Pulldown to MOVE BETWEEN SITES

January 30th 1999 I sent around an email to the Management Education list serve tilted "The Extinction of the Last Great Occupation on Earth." The discussion got heated and spilled over to the radical organization theory and critical theory list serves. The responders advocated or challenged the kinds of knowledge worker knowledge management (KWKM) worldview I wrote about in chapter two. The responses tell us something about the new university and the themes in this book. The cyber professor wired to distance education students is rapidly becoming the role model for the Internet literate. Web-based course materials are making their way into college curriculum with some universities going totally cyber, becoming full-fledged KWKM systems. The question is can we sort through the various worldviews to find festival possibilities in the university? Spectacle University is a narrative and a theatric performance that legitimates, rationalizes, and oftentimes camouflages violent production and consumption. Festival, I shall argue, is possible in the midst of Spectacle University, as the production and consumption of violence gives way to non-violent narration and theatrics. The universities carries the joys and hope of the world, but also the workaholism, animal testing, oppressive social control, and corporate colonization of knowledge that is spectacle. It would seem that a university could embrace Ahimsa and non-violence in the celebration of knowledge. How could universities accentuate their non-violent narratives and theatrics?

First, festival assumes we can create universities that earn a capitalist profit and maintain non-violent ecological and social practices. Second, festive universities assume local stakeholder groups of workers, citizens, and administrators can take money from and still balance the burgeoning power of global corporate monopolies, by expressing universities' non-violent preferences. Third, festive universities assume the myopic corporate focus on short-term accumulation could be abandoned when there is an understanding of the living whole in the various sciences and humanities. Fourth, when festive university citizens recognize the difference between living to work versus working to live, then they will be able to tame their shopaholic and addictive consumption appetites, thereby letting others live. Fifth, non-violent work, fun, and leisure are possible in universities. In sum, the festive university is a critical postmodern project of emancipation of knowledge from violent production and consumption. Festive universities are rich in joy, fun, singing, dancing, and poetry, as well as physical and social science work. Festive university is defined as the pragmatics of long term sustainability in a non-violent culture, in balance with the whole planet. Here is an updated version of my email. It is a critique of Spectacle University.

The Extinction of the Last Great Occupation on Earth I assert that we academics are participating in an information technology transformation of the university life style in which the bureaucratic administration and its techno investment are both bloating, and to finance its new directions and corporate partnering, the administration is cutting faculty and increasing class size. As Noble (1999) argues it "is a battle between students and professors on one side, and university administrations and companies with 'educational products' to sell on the other." With more and more part-timers, under-paid adjuncts, and the usual slave-grad students recruited to staff the celebrated techno-instruction, there will be the inevitable downsizing and consolidation, as universities vertically integrates with media corporations. Apple, IBM, Intel, HP, and Microsoft provide the soft and hardware, while publishing companies like Disney, Prentice-Hall, McGraw-Hill, and Simon and Schuster market the new media text CDs. And, University of British Columbia has spun off its own web software company, WEB-CT, to exploit the new partnership between media companies, publishers, and cyber universities.

For example, Channel One is seeking to renew its contract with public schools. Channel One Corporation offers free televisions, cable hookup and services for free, as long as the students are a captive audience during their commercials. No public space seems free of corporate colonization. The university is no more sacrosanct as a center of learning. These are twenty billion dollar youth advertising markets ripe for exploitation. Corporations are flooding all education with courseware, cable hookups and equipment under the guise of free "instructional media." Nike sponsors elementary school lessons on how to assemble Nike shoes using biodegradable glues (unavailable to its overseas workers) and celebrates its rubber recycling efforts. Other corporations do some most interesting lessons. Free instructional material (pencils and posters) from Dupont and the American Farm Bureau questions ozone loss, mass extinction of species, seeing species benefits to clear-cut forestry management tools. Exxon sees benefits to oil derricks. Even the Valdez oil spill was not so bad. Revlon teaches the self-esteem benefits to its hair products. Consumers Reports, analyzed 111 "sponsored educational materials" for Captive Kids, a study of commercialism in schools. They found that roughly 80% contained blatant bias, commercial pitches, inaccuracies, or, quite often, all three! An analysis of management and organization textbooks, I believe, would find similar results.

Spectacle Teaching Conferences We are hosting the Organizational Behavior Teaching Conference (OBTC). OBTC is a spectacle, a gathering of business educators, seeking to create new standards of teaching excellence, a reunion of old friends, a discovery of new mates, navigating a maze of simultaneous staged performances, while engaging in talent shows, T-groups, meditation, and animated conversation at Jim's Place.

OBTC is a spectacle within the genre of Academy gatherings, other teaching conferences, and even other international conferences. Like most spectacles, there is indoctrination going on, the purpose is to become more submissive by our mutual assembly. We say we are out to reform the standard technology of OB and management education, all that rote learning and factoid memorization, followed by a series of multiple choice tests. The ironic thing about spectacles is that reform is part of the act, part of what makes spectacle.

OBTC is a spectacle going through a transformation; a new spectacle is being embraced, a new indoctrination into a new technique. We say we reject the standard technology of students in rows and columns, teacher talking, while student-spectators passively consume the performance, repeating it back verbatim on the final exam. Ironic it is that the new spectacle, the new technology of indoctrination, is even more passive than the standard technology we reform.

The OBTC is embracing the new spectacularization, just as the Management Education division of the Academy is doing exactly the same, as is all of university education. We have new technology, expensive multimedia toys to play with, new web-based testing, chat rooms to replace the small group designs, of which we have grown so fond. We are saturating OB and management (and all of university) education with the new stage of spectacle. Our textbooks are media-produced by media companies, and being stamped into convenient lower-cost CDs.

Education Maintenance Organization (EMO) The EMO (Education maintenance Organization) transformation of a human face-to-face interaction system into a cyber-face interaction system requires significant dosages of propaganda. Faculties who oppose such transformations are labeled "Luddites," or "opposed to technological progress" or the inevitable "evolution of education delivery systems." EMO is presented as the panacea for unrestricted access. The propaganda is propagated to overcome resistance to taking the UMO Theater of consumption onto the global stage of commerce.

It is the end of the faculty job. My successors will be happy independent contractors taking up new assignments in the Cyber University every five years. Or, maybe working two or three contracts to make ends meet.

In the elite cyber Knowledge University, thousands of faculty will be let go as the new information and media technologies penetrate and appropriate the labor process of academic work. The university is doing the technocratic, deskilling, just-in-time knowledge, and downsizing dance of capital accumulation that Harry Braverman (1974) describes so well for blue collar and clerical workers. It is the same dance that created HMO in healthcare, and is leading to education maintenance organization (EMO). EMO is coevolving with Internet technologies in radical ways (Noble, 1999). Kill tenure, keep a few well-known full time professors to do the design work on their techno-archived virtual cyber web lectures, put a lot of techies on five year contracts to do the techno work: management of tests, cyber-video access, and chat room management.

In the new labor process of professor work, administrators control and restrict and channel access to the elite-few professors who will remain as cyber-teachers to the mass of paying students. There will be former professors and graduate students hired at slave wages to do the grunt work on cyber-classes (start up stuff mainly). The big techno dream is that the administrators can bring about cost efficiencies and mass access to dominate and control the university. The Cyber University becomes the body without faculty, buildings, and land. The faculty bodies are reduced and in their place a majority of techno-entrepreneurs are hired who can bring patent, license, grant and other projects to the university capital accumulation system. The building and land can be sold off, since faculty and students just telecommute. In short, the university is being colonized as a business and becoming big business as control shifts from faculty and student bodies to administrators and corporate techno-entrepreneurs in disembodied time and space. The promise is the students and faculty can fit learning to their own schedule, learn at any time and in any space, instead of the structured and rigid time and place of the traditional land-bound university.

But are we losing educational quality be becoming disembodied? David Noble (1999) argues "You can't educate over the Internet, because education is an interpersonal process." Yet, studies are being replicated to show no discernable difference between live and cyber education. Cyber professors conduct "live" interactive sessions in virtual web "class rooms" where students report receiving one on one feedback on their keystrokes. With over 61,000 currently enrolled students and close to half a million graduates, the University of Phoenix is America's largest private accredited university for working adults. Western Governors University offers distance learning courses from dozens of colleges, universities, and corporations across the United States (and soon the world!). Utah governor Mike Leavitt proclaimed, "an institution of higher education will become a little like a local television station" (Noble, 1999: 6).

A special issue of Social Text (1997), however, questions the viability of Internet Universities, viewing the new trends as a devolution of higher education to effect more concentrated administrative control and the end of academic freedom. There have been strikes by faculty and students protesting the new balance of power away from student and faculty control to administrative, university ventures, and corporate sponsorship. "Once faculty and courses go online, administrators gain much greater direct control over faculty performance and course content than ever before and the potential for administrative scrutiny, supervision, regimentation, discipline and even censorship increase dramatically" (Noble, 1999: 7). Yet, the bandwagon is moving towards quick UMOs. The theatrics of consumption of university knowledge is making its entrance onto the global stage. The KWKM dream is unstoppable.

The dream always has been complete and unfettered access to the totality of the world's storehouse of knowledge. The establishment of the global network of networks is the first step towards achieving this age old dream. The combination of ever more powerful computers and greater bandwidth coupled with AI search and retrieval engines retrieves this dream from under the fog of information overload (Achleitner, Vowell, & Wyatt, 1998).
 
 

There is something more happening in universities and in our society that s fueling our fixation with outcome and process assessment stories. As a faculty, I am wondering why student evaluations, annual performance reviews, and the gaze of deans and department heads is considered insufficient surveillance of the teaching process and student outcomes. Other things are going on than increasing quality of delivery or making it look more like a TQM program. It is about who controls the system, administrators and corporations or faculty and students.

The administration and corporate vendors of course soft and hardware pick up more and more control over the delivery system process and content. The state also gets more control over what is taught and how it is taught. I view the assessment bandwagon as an enemy of spontaneity, creativity, and imagination, academic and individual freedom in the classroom. Festive university would mean being quite critical of the materiality of the new KWKM systems. Professors are lulled or coerced into putting the syllabi, test management, lecture slides, handouts, etc. up on the web. We transfer our intellectual property rights to the EMO and thereby sacrifice our bargaining rights. Everybody is doing it. The EMO gradually systematizes and standardizes the whole mess to lower costs and transfer control of the labor process.

The EMO sells legislators and parents the image of the slow-moving, over-sized, dumb, bureaucratic Dinosaur that can be easily replaced by the image of the Jurassic Park Dinosaur, the smaller, reptilian, hunts-in-teams (packs), reptilian dinosaur that W.J.T. Mitchell (1998) writes about in The Last Dinosaur Book. We are locked in the Cybertech and Biotech and Disneyfied spectacle of the Jurassic Park MBA. We could have played the role of Jeff Goldblum in a critique of the Business College turned Mickey Mouse College, but instead we will be labeled postmodern Luddites.

As Aronowitz (1998) wrote in the book Post-Work, being a professor is the last great job on earth. What he means is that as the techno transformation of the university happens, any form of human interaction is discouraged between faculty and student, the administration takes over, and the life of the tenured professor is treated with all the respect of the dinosaur (the clumsy, stupid, non-adaptive one, not the quick, agile ones, hunting in packs). I am the last Dinosaur. Look at the students. They're raised on chat rooms, occupying more time in Cyberspace than in human space, playing more Sony and Nintendo games than book time. A friend of mine observed a class yesterday in which as the professor lectured the students sat at their terminal, doing chat room. Do students and faculty no longer care about class interaction?

Noble (1999) argues that "students want the genuine face-to-face education they paid for, not a cyber-counterfeit." At New Mexico State, there are courses where you can get the face-to-face or just do the cyber-meetings and virtual homework and quizzes. Students question why they are living on campus when they could be at home. I have taken the WEB-CT training. Our College administrators believe that we can lump several smaller sections together into 300 person lecture halls and use WEB-CT to provide quality education. I am taking WEB-CT classes, incorporating in my classes, a bit here and there. I am not going on line, I am seeing if there is a path between EMO and the face-to-face university. Can we put some stuff on line, but keep the important face-to-face meetings in one time and one place, that to me is the heart of the university? Can we also disengage from the tyranny of time and place regimentation that makes university life the panoptic factory? Can we do something different than decide between the rows and columns of chairs in lecture halls and desert the physical university factory of hour classes and semesters for the flexibility and freedom of engagement of V-U?

Discussion in worldwide chat rooms of more than six people my friend Terence Krell tells me are hard to achieve cohesive and meaningful discourse. I note that students resist the Internet cyber group assignments. As the courseware gets more customized and adapted this limitation may fall away. There is a degree of 'opportunism' in the rush to web based instruction and EMO.

We are witness to the end of textbooks and live instructors due to web-base teaching technologies and CD video archives. In cyber universities, the professor comes with the courseware, in a computer-aided spectacle of global knowledge dissemination. In the festive university the faculty and students still produce the knowledge, invent the texts, and possibly learn more mindful consumption and frugal production. University knowledge dissemination is big business and it is an opportunity to transform the practices of production and consumption. Putting a professor into an MPEG video is good marketing and profitable business, but to me it disembodies teaching and learning. The MPEG is mass-produced in courseware packages making individual scholarship obsolete. Scholarship becomes a commodity. There will be Internet management education but most of us will not be writing the modules, the administrative apparatus will carefully control such modules. Star performers from Harvard and Stanford will have these theatric performance jobs.

The classroom KWKM spectacle is growing in parallel with the global knowledge spectacle. The good news is the hegemony of the textbook with its banal historicism and monovocality is being re-registered into the digital web-texts linked to a web of other texts (assuming the buttons are designed into the architecture). The library with books and journals on shelves is giving way to CD libraries accessible from remote locations. The transglobal spectacle of higher education is being reconstructed by the hegemony of a few major media corporations, buying up tele-communications and textbook publishers, then remixing them into one. A new patriarchal social order is being born in higher education. Selling web and textbook CD technology to the university is big business. But, could it become entrepreneurial, with small adventurers marketing more critical appraisals of production and consumption?

We are witnesses to higher education turned into spectacle, as Guy Debord spoke of in the Situationist International movement. But, he also saw in that movement, a rebellion against the university and commerce. And if you look at what is going on it is the most amazing and radical shift in management and organizational thought since Spencer's Social Darwinism gave legitimacy to survival of the richest, and Taylor's application of Upton Sinclair's (1905) Jungle-Slaughterhouse principles to the rest of manufacturing. Tenure is a relic, and this generation will be last on the planet to enjoy what is left of Academic Freedom. Here is a sampling of the feedback I received, for and against my comments:
 
 

First, Rifkin's Biotech Century, where business classrooms will be named after Monsanto, Dupont, and the entrepreneurs in the gene-splicing industry, the one that is reengineering a mutated human species in what Rifkin (1998) calls Second Genesis. Second, there is the tamer side of this new revolution, the Kevin Kelly (Wired Magazine guy) with New Rules for the New Economy, the new cyber/cyborg human/machine economy. These classrooms will be named after Apple, IBM, Intel, Prentice-Hall, and Disney. I follow the lead of Steven Best and Douglas Kellner (1999) who are providing a critique of the New Rules of the New Economy, the Biotech/Cybertech economy that will be the basis of the Next Century and the EMO. While the Rifkin economy is about the deforestation, desertification, contaminated (air, water, soil) planet --- the Wired world (combined with the pseudo economics of Coyle's Weightless World, 1998) says its just the evolution of the cyber-species (humanoid) into cyber-life. The New techno changes to Cybertech and Biotech are being implemented en mass without much dialogue about Bioethics or Cyber-ethics.

Spectacle, says Debord, is an opium, that allows us to sleep walk, as if drugged, stumbling blindfolded through a devolving landscape of ecological and human horror; while cocooned in artificiality and illusion; mind-numbed by cyber media into passive stupefied spectators. Spectacle University is above all a legitimating narrative producer for social engineering and social control while theatrically masking the violent acts of production and consumption. There are consequences to setting up EMO as diploma mills with "no classrooms" and "untrained faculty" while most of the university personnel exploits the patents of the new technologies and university-held intellectual property rights. University education quality declines to the intellectual level of the home shopping channel while the ideology of conspicuous consumption and mindless production accelerates. The Situationaliste answer to the ideological social control of spectacle is festival. The festive university can be antispectacle. Festive learning is intertwined with spectacle learning, not apart from it, but complicit. What is appealing about the new V-U is how self-managed learning processes can overcome regimented ones, how interactive play can replace routinization of curriculum, and how teacher and learner can co-create more playful times and spaces. Could we do V-U without the control of administrators and without the home shopping predatory behavior of media moguls (Mokhiber & Weissman, 1999)? Festive university is the self-management and self-design of our own education time and space situations. One way to tame the voracious material spectacle of production and consumption is to develop an alternative philosophy of the situation, a celebration of learning, or what I call the festive university. This book has been an exploration of five spectacle worldviews, as well as four hybrid views.
 
 

Table One: Summary of Five Spectacle University Worldviews
 

Chapter 3. Corporate Imperialism Spectacle  Corporate colonization of university learning communities into courseware and hardware outlets.	Hybrid of 3 and 4     Anti-Colonialism A hybrid of Ahimsa or nonviolence resistance and nonviolent attempts to resist university colonialism.	Chapter 4. Ahimsa and Simplicity Spectacle Ahimsa and Simplicity approaches of nonviolence in university consumption and production.
Hybrid of 3 and 5     University Charter A hybrid of political economy critique with movements towards rewriting university charters for more local student and faculty control.	Chapter 2. Knowledge Work and Management Spectacle Includes university knowledge workers, knowledge managers, and knowledge consumers, as well as the global division of virtual labor.	Hybrid of 4 and 6     New Age Postmodern A hybrid of the spirituality in university and with certain affirmative postmodern positions (animal rights, human rights, planet rights).
Chapter 5 Political Economy Spectacle A focus on the critical and labor process theory of Marx. Includes an analysis of the political and economic uses of technologies in the university.	Hybrid of 5 and 6         Critical Postmodern A hybrid of critical theory and certain postmodern perspectives such as theatrics (chapter 12) and narrative (chapter 13).	Chapter 6 Postmodern Spectacle Positions that range from Lyotard's focus on local narratives, Baudrillard's hyperreal, Bauman's analysis of Holocaust, to Best and Kellner's extension of Debord to postmodern sensibilities.

 

The popular new logic at the center of Table One (KWKM) is that self-steering markets will provide competitive drivers for efficiency, cost control, flexible adaptive change, and even profit that will radically transform the university on a global stage. This logic gets written into a narrative of the new coevolution of technology, business, and university in the Biotech Century. Get with the inevitable evolutionary path: downsize the faculty and reengineer the university. Join e-commerce to e-university. The average Joe has been downsized, thrown into low-pay, temporary contract employment, without benefits or job security, why should university professors sustain their unique privileges? The other positions we have explored surrounding the KWKM spectacle present different views, and hybrid views.

Corporate Imperialism and political economy look critically at the reformations to the labor process and colonization of human learning with course ware products. Ahimsa and simplicity and the postmodern spectacle worldviews look at the possibilities for a different kind of university. The four hybrid combinations present the rhizomatic possibilities. A university charter movement, a resistance to university colonization, a spiritual awakening, and new forms of narrative and theatrics.

What we are seeing in Spectacle University is the cosmology that overcomes resistance to biotech and cyber ware marketing. The faculty voice, the voice that had the traditional role (more in New Zealand than here) of critiquing the role of business in society is being silenced. Part-timers and five year contract professors do not critique anything (not that too many of us do now). We critical postmodernists are labeled Luddite. If we allow business cyber and biotech interests to take over the university along with legislative outcome assessment and five-year contract schemes, then academic freedom falls silent.

It is to me ridiculous teaching management and organization history in a business school fed on pseudo-history. It takes academic freedom to teach and research how Upton Sinclair's (1905) Jungle (Slaughterhouse) is being reinvented in 1999 with migrant workers taking the role of Jurgis and Ona (the Lithuanians and other immigrants) and how instead of distributing diseased-meats - the new genetically altered and hormone-spiked meats are distributed to the year 2000 population. It takes academic freedom to research how the young lads in Haiti who are growing breasts as large as their girl friends from the over-consumption of hormone-fed chickens. Such ethical considerations are taboo in the EMO. We are sold a new narrative, get with coevolution, the university is part of the evolving cyber economy. I do not dispute coevolution, only that this one is inevitable. It is subject to choice making.

The buzz of KWKM is for efficiency, cost control and profit, but more is going on in this than coevolution of university with corporate hegemony. We must ask how is it that the cyber/machine system is co-evolving with the human, and these co-evolving with the Biotech species changes we are genetically reengineering and unleashing into the planet, how is the cyberspace coevolving with cyborg (human/machine). Mimicry may be a well-known effective evolutionary strategy, but it is one we need to look at carefully. This we reviewed in chapter 9 coevolution approaches, in books by Dyson (1997) Darwin among the Machines and Mitchell (1997) The Last Dinosaur Book.

I ask a simple political economy question: where is this investment coming from and who benefits? The growth of cyber education technology is financed by the computer equipment, software and telecommunication industries. Business is colonizing the academic delivery side of university. Media industries such as book publishing, newspapers, telecommunications, and television are merging to move in on global education delivery systems to exploit e-commerce.

Corporations are also forming their own universities in yet another transformation and transference of the knowledge function of society from university to corporation. With the popular selling textbooks, knowledge is already monopolized by the media companies to put forth a version of management knowledge that will make the transition to the commercialization seem seamless, a part of the natural cycle of coevolution of human into cyber-human playing in the terrain of the cyber-world instead of the out-moded terrain of natured-space. It will also appear natural to live in chat rooms instead of classrooms.

Business, especially information technology companies and universities are striking a new balance, one that will radically reengineer the job of university professor and student into a new techno matrix. As with any new technology implemented in enterprise, it can and often does become a new means of social control. But it is not the innovation that frightens me. It is the lack of critical appraisal of the changes and the uses they are being put to. We are telling ourselves a new story about the Biotech and cybertech Century, but to me it is a one-dimensional man story (i.e. Marcuse), one that celebrates without asking the ethical questions.

I think we are sold a bill of good about linking up folks who can not get education because they are too remote. There are a few remote folks who do not want to commute. But look at the case of New Mexico, a diffuse population with lots of rural folks in small towns. Seven distance education providers including New Mexico State compete in out-lying communities to provide distance ed. What you see is each attracting very few students from the rural areas and having to pay for the technology by enticing on-campus students to fill out the empty seats. The competition is cutthroat to reach the rural few. Students on campus do not seem to like the distance ed. "Why come to campus if I am doing cyber-class work?"

I do not see the bloated Weberian administration with its iron cage hierarchy and heavy investments in cyber-course ware as improving the efficiency or effectiveness of university education. The KWKM argument is that strong central administrative control combined with efficient information technology will lower education costs and allow university education access to spread to remote rural areas throughout the globe. The business model has colonized health care with HMO models of centralized cost administration, why not have EMO's (education maintenance organizations).

Many citizens and legislators complain that universities are getting wildly out of control. Outcome assessment and reaccredidation schemes are an important part of this trend. "Witness high school and community college cultures dominated by administrators" argued one list serve discussant. Measuring outcomes is a ruse since everyone knows you substitute what you can measure for what you can not. What you can measure is the implementation of the nouveau technology. The college and high school is part of how the population gets socialized.many of the postmodern critiques of the Internet, Cyberspace, Biotech revolution we are witnessing are about "predictions of doom" particularly about the future of traditional universities.

"If you can open an email, you can open the door to your future!" touts the Jones International "cyber" University web site. On March 5, 1999 Jones International University, which specializes in selling online courses for profit, is the first 100 percent virtual university to receive the legitimacy of accreditation. JIU met the rigorous criteria set forth by the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools. JIU is a cyber university which features courses designed by professors from schools like Columbia and Stanford and taught by part-time professors free-lancing for extra cash, offers bachelor's and master's degrees in business communications. Mr. Truscott, for example is a JIU instructor with an MA degree who also teaches part-time for the University of Phoenix. "In the U.S. there are 100 million people who need some kind of additional education, and there are only 15 million seats in universities," says founder Glenn Jones. The school started offering Internet courses in business communications four years ago. (Wall Street Journal 9 Mar 99). "We have dedicated four years to reaching this milestone and are proud of our accomplishment," said Dr. Pamela Pease, President of JIU. She added, "We are looking forward to expanding our program offerings and increasing our student enrollments with this announcement." Roberts Jones, President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Alliance of Business, echoed his JIU peers' comments. "Accreditation by NCA means that JIU, its courses, content, and unique Web-based delivery rank among the finest in the country. The velocity of change in the business world demands extraordinary change in the delivery of instruction to a geographically diverse student body," he added. Public policymakers, primarily legislatures and governors, are mandating institutional efficiency and increased access. The search is on for low-cost, high-quality, state-accountable education systems.

Deconstructionists and Legislators I would like to offer another critical reason why there is such decline in legislative support for university funding, while the emphasis on outcome assessment and cyber education grows stronger. Jane Smiley (1995:19) puts it quite eloquently in her novel Moo.
 
 

Yet from a critical postmodern worldview, it may be possible to emancipate Spectacle University from its entrails of production and consumption practices. Rather than doom and pessimism, it may well be that it is possible to use Internet technology to augment face-to-face classroom instruction. For example, put papers and handouts on the Internet, use the Internet to link to supplementary, even activist materials, do some of quiz taking on the web. This could provide more face-to-face time for teaching and learning. We can simply put our texts on the web to be freely accessed and take the economic incentive out of their control and reproduction. It may be possible to use the Internet to introduce Improvisation Theatrics, to try out new playful roles for students and faculty in the virtual chat rooms, but insist on face-to-face times and places. A postmodern theatrics could allow ironic parody of the Brick and Mortar University with its course bells and multiple-choice quizzes.

One answer is to set up shop as independents, and enroll students in our own faculty-run universities that compete with the new corporate cyber universities and the administrator-bloated EMOs. I favor a return to the Guilds, to the university run by students and faculty, rather than one run by corporations and their university administrators. To me it is time to remember Ivan Illich and Deschool the University, get back to the university life of the 12^th century where the business of universities was education, not commerce. Yet, we can not go back, the techno revolution has made the bookish work of the university obsolete, replaced it with CD books and interactive web texts.

The only critical postmodern, instructional theorist, I know is Wilson (1997). According to Wilson (1997: 1), "The constructivist movement is changing the way many of us think about instructional design (ID), but still, postmodern critics of educational technology are often seen as too radical, too iconoclastic." They are these deconstructionists written about in Smiley's Moo novel. Still I contend real learning is messy and does not fit neatly into pre-determined outcomes or standardized learning objectives. Festive learning is not found in corporate diploma mills.
 
 

Internet based Learning and the Future of Education
 
 

Internet based commerce and education are immensely popular, as is their merger. The claim is that it will provide new around the world access, more cost efficiency, and better education because of fast and easy updates to databases. People of varied geography and socioeconomic and cultural background can be brought together on line. The claim is Internet collaborative activities will be a cost-effective substitute for face-to-face learning. Internet books will replace printed textbooks to keep pace with rapid paces of global change. This is the KWKM argument.

I would like to suggest that we hold KWKM accountable to its new code of university conduct, find ways to make its ideal narrative find materiality and actuality. Can the technologist, university-as-business entrepreneur, and the administrator serve the needs of simplicity and access, low cost access of university knowledge to the three billion peasantariat, those without any computers and no virtual access to university education.

A Festive University would offer independent self-discovery of knowledge in its learning methods. Instead of the classroom (be it cyber of physical) being the prime source of instruction, the Festive University would focus on a relationships. How could university education be made accessible to the entire six billion people of the world? Instead of faculty lectures or assigned chat room dialogues, the Festive University would be a cooperative learning journey between the haves and have nots. Virtual classrooms allow members to post messages in folders, in contrast with a mailing list's stream of e-mail messages, which are typically co-mingled with other unrelated threads of discussion. But, if you have no computer, you can post no such messages. The messages read like a conversation of elites, when those without computers have no access. And in virtual chat rooms there are conversations allowing spontaneous and synchronous communication, but only if you are an elite computer user. As David Fetterman, a Stanford University cyber professor puts it "The virtual classroom is a functional reality in the present, not a distant dream of the future." Yet, it is not a functional reality for everyone. It seems that in the cyber university students and faculty does not have to be present in the same place and time. But, to get present at all requires access. I still think Face-to-face interaction is an important educational process even in a world with total access to EMO.

Final Words Ahimsa is not a religion it is a way of life (Rosenfield & Segall, undated). We live in a human ecology saturated in violence from our language, television, movies, diet and garment consumption practices. While our planet has the necessary resources to provide for all, a few have accumulated more than half the world's population have to eat and live. Last month, the group issued "Shifting Fortunes: The Perils of the Growing Wealth Gap in America," a report that features the latest findings of economist Edward Wolff of New York University, a leading authority on wealth distribution.

• Since the mid-1970s, the top 1 percent of households have doubled their share of the national wealth. The top 1 percent of U.S. households now have more wealth than the entire bottom 95 percent.

• The top 1 percent of households control 40 percent of the wealth. Financial wealth is even more concentrated. The top one percent control nearly half of all financial wealth (net worth minus equity in owner-occupied housing).

• Microsoft CEO Bill Gates owns more wealth than the bottom 45 percent of American households combined. In the fall of 1997, Gates was worth more than the combined Gross National Product of Central America -- for you geography buffs, that's Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua and Belize. By the fall of 1998, Gates' $60 billion was worth more than the GNPs of Central America plus Jamaica and Bolivia. Workers are earning less, adjusting for inflation, than they did when Richard Nixon was president. Average weekly wages for workers in 1998 were 12 percent below 1973, adjusting for inflation. Productivity grew nearly 33 percent in the same period.

• Families have sunk deeper into debt. Household debt as a percentage of personal income rose from 58 percent in 1973 to an estimated 85 percent in 1997. Total credit card debt soared from $243 billion in 1990 to $560 billion in 1997. Credit card limits have risen to the point that the average person can charge more than eight times what they already owe. As of 1997, almost 60 percent of American households carried credit card balances -- balances that average more than $7,000, costing these households more than $1,000 per year in interest and fees.

• The wealth gap between rich and poor is masked in the spectacle predatory capitalism (Mokhiber & Weissman, 1999). Spectacle violence of domination, exploitation and sentient killing is antithetical to life capitalism. Human and non-human lives are eager to live. Festive worldviews "perceive all planetary life as one interdependent family from which no living being is excluded" (life (Rosenfield & Segall, undated). Ahimsa originated several thousand years ago as a way to live in non-violence. The reverence for all life can be part of university, corporate, and consumptive life modes.

We can aspire to ethical non-violent consciousness in our postmodern condition. Ethical production and consumption does the least harm to humans, animal and planet. The days of slaughterhouse production are numbered because there are alternatives. It could be the task of management and organization to care for all life forms instead of operating overcrowded human and animal factories. It could be the task of consumers to actively inquire into the conditions of distributed violence. It could be the task of producers and consumers to actively consider the ecology of the planet and to seek more equitable existence of rich and poor. Hoarding does not have to be a celebrated way of life. Business could be about the frugality of planetary resource consumption as well as frugal cost attainment. Refuse to consume products unless you know the story of where they come from. Were these products created in pain and suffering? Do not be a passive spectator in the theater of violence. In festivalism is the opportunity for each person to take charge of his or her own consumptive and productive habits. - David M. Boje