Cinema Canada (Jun 1983)

—* ee Ee eee maining faculty devote themselves to research and, in all likelihood, mainly short-term contract research. The current power and authority of the university may be seriously eroded. Alternatively, if universities remain in the forefront of the development of alternative educational practices, their prestige may grow accordingly. Those who do control the new forms of higher education will certainly enjoy considerable prestige, if not profitability. The incentives will be high and we can clearly expect a great many new players in the post-secondary educational sweepstakes. Changes of this magnitude, though possible, will not occur overnight. Leadership will come from those who have experienced and comprehended such changes most fully, and this will no doubt include those universities that actively explore new forms of undergraduate education extensively and monitor the results carefully. Clearly, the very possibility of changes of this extent will prompt universities to rethink once again the nature and purpose of a university education and, particularly, how it can be differentiated from alternatives that approximate more and more closely the characteristics, if not yet the quality, of the traditional undergraduate curriculum. In summary, what changes can we expect to see in higher education in the years to come? We will see students who, ironically, often will have a greater degree of visual and computer literacy than their professors. Their expectations will pose serious questions about the availability of such things as wordprocessing or data base searches, particularly the question, Who pays ? At present it only seems clear that no one answeris evident. In terms of data base access both the federal and provincial governments have openly encouraged their greater use, verbally, but have made no provision to offset the cost, which can run between $15 and $100 per search. Universities themselves have seen their operating budgets shrink every year for the last five years orso as new funds go primarily to keep salaries not too far below the rate of inflation. Students will be uneager to assume yet another ancillary expense, and faculty may wonder what impact this will have on the traditional apprenticeship system of graduate assistants who often perform such data searches by hand as one of the service activities they perform in exchange for financial stipends. Adult education in all its forms can be expected to burgeon. With satellite linkages and computer networks there may well arise superuniversities equivalent to super stations in the television entertainment sector. Universities need no longer concentrate on providing distance education for those within their immediate geographic area; it will be entirely possible for a university to offer extension services to students scattered across the country or even the continent. This will put greater pressure on universities to identify areas of strength and to nurture them, lest funding for these areas begin to flow elsewhere to a disproportionate degree. The rise of course packaging by means of interactive computer programs will also mark a radical change in the basic nature of higher education, should it occur to any sizeable extent. Historically, higher education has been served by an identifiable institution within our society, the university. Like the hospital, school and courts, it is a repository of values and knowledge that the rest of society depends upon. New information technologies and the entrance of powerful economic forces into this area, however, mean that higher education may take on more and more the characteristics of a market rather than an institution. The educational marketplace will be characterized, initially, by furious competition, possibly by strenuous and perhaps misleading advertising, and by problems of quality as the classic tension between profitability and excellence makes itself felt as a major constraint. Education itself may become more and more of a secondary experience as faceto-face contact with an instructor is replaced by long hours in front of a video display terminal. The concentration of resources needed to mounta successful telecourse or CAI package will require educators to work in teams and consortia to an increasing degree. The individual instructor, unless he or she is exceptionally good, will be hard put to compete with the instructional programs developed by NICHOLS teams ofthe very best professionals money can buy. The academic’s traditional privacy within the classroom will come under siege, not by prying administrators, but by competing educational “product.” The notions of academic freedom and tenure as they apply to the classroom may suffer considerable erosion and the rich spectrum of differences in approach represented by a university faculty may become narrowed down to a few marginally different approaches, something like car models, in which distinctive points of view will be flattened out by consensus decision-making. National, regional and cultural studies may also come under siege as higher education becomes more of a market, subject to the same market forces as other commodities. Buffers to the “freedom of information” advocated by those who control the bulk of information and constraints on transborder data flow will become of increasing importance. In some ways the impact of new information technologies on education may be tantamountto Custers Last Stand for questions of national sovereignty and cultural identity. It's do or die; and if it's die, few will remain to remember the nation that might have been. Within the educational market place there will be a mix of sunrise industries such as_ electronics, computer programming, artificial intelligence, and cultural programming and some sunset industries, educational equivalents to Lockheed and Chrysler. To a large degree these sunset industries will be found among the humanities. The wisdom of supporting them rather than those in their ascendancy will be hotly debated. Arguments about tradition and quality will wear thin. And as much as | personally suspect that the very idea of the university will change, profoundly, and for the worse, | also wonder if this change is not to some extent inevitable. Humanities departments took their place at the centre of the university when their disciplines were perceived as central to the making of an educated individual. The new literacies dilute the claim of the classic humanities departments. The battle is no longer over whether to admit English literature to the curriculum, as it was at the turn of the century, or even film, as itwas in a 23