David F. Noble

Digital diploma mills

This paper argues that the trend towards automation of higher education as implemented in North American universities today is a battle between students and professors on one side, and university administrations and companies with educational products to sell on the other.

Technology and the Commodification of Higher Education

The following article is adapted from David Nobles new book, Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education, just published by Monthly Review Press. Noble, a professor at York University, should need no introduction to MR readers. For the past three decades he has established himself as one of the great scholars and historians of technology, demystifying the subject and placing technology in the necessary social and political economic context. His publications include America by Design: Science. Technology, and The Rise of Corporate Capitalism (Alfred A. Knopf; 1977), Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), and The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and The Spirit of Invention (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997).This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The Truth about the Information Highway

At the end of November 1994, the truth about the information highway finally got out. Protesting the announcement of another 5,600 layoffs, 1,200 Bell-Atlantic employees in Pennsylvania wore T-shirts to work which graphically depicted themselves as Information Highway Roadkill. The layoffs were just the latest round of cutbacks at Bell-Atlantic, which have been matched by the elimination of jobs at the other giants of the telecommunications industry—ATT, NYNEX, Northern Telecom—supposedly the very places where new jobs are to be created with the information highway. In reality, the technology is enabling companies to extend their operations and enlarge their profits while reducing their workforce and the pay and security of those who remain by contracting out work to cheaper labor around the globe and by replacing people with machines. The very workers who are constructing the new information infrastructure are among the first to go, but not the only ones.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.