Who Owns U

Who owns your work?

When you design a course or project, you probably think its your creation, your own intellectual property, in the same way a book is considered your own work. If you're an adjunct teaching an on-line or distance education course, you may be surprised to find out that your institution owns your course work.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reported in its June 5, 1998 issue, that many colleges and universities are developing contracts with faculty that give the institutions rights to ownership to online courses developed at that institution. These provisions indicate a new zone of conflict between faculty and administration.

Of course such issues of intellectual property aren't entirely new to business or academia. Scientists and researchers who work for industry often find that any patents they receives for new products of procedures belong to their employer including universities. In such cases employers claim that inventions created using their resources are the property of the employer. Rights to license them for general use belong to the employer. Courses which consist of lectures, demonstrations, group projects etc. were never considered inventions in this sense, nor were they marketable. However, the advent of on-line courses is changing the notion of way is commercially exploitable. Now course work could be marketed through CD-ROMS or other forms of online distribution, and can become a source of profit for cash starved universities.

Institutions claim that such courses depend on their the technologies and resources in order to develop and distribute courses. On-line courses are interpreted by some universities as a form of "work for hire", in which case the employer claims to own the work. Kathleen Davey, dean of instructional technology at Florida Gulf Coast University asserts that where professors are paid to create courses "first rights belong to the university" At the New School for Social Research on-line program (where I have been employed) instructors are independent contractors with no affiliation the university and no rights. In both of these cases academic work comes close wage labor. Just like factory work, one sells one's labor or the employer for a fee and the products of that labor belong to the employer.

Full time faculty have contested these changes. They fear the loss of control over their work and potential threats to academic freedom. They also fear the advent of a supermarket approach to education, in which education becomes akin to a grand commercial shopping mall of courses. To a large extent these fears have a real basis, but not simply because of their threat to intellectual property. They herald a drastic change in the nature of academic work.

Academics, including adjuncts tend to view themselves as processionals whose dedication and calling in the dissemination of specialized knowledge buffets them from market forces. Professionals like to se themselves as self-regulating and autonomous groups who control their own work. However, this conception is being challenged by the transformations of higher education. The new arrangements give greater power to administrators rather than faculty.

In the case of adjuncts , the image of the professional largely independent of market forces has been an illusion for a long time. In fact they have been the shock troops for the successful downsizing of academia. For all intents and purposes adjuncts have already been converted to works for hire. Today's adjunct is decidedly the creation of market conditions. They are largely another commodity to be bought and sold on he market as conditions warrant.

Labor historian David Noble, has argued in a widely circulated online paper, "Digital Diploma Mills" that higher education is undergoing a large scale commodification. At some schools like UCLA online courses are being market in a for profit corporation in partnerships with private firms. Noble contends that universities are being viewed as a prime area for investment and capital accumulation by large corporations. The first stage entailed the licensing of patents the second the market of "courseware." Second is more troublesome since it "entails the commoditization of the educational function of the university, transforming courses into courseware, the activity of instruction itself into commercially viable proprietary products that can be owned and bought and sold in the market."

Noble disagrees with technological optimists, including some who should know better that the Internet represents the emergence of large scale alternative democratic public and forms of democratic empowerment, uncensored and unregulated, by the forces that have constricted other mass media. Technological changes are also wedded to social purposes. Whatever the potential in the abstract for technology, its function in our society has entailed harder and longer work, under worsening economic circumstances, with less control lower benefits and less pay.

These changes need to be viewed in a broader perspective. One for the basic tendencies of the economy in its post Keynesian stage is the extensions of market control over areas previously regulated either by government or by non-market social ideals. Protections guarantee by the welfare state ideals are being eased away as everything is justified by the discipline of the market. If faculty were to view their situation in this larger perspective they could take positive action. Otherwise they find themselves fighting a rear guard action. It will be hard for academics to call on others to help them avoid downsizing if they are unwilling to fight for others in the same position. Full-time faculty would need to make a common cause with adjuncts too. If adjuncts are marginalized while other faculty are protected it will only increase the tendency toward a two-tier academic system. Education for the few and courseware for the many.