier precedent “““standards””” argument prefaces our own age’s opaque admissions “complexities.” As our readings clearly show, CUNY history is not without its own ironies: what was once an institutional refuge for the Jews Columbia rejected is now in this midcentury moment reinscribing the wrongs its beginnings sought to address and remit. The “elite delusion of superiority” (44) Molloy seizes on in these chapters is born from exactly the same gatekeeping attitude that motivated Columbia’s own racist practices.

Through Berger, Molloy suggests we ought to disentangle traditional metrics of “““merit””” from a student’s “innate ability” (94). This is a notion that’s obviously useful. But what I’d like to push is this question of “ability”: even if we reject “standards” arguments more generally, doesn’t focusing on “innate ability” reinscribe “ability” as a standard of its own? In other words: if we set “ability” as a “standard” of sorts, one that admissions criteria attempt somehow to quantify—even if it’s amorphous or difficult to measure—doesn’t that mean we’re missing altogether the question of motivation? Attributing motivation and commitment to academic study only based on the fact that a student has submitted an application might be too flimsy a pretext. But is this flimsiness altogether a bad thing? Such a flimsiness doesn’t necessarily amount to an open admissions policy, though at first glance it appears that it might. If we read the admissions office as the primary mouthpiece for institutional policy and direction, then wouldn’t fixing motivation as the only or the most significant admissions criteria be a more “““honest”””—honest, I mean, to CUNY’s own history (or perhaps: histories)? And if we evaluate “““merit””” or “““achievement””” by any other “standard” than that of motivation, what does it betray about our own purposes and aims?

The SEEK program was clearly an improvement. But I wonder: what happens when we commit to this apparently radical reorientation (from “ability” to “motivation”)? And is such a reorientation all that radical? In the etymological sense, yes: insofar as motivation is something shared among all potential applicants, it’s the most “radical” or foundational shared attribute. But in a more colloquial sense it’s not necessarily all that radical, especially when we recall CUNY’s ostensible mandate—as an institution of higher learning funded by, dedicated to, and helping alongside the city and all her various inhabitants.

[Finally, a provoking editorial: New York spits out all her unmotivated children; hers is a brutal language of implicit “standards” and “merit.” We ought not to underestimate the extent to which intention, aspiration, and will play in achieving these “standards” or meeting these designations of “merit.” She’s not a meritocracy, to be sure—far from it. But we might want her to be one—but only on the condition that she not sacrifice her primary currency, which driven ambition. It’s only fitting, then, that her university system prize ambition—insofar as submitting an application indicates commitment—as the only suitable “““standard.”””]

Tracing the role of Columbia’s “““guiding””” hand in New York (City and State) educational policies (read: politics), Wechsler identifies college admissions processes as the teetering fulcrum point of tensions between an institution’s apparent “““right””” to self-definition and its role in shaping “the larger society” in and by which it operates (187). Wechsler’s primary method relies on an ostensibly neutral historical voice that tells two stories at once: the external story, which escapes Columbia’s grasp here even despite the university’s jealous micromanagement of it, and the internal story, which betrays the institution’s true power-seeking and -maintaining objectives.

Absent largely from his account (not unlike some of the others we’ve examined) are student voices—save for that of Columbia’s student newspaper, which explicitly “endorsed […] legislation” (199) prohibiting discrimination in college admissions. By keeping the student newspaper relegated to the margins, Wechsler redoubles Columbia’s blind ignorance of student interests (((broadly writ to include not just Columbia’s students but also those whom Columbia refused to admit))). Wechsler’s performance results in a picture not of education and learning but of politics—and of power. The university (its changing form, its cultural significance, its concern for its own murky ends—but not, carefully, the “““content””” of its academic contributions) is merely a fragile pretext for the “““old guard””” to exercise its favorite classist function: maintaining its iron claim to cultural-political (re)production.

Wechsler’s genealogical (archival) technique prevents him from making explicit the important circular point his intimations seem only to trace lightly. I’ll try to be a bit blunter in this paragraph’s speculative paraphrase. The most selective schools’ admissions offices, Wechsler argues, determine at least in part “the nature of the decisions made by those in [state] authority” (187). Problems arise, obviously, when these institutions’ alumni and friends assume power, whether by democratic election or (perhaps more frequently) by political appointment. Whom, then, do these figures serve—or (if it’s any different) whom do they end up serving: the credentialing entity that “““legitimates””” their claim to power? or the people who invest their trust in the governmental institutions designed to shepherd the public’s common good (cf. “commonwealth”). The gate-keepers admit only those who will one day faithfully assume the gate-keeping function, it seems, and the cultural interests these gate-kept institutions claim to produce are sustained by the culture through which they act—and that acts through them.

I’m being deliberately circular because Wechsler wisely suggests college admissions and the “standards” discussion are similarly obfuscatory, spiralized. (((The end of this reflection will contend admissions today are no less opaque and inaccessible.))) Wechsler’s point of departure (admissions as institutional identity practice) is purposeful, even if it feels disjointed or irrelevant to the chronicle it introduces, because it illuminates his ending condemnation of Nicholas Murray Butler, Columbia’s president during Wechsler’s period of examination. Though Butler’s refusal (206) to “distin[guish] between public and private sponsorship of higher education” because he “claim[ed] that all universities were public in the sense that they […] served a public function” may be admirable (one to which I—and perhaps Reagan*—and most anyone who argues for student loan forgiveness—am sympathetic), it also kind of misses the point (this is me reading Wechsler with a liberal degree of speculation): it’s not that we should let everyone in, nor is it that we need to lower our standards. Rather: it’s that inequities (or? injustices) will persist so long as admissions practices aren’t viewed as an institution’s primary mechanism for self-definition. (((Cf. BPRSC’s Five Demands, which originate from the thesis that the “standards” discussion is a plainly racist attempt to exclude exactly those students whom CUNY must serve most—those who, as Wechsler himself puts it, comprise CCNY’s “local constituency” (191). [—Query who is among CUNY’s non-local constituencies, and/or whether she has any at all?])))

Wechsler’s circles tighten their focus around this suggestion just before this chapter’s ending (gentle) indictment of Butler, which I’ve just mentioned. The final recommendations of the Temporary Commission on the Need for a State University (the business and politics of which concern much of this chapter) limited state funds “only to institutions that admitted students on the basis of merit and not with regard to race, color, creed, or national origin” (203). For obvious reasons, this is a rather tenable endorsement—and (as Wechsler’s concluding meditation on Butler seem to note) one that even the Commission’s opponents seemed to accept eventually. But it gets a bit more complicated when we trouble “merit”—and more so when skeptics demand definitions of “merit” from admissions boards that (!speculation!) step out from their desk hiding spots (!provocation!) to condescend: “agenc[ies] responsible for determining violations” must “understand all the complexities of admissions policies” (202). [Translation (read: indulgent provocation): You, the public, can’t ever understand our process because you don’t meet our “standards,” you weren’t accepted into it, your privilege didn’t filter through it, and your power doesn’t exist without proximity to the thought that happens by and emanates from it. (!!!)]

How opaque is this convenient shield of “complexities”—just as useless as—if not more so than—“merit” equations! We’re still wrestling with these terms and the inequities they (in)elegantly conceal. Emerson writes in “American Scholar” of the “joy” that “awe[s]” us when we find in some long-dead poet’s work “that which [we] also ha[ve] well-nigh thought and said.” Yet it’s not “joy” that overtakes me when I realize—most recently: earlier this week at about the halfway point of a Chronicle article on SFFA v. Harvard’s latest developments**—that we’ve been having this debate since long ((at least) a half-century!) before Kennedy deployed the term “affirmative action.” This chapter sobered me by sparking something more akin to horror than to the “joy” Emerson profiled, coincidentally (or not), before (!gate-keeping!) Harvard’s (!!!ultra gate-keeping!!!) Phi Beta Kappa chapter in 1837: we’ve already had this conversation on “complexities” and “merit”—and we keep having it, no matter the language we use to describe it. To be sure, we have made some great progressive steps. But I wonder: why haven’t we been able to arrive at an argument good enough to best those from even the most “““selective””” gatekeepers? even the stingiest lawmakers? even the most skeptical “constituent”?

Thanks for thinking with me; I hope you’ve been provoked.

* I’m invoking here all the different potential valences of a curious little paragraph I read a few weeks ago that keep returning to my mind—from a recent (2018) Feminist Studies article on our apparent “Crisis Consensus” by Abigail Boggs and Nick Mitchell smack in the middle of 461. [@Flora will recognize this piece from Jessica’s class(!).]

**This is the Chronicle article and this is the Harvard Crimson piece.