I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education covering innovation in and around academe. Here’s what’s on my mind this week:
Do corporate-style NDAs have a place in higher ed?
The broad nondisclosure agreement Purdue University Global requires its faculty members to sign has been nagging at me since I first reported on it a couple weeks ago. The more I’ve talked to people about it, the more it seems at odds with the values of higher education and the traditional role of faculty members — even recognizing how businesslike the enterprise has become.
Even if the policy is an anomaly — and despite assertions from Purdue Global, it looks like it is — I wonder whether it’s yet another harbinger of the rising corporatization of the sector.
Purdue Global makes no bones about the purpose of the NDA. The policy states that the nonprofit university created when Purdue University acquired the for-profit Kaplan University “is engaged in the highly competitive business” of providing students with educational services and materials.
NDA prohibits sharing
The NDA prohibits faculty members from sharing confidential information “that does or may have economic value,” including nonpublic information about course materials and methods of instruction, plus dozens of other categories of information. I had hoped Purdue Global’s chancellor, Betty Vandenbosch, would talk to me about it, but she was traveling and unavailable when I reached out. My invitation stands open.
The NDA is not the only recently revealed policy of the institution that has been raising questions. Purdue Global also appears to be ceding unusual control over its admissions policies to Kaplan Inc., the ex-parent company of Kaplan University that now handles marketing, technology, and other services for the online programs. And Purdue Global is continuing the Kaplan University practice of forced arbitration — requiring students to waive their rights to sue the institution in the event of disputes, a practice that few other nonprofits follow. Those findings, along with others, were made public by the Century Foundation, an organization that previously challenged Purdue’s purchase of Kaplan.
Gag clause
The American Association of University Professors and its Indiana chapter, which first publicized the “gag clause,” aren’t letting the issues go. They’ve created an online petition urging Purdue Global to scrap the NDA and the forced arbitration. They are also using the petition to find out if people have encountered nondisclosure agreements at other institutions.
I’ve been curious too. Besides the institutions with big online operations that I mentioned in my original story (Arizona State and Southern New Hampshire Universities, and the for-profit American Public University System) I’ve since learned that institutions owned by Adtalem Global Education — like DeVry University — don’t use them either. Ditto for another nonprofit, National University.
Wallace Boston, chief executive at American Public, said he found the idea of an NDA “sort of awful.” If anything, he told me, “I want my faculty members to talk about their courses. That’s how the courses get better.”
Colorado State University-Global Campus does have its faculty and staff members sign a confidentiality policy, but Becky Takeda-Tinker, president of the institution, considers the policy less restrictive than Purdue Global’s because it doesn’t enumerate all the categories of potentially confidential material and it’s the same document every state employee signs.
Takeda-Tinker also sees the NDA as contrary to a strength of higher education, one that she had a hard time appreciating at first as an entrepreneur-turned-college-president: “In higher education, there is this collegiality, this sharing.” And she dismisses the premise — the competition factor — that underlies the NDA. “Oh my gosh, there are plenty of students,” she said. My spin detector goes off whenever I hear a college president poo-poo concern for market share; despite that, her observations seem right on the mark.
