Technology and intellectual property: Who's in control?

Academe, May/Jun 1998 by Schrecker, Ellen

FOR ME, PERHAPS NOTHing better illustrates the contradictions inherent in the academic use of the new technology designed for distance learning than the first time I saw it in action. It was at a local AAUP chapter meeting where we decided to use the university's teleconferencing equipment to bring our colleagues at the school's other campus into our discussion. Once we got the system under control, we realized that it presented some serious academic freedom issues insofar as it might have allowed unwanted surveillance. So we shut down the connection. Relations between the faculty and the administration were sometimes strained, and we did not want to discuss potentially sensitive matters in such a venue.

While my colleagues and I may be unduly paranoid, the growing use of technology in the educational process raises problems that academics can no longer ignore. Both the AAUP's Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure and its Committee R on Government Relations have addressed these problems. AAUP committee reports on distance learning and intellectual property rights, as well as related articles by Karen Cardenas, Robert Gorman, Marjorie Heins, and M. M. Scott, form the core of this issue of Academe.

It has become all too common to treat technological change as an irresistible force of nature over which mere mortals, and certainly mere college professors, have little control. But technology is not a tornado. It is a tool, a human invention brought onto the campus, as elsewhere, by people who want to improve their operations and cut costs. However, because the academy's embrace of technology is occurring at a time of financial stringency, it not only amplifies preexisting problems, but does so in ways that are not always compatible with scholarly inquiry or academic freedom.

Neither the members of AAUP committees nor Academe s authors are Luddites. Karen Cardenas enthuses about computer-aided instruction and the way in which distance learning enables the language departments at several South Dakota institutions to offer upper-level courses that no single school could mount. At the same time, she recognizes, as does Committee R, the dark side of the new technologies: their recurring breakdowns and their unprecedented demands on a professor's time and attention.

Electronic classrooms are not cheap. Though often touted as saving money by lessening the need for teachers and classrooms, they require such a heavy investment in rapidly obsolescing hardware, software, and support staff that, as Committee R points out, the "cost-cutting aspects of distance learning are, in most cases, cost shifting." Moreover, the considerable expense of installing and maintaining the required infrastructure may well accelerate the growing divergence between the academy's institutional haves and have-nots.

Equally distressing from the faculty's perspective is that the impetus for these innovations often comes from outside, threatening the autonomy of individual professors and raising serious questions about institutional governance and the locus of decision making on campus. Moreover, because the new technologies encourage trustees and administrators to view a professor's scholarly and creative work as a potential source of income, conflicts over the control of that work-intellectual property rights, in other words-have begun to arise.

Commercializing intellectual property can, as Gorman, Scott, and the Committee A report reveal, damage the integrity of scholarly inquiry. Universities may try to steer research into financially remunerative areas or insist on owning the copyright to faculty work. Already, some professors who depend on corporate funders have lost control over their research. They must keep it secret and cannot discuss it openly with students or peers. Such restrictions go to the heart of academic freedom.

There is overt censorship as well. Usually the subject is sex, which, as the comments in Nota Bene by Susan Lehrer and Candace de Russy reveal, currently provokes many challenges to academic freedom. Marjorie Heins explores the technological version of this threat in her discussion of the recent Virginia law preventing state employees (including college teachers) from obtaining "sexually explicit" materials over the Internet. University administrators can be just as repressive as any legislator, especially when they seek to head off outside critics by denying students and faculty members access to allegedly pornographic sites.

The outlook is not entirely bleak. Neither the introduction of technology nor the sale of intellectual property in and of itself erodes the faculty's autonomy. As Scott's report on Indiana University's deliberations about intellectual property shows, professors can regain some control and persuade administrators and trustees to respect educational priorities and academic freedom. But first they must become informed. This issue of Academe is a step in that direction.