Why Audrey Watters Thinks Tech Is a Trojan Horse Set to ‘Dismantle’ the Academy

This is the latest episode of our new podcast series on the future of higher education. You can subscribe in iTunes to get prior and future episodes.

This interview comes by request. We asked you, our readers, who we should bring on the podcast, and the top pick was someone a little different. We usually talk to people who are pushing for change in education, usually with technology. But when we tallied the votes, the winner was a critic of technology: Audrey Watters.

On her influential blog and in speeches she gives around the country, Audrey Watters warns that gadgets deserve more scrutiny, and that they often mask what she sees as a political attack on the academy. Watters has known higher education as an insider. She was an almost-Ph.D., having come just chapters away from finishing her dissertation, and she taught for years when she was a graduate student. But she now stands on the outside looking in on the academy and providing her analysis of where ed tech is going. She’s a fiercely independent voice who refuses to accept ads on her blog or do consulting. Her website describes her job description with one word: “troublemaker.”

Just a few weeks ago, she started a podcast called Tech Gypsies. Each week now, she and her partner, who is an advocate for open software standards called open APIs, riff on the latest ed-tech news, and, as always, she calls things as she sees them. After listening to the first few episodes, one thing struck me. She’s deconstructing what she calls a Silicon Valley narrative that she sees as pushing into higher education.

The Chronicle talked with Ms. Watters via Skype this week. Listen to the full audio. Below is an edited and adapted transcript of the podcast.

Q. What do you mean when you say there’s a “Silicon Valley narrative,” and what do you most want people to understand about it?

A. This certainly comes from my background of having spent a lot of time thinking about culture. My master’s degree was in folklore, and so that’s very much about ethnography, culture, people, and stories that we tell. I’m also really interested in systems and institutions. I want people to really think about, What is technology doing? I think we really like the story that technology is inevitable, that technology is wrapped up in our notions of progress, and that somehow progress is inevitable itself and is positive. I think that there are lots of ways in which we can scrutinize the way in which technology is changing the world, changing our culture, changing our institutions, that aren’t necessarily about progress. Or to put a political bent on it, about progressive change.

A. Gosh, where should I start? I think that one of the things that really interests me, and this is connected I would say to the Silicon Valley narrative, is the way in which we talk a lot about personalization through technology. And one of the values, I think, that Americans in particular tend to really privilege is individualism. There’s something really appealing, culturally, for us with this notion that we’re going to have software, and it isn’t just educational software, but we’re going to have software systems that are individualized and personalized to meet our needs. Amazon says it does this. Netflix says it does this. Facebook says it does this.

I think that we as Americans really like the idea that the world is about us as individuals. I think that it’s important to recognize that that’s a cultural value. Individualism is a cultural value. It’s not a natural way of being. But there’s something about the classroom that also involves a collective experience. We learn from one another. It isn’t simply just a matter of things being personalized or individualized to meet our needs. What happens when we decide that we’re going to all be on our individual computing devices working through lessons at our own individual pace? What happens to dialogue? What happens to discussion? What happens to debate? We sort of describe education as these polar opposites — that it’s either a math lecture or it’s this sort of individualized, personalized experience. I think those are sort of extremes on both ends.

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But what happens when we do lose the ability to spend time as groups, talking and working through material together? I think university professors see technologies — with the exception of folks who adopt them on their own — as something that’s done to them, that’s imposed upon them, that’s not really their decision to make, that somebody else makes the decision about the technology. Somebody else decides whether the room is going to have a projector, or the computers in the teaching facility have Windows or Macs. I really feel as though technology is something that gets done to the classroom and isn’t really interesting to many, many professors. It seems like an obligatory thing.

Q. You’ve described on your blog how you dropped out of a Ph.D. program out of disillusionment with higher education. After that, there are lots of directions you could have headed in your career. I’m curious why you decided to devote your writing and the focus of your work on education and hacking education. Your blog is called Hack Education. Why be somebody who is watching and writing about higher education?

A. I think that this question of disillusionment is actually pretty significant, because when I was working on my Ph.D., I already saw the handwriting on the wall. This was circa 2007, 2008, when I dropped out. I saw the sort of the “adjunctification” of higher education. For me, I sort of realized that, despite having spent really my adult life in college, having devoted myself to becoming a scholar and perhaps a professor, that was actually not realistic. I saw the job prospects. My Ph.D. would have been in comparative literature. The job prospects were bad, and I didn’t feel as though, as a single mom, I could afford to be an adjunct. I had to look for something else.

I managed to get a job working in education technology, which is something that has always interested me and been adjacent to what I’ve done both as a student and as a teacher. I took it from there, and decided that paying closer attention to what was happening to the institution of higher education and K-12 and how technology was changing or not changing became really interesting to me. Again, as a researcher, as a writer, and as someone who really cares about making this a place that is more just, more equitable, and less deceptive, less disillusioning.

Q. Naturally, folks I talked to in Silicon Valley see things differently. I think they’d argue they provide an important lever these days to push higher education to modernize and adapt to the times. What you say to that idea?

A. I think that there are lots of factors at play here. What do we do with shrinking public funding? There’s a point where people say, “We have to do more with less,” and you just throw up your hands and say, “We can’t. We can’t do more with less.” So the question of public funding is real. Whatever happens with the technologies we use, are we going to make a commitment to publicly funded higher education the same way that we have valued publicly funded, for better or for worse, K-12? If everyone is supposed to go to college, do we actually find a way as a society to pay for that?

That’s one piece of the puzzle that’s outside the realm of technology. Then we have think, too, what is the value we see in higher education? What does it mean when we say we want people to have high-tech skills? What does it mean to say that going to college is about skills? What does that look like? What does that mean in terms of the kinds of things we want students to learn? I think that’s been a huge push, and we can again trace this back as far as Ronald Reagan as governor of California, who was really adamant when he saw the student protests in the state, that students needed to stop learning about these political things, and they were in college to get jobs.

The conversation that college is about jobs really is a different mission than many faculty see as their mission — their mission being, thought, deep thought, scholarship. The sort of practical jobs thing is a different narrative. And then, so much of this is outside the control of universities. If the job market is crap, there’s not a lot you can do. The labor market isn’t something universities are responsible for.

There are many things at play that may or may not prompt higher education to change. I think there are many, many places in which we have great entrenchment in our institutions that are resistant to change as well. We can talk about badges, for example, we can talk about going to a coding boot camp for an eight-week program. But at the end of the day, do employers value that? Or does an employer still value a degree from a university that they recognize and respect? That’s a question of prestige, and no amount of technological innovation right now really gets at that prestige question.

It was clear from the conversation that Audrey Watters is not against technology — not at all. In fact, listening to her podcast reminded me just how deep she dives into digital culture. She’s arguing that professors should actually do more with technology, to get more involved and be more savvy. Don’t just put photos on Facebook or put work on commercial platforms, she argues: Set up your own website. Have a domain of your own.

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