Rethinking The Academy:

Double-edged and Dangerous


The desire to do things faster is built into our culture: we have efficiency experts, deadlines, and goals which are defined in terms of speed. We get paid by the piece or by the article, both measures in which the ability to do the job faster is directly linked to the amount of compensation we receive. We even see this happen when we are promised hard bodies with just three twenty minute workouts a week or when church services are criticized for being more than an hour long.

And in many ways it is good for technology to speed things along - without a calculator I would never be able to submit my students' final grades. Certainly without a word processor, many fewer papers would be written, and publishing them would be almost impossible without means for the creation and distribution of printed material.

Yet there are dangers in the ability of technology to speed up and automate our work lives. We may find ourselves in the position of being able to do yet more work, to be more productive. As a direct result, we may - especially in today's political climate - find ourselves called to do more work, teach more classes, and teach more students in each of our sections.

If the requirement for more productivity is not associated with a concomitant increase in compensation, then technology is only being used to create a cheap labor pool at the very moment it demands a high level of skills.


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Last Modified: August 2, 1996

Copyright © 1996 by Keith Dorwick