In response to one of my earlier blogs, The Future of the University, I posited a bleak outsourcing scenario as one potential outcome of the University of Phoenix's networked model of education.  Outsourcing, particularly in the last five years, has become the preferred method of slashing expenditure for those schools struggling to remain fiscally operable.  What has been happening is a cumulative process whereby administrators privatize functions previously under the purview of the institutions themselves.  For example, they hire Marriott to run their dining halls. The first sector of the university subject to these sorts of transformations was the service sector: the dining room, housekeeping, and janitorial tasks that, in terms of the ledger, were excessive costs.  That was in the beginning. 

Now universities are becoming increasingly creative in identifying the various components of the university system that can be outsourced. This includes, and this is a recent boom up from 57 to 62 percent in 2006, IT services and the campus bookstore, typically operated by Barnes and Noble. In terms of IT, universities have taken this process one step further by outsourcing campus email to Google and Microsoft (in some ways a boon if the previous university system was a behemoth).  This has, not surprisingly, led to concerns over privacy with regard to FERPA and e-discovery.  Other colleges have even hired public relations firms to handle recruiting and admissions.  And while university administrators initially balked at the idea of outsourcing any aspect of their accounting and financial functions, the City Colleges of Chicago have done just that: passing payroll, billing, budgeting, and purchasing onto the shoulders of private specialists.

In an article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, David L. Kirp commends outsourcing for cutting the fat, if you will, but worries that the university will no longer be able to identify the point at which to stop. The line between academic/non-academic, essential/inessential is already quite blurred, raising the spectre that all university functions are potentially on the chopping block.  This includes the core function of the university: teaching. Kirp rightly points out that the teaching force in the US is already significantly outsourced, we just don't refer to it as such. What he is gesturing toward is the increasing use of low wage part-time adjuncts, often one-third of the teaching staff in the typical public university. And increasingly this ratio is as high as 50/50. What guarantees do we have that this sector will remain unscathed, spared from the bottom line logic driving these privatizations?

In another Chronicle article, Franchising Higher Education, the suggestion was put forth to increase revenue by having American professors remotely teach online courses to foreign students, without those students having to travel to the US or the professors having to travel abroad (i.e. the University of Phoenix).  As I discussed in my previous post, feelings about the UP model have very much to do with personal preferences regarding proximity and distance. Taken to the extreme, the UP version becomes, for me, one of the possible nightmare scenarios I imagined for the future of the US university. This stems, in part, from my experience teaching online courses as well as my brief stint as a writing tutor where we had both (traditional) face-to-face and (virtual) E-Tutor appointments.  In comparing these two modes of instruction, I imagined how a Writing Program could, if converted completely to an E-Tutor system, turn teaching/tutoring into a service model, akin to outsourcing McDonald's drive-thru workers to other states.  I could imagine sitting alone at a desk in front of computer for eight hours a day, sending feedback on Freshman Comp papers to students in other states (or countries) whom I would never see. This fantasy left me somewhat de-moralized.