Higher Ed Is ‘Disrupting’ Itself Into Oblivion

First as MOOC tragedy, then as AI farce

Around 2012-13, one of the many tech hype cycles that have punctuated the past few decades reached its crescendo. I’m referring to the craze for Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs), which began when a cluster of new startups started promoting free, open-enrollment courses taught by faculty from top-tier universities like Stanford, Harvard, and MIT. Online education was several decades old by this time, but the combination of elite branding with the Silicon Valley language of “disruption” managed to repackage it as something thrilling and inevitable, rather than a second-rate option for part-time students at schools like the University of Phoenix.

Given how little-remembered this episode is now, it’s remarkable to revisit the soaring rhetoric that surrounded MOOCs in that period. In the pages of The New York Times, they were hailed as a “revolution” and a “tsunami”; the paper’s education section declared 2012 “The Year of the MOOC,” and a DC think tank declared that it was time for President Obama to appoint an “undersecretary of MOOCs.” While the instigators of the trend were for-profit companies, its guiding rationale was presented as nobly philanthropic. A Time cover article told the story of an 11-year old Pakistani girl who was able to take an advanced physics course over YouTube; a Stanford donor promised The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta: “We’re on the cusp of an opportunity to deliver a state-of-the-art, Stanford-calibre education to every single kid around the world.”

Trying to make sense of the MOOC craze was the occasion for my first investigations into the Californian Ideology, as well as for some of my first published non-academic writing. In February of 2013, I wrote what I hoped would be a brutal and definitive takedown of the phenomenon for Dissent, the venerable lefty outlet. MOOC hype did crash and burn over the subsequent year or two, somewhat prior to the broader “techlash” of the mid-2010s, but I can’t claim any credit for that; ultimately the enterprise was undone by its own internal incoherence.

At the time I became briefly obsessed with critiquing MOOC mania, I was finishing my doctoral dissertation (on unrelated literary matters) while living in California, where I was precariously employed as a lecturer in the public university system. Physically, I wasn’t far from the epicenter of the tech industry, but culturally and socioeconomically, the Cal State branch I taught at felt far removed from the glamorous future it was promising us. My students, mostly working-class and first-generation, clearly struggled with learning in ways that “innovation” wasn’t going to solve.

Although I was partly animated by the incomprehension and contempt for students like mine exuded by MOOC boosters, the issue also had immediate material stakes for me. It was clear from the rhetoric of its promoters that the glorious MOOC future had no place for humanities instructors at regional universities (not that our situation was optimal or unthreatened prior to that). In early 2013, the California state legislature was debating a law that would require schools in the state system to give credits for MOOCs: a convenient arrangement in a time of fiscal crisis, since it would mean in effect outsourcing instruction to private companies that were handing out their educational wares for free. It wasn’t hard to see that this would add up, in effect, to an opportunity for big savings on state payroll. It was also very clear to me that the vast majority of my students wouldn’t—to say the least—thrive if their coursework consisted entirely of lecture videos and automatically graded online quizzes, even if they were “Stanford-calibre.”

Not too long after this, I got a job at a private university (NYU) where I was employed for nearly a decade on less precarious terms; I then left academia altogether. In the intervening years, I have become far more pessimistic about the value of preserving our higher education system in anything like its current form. Nonetheless, I decided my old critique of the MOOC agenda retained some relevance as I was reading about the latest wave of “disruption” washing across campuses: AI-enhanced education, which Ryan Zickgraf wrote about for Compact this week, Some institutions continue to ban student use of ChatGPT and the like, but others are now requiring their use. For Zickgraf, this amounts to something like mandated doping in sports.

I was unsurprised to see the Cal State system is one of the institutions jumping on the AI bandwagon, since it was also caught up in MOOC mania when I was there. When technological change poses a fundamental threat to higher ed business as usual, there are basically two responses: try to resist (as schools banning AI are doing) or try to get ahead of the competition. Elite colleges are better-positioned to take the first option, at least for now (although I hear anecdotally that in practice that isn’t going too well) than less well-resourced ones.

At the peak of the craze, MOOCs were framed as both inevitable and intrinsically desirable. On the first point, the idea was that technical affordances—the ability to record and disseminate video lectures and course materials across the world in an instant—had rendered the practice of limiting enrollment to a set number of enrolled students on a specific physical campus an obsolete relic. And if it was technically possible to offer “every single kid in the world” access to a “Stanford-calibre education,” surely it was unjust and exclusionary not to do so. Hence, startups like Udacity and Coursera could present themselves as the moral vanguard of our time.

There was much that I found infuriating about this line of reasoning at the time. For one thing, the people promoting this vision seemed to have only just realized that elite education was exclusionary. Moreover, they believed the remedy to the exclusion came not through democratic politics but through the private sector: Venture-funded companies would simply extract certain elements of elite education and market them to student consumers as a “freemium” product. (The revenue model for Udacity and Coursera was never all that clear, but the basic idea seemed to be to offer the courses for free and then charge for some sort of certificate of completion.) The MOOC ideology was the Californian Ideology in a nutshell: vague egalitarian rhetoric combined with unquestioned certitude that the profit motive was the primary vehicle of moral progress.

The effective altruist worldview that has provided the ideological frame for the AI boom is another version of the same thing, but at least so far as education is concerned, I haven’t come across any particularly strong philanthropic or moral arguments for why colleges should embed AI in the learning process; it seems obvious to anyone with a bit of common sense that, as a viral recent New York article documented, the main effect of LLMs is to enable students to outsource just about all of their required work to automated systems, with minimal effort. I can only read the move by Cal State and others to accelerate this fate as a gesture of resignation. Once a technical affordance exists, the thinking seems to be, its use is inevitable, and resistance is futile. No one can quite come up with a clear explanation of why colleges or anything like them should continue to exist if the skills they claimed to impart are now easily automated. Perhaps this should be taken as an admission that the point is actually just to give you a piece of paper.

The rise and fall of MOOCs offers grounds for both optimism and pessimism for those who retain some attachment to learning as we once knew it. On one hand, it turned out that the mere technical affordance of, say, broadcasting Harvard lectures across the world didn’t mean, as many predicted at the time, the immediate end of in-person education. In fact, when in-person education was temporarily shut down in 2020, most experienced the result not as utopian but as rather dispiriting. So most students continue to attend in-person classes, even if tech types 15 years ago were making internally coherent arguments for why doing so no longer made sense.

The negative lesson is that colleges have even less compelling answers to the question posed by MOOCs, now posed even more acutely by AI: Why should they continue to exist at all?

This week in Compact

• Stephen Adubato on ACT-UP’s legacy for LGBT activism

• The aforementioned Ryan Zickgraf on AI as doping

• Dominic Green on Frederick Forsyth

• Joel Kotkin on the LA riots

• Evelyn Quartz on why Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is no moderate

• Leila Mechoui on surging gold prices and the end of dollar dominance