 I mean, welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the Forum's creator, host, and chief cat-herder, and I'm delighted to see you all here today. We have a fantastic guest who has written just some blistering critique and I'm really looking forward to hosting it. I'm absolutely delighted to welcome Professor Matthew Siebold. He's a Mark Twain scholar, which is awesome enough, but he is most recently the author of an absolutely ferocious critique of some ways of higher-end operates. In fact, he specifically links two things, a certain use of technology and a certain corporate style that's more neoliberal and more austerity-driven and definitely the combination of which is hostile to academia has the author values. You can link to it. On the bottom left of the screen you'll see a kind of, you know, rectangle-shaped edtech griftopia. Click on that and you'll find the entire article. But since that article has been written, quite a few things have happened in the world, which I think would give Professor Siebold even more to say, more to say about, and so I'd like to have him join us and to speak about what the edtech griftopia is and how people are using edtech in a horrible way that initiates academia and our values. Welcome, Professor Siebold. Thanks for having me, Brian. It's very good to be here and I'm looking forward to chatting with everybody. Oh, it's my pleasure. It's my pleasure. Now the first question I have to ask everybody is, what are you working on for the next year? What lies ahead for you? Yeah, so for starters, I am the producer and host of the Center for Mark Twain Studies podcast, which is called The American Vandal. And just this moment I am working on our next series, which is going to be called Criticism Limited, and it focuses on the state of contemporary literature, literary and cultural criticism, not just in academia and legacy periodicals, but we're also trying to think about websites, booktubes, book talks, Twitter feeds, podcasts. And so that's the, you know, the immediate project for me later this year. We'll be celebrating the 150th anniversary of Mark Twain's The Gilded Age. It's curious about not only the novel, but the metaphor of The Gilded Age and how it remains in many ways. The subtitle of the novel was A Tale of Today, and in some ways it still is a tale of today. And so that's the sort of podcast site we'll be doing at least three series this year. And then for the LA Review of Books, I'm currently working on two things. One is about the origin of two police departments in San Francisco and Charleston, South Carolina. And their early confrontations with two journalists, one predictably Mark Twain, and the other guy by the name of James Redpath, who went on to become Twain's publicist. And I'm trying to explore how those confrontations, what they can tell us about this sort of intrinsically antagonistic relationship between media witnesses, journalists, mass media outlets, and police departments. And I'm hoping to have that ready around Memorial Day. And then I'm also deepening the weeds on the emerging and incendiary rivalry between Twitter and Substack. And I don't know where that's going, but that's been an assignment that my editor gave me several months ago. And things just keep happening. So we keep sort of pushing it down the road, because we think that there's something really interesting happening there. I'll also, of course, be doing a lot of writing and speaking and editing for the Center for Mark Twain Studies, most conspicuously, a project that I call the Twain Doctrine, which I began publishing last year, which focuses on how Twain's legacy gets wrapped up in Cold War propaganda operations in both the US and the Soviet Union. And you can read some selections from that on MarkTwinestudies.org already. That's just a sliver of what I'm working on. We're launching a media studies program here. I'm getting ready to teach my favorite course, which is called the Culture of Global Recession. So plan to keep me busy. That's a sentence I wouldn't have imagined in any part of that. But it busy indeed. Fantastic. And I'd love to follow up with almost all of these. For your Gilded Age note, the Swiss Reinsurance Company, Swiss Ray, said that we were in Gilded Age 2.0. So I think they wouldn't know. That's a useful thing to have. Mark Wilson reminds you that Musk locked Matt Taibi off of Twitter because of his sub-stack. That's exactly right. That's the most recent and I think most overt of a number of sort of indications that we are moving towards a real confrontation between those two platforms. I think so with the notes being the big Twitter gauntlet. Well, friends, what I'd like to do is ask Professor Siebold a couple of questions about his critique to get the ball rolling. But then I would love to hear from all of you. So again, the forum is your place for your questions, your comments. Just go to the bottom of the screen along that white strip and choose your poison, which way you'd like to respond. To begin with, your critique, your article is just splendid. It's so engaging. It's so powerfully written and also is so extensively researched. If you could begin by talking about what is the, I try to think of a good word here. The management style is in the right word. What is the ideology espoused by now Temple's former president that you found so clearly present here and so deleterious to academia as you'd like to see it? Well, there's a lot of different ways to answer that question. And as you've indicated, you know, there were many things in reading Jason Windgard's books that I found discomforting, problematic, sometimes outright offensive. And so it's it's kind of hard to pick one thing. I can maybe start with the fact that he comes out of a sort of tradition, you know, a management business school tradition, that is, I would say dehumanizing about workers, right, as oftentimes referred to as, as sort of human capital management. And clearly one way that he is constantly approaching education is through, you know, a means of minimizing staffs, minimizing faculties, and if if it all possible, replacing them with with tech. And so I think that, you know, if there's one sort of simple way to start this question, it is about the ways in which labor and the people involved in that labor are being disregarded, and sometimes simply disposed of in this, what is largely a sort of imaginary idea of what of what higher education and I would say, you know, though higher education is much of what Windgard talks about, these plans extend well beyond the university campus and and certainly into secondary schools and primary schools. Thinking about a a form of educational interface that reduces the number of teachers, the number of number of instructional workers, right, and also reduces their input and their control and their autonomy within classroom spaces. It sounds, I mean, you've got me thinking about this, both through your discussion of Twain, but also your your the historical scope that you that you address. This sounds like classic union busting. Yeah. Well, and that's, you know, if that's where this all really started for me was, you know, I obviously have been following, as I'm sure many of you have, the, you know, the sort of growing academic labor movement over the last few years, and, you know, a number of strikes just at the end of last year, we had the largest academic worker strike, I believe, in history at the University of California. And so I was, you know, just sort of following that developing movement. And when the Temple grad strike happened, one of the things that distinguished it was how hard the administration pushed back against its grad workers who were asking for pretty, you know, what have come to be the pretty common requests, right, from grad worker unions and which follow in this, you know, this movement that has developed over the last few years. And some of the things that the Temple did to push back against that work, you know, they did not negotiate in good faith, and they immediately started really strong, unprecedented union-busting techniques. And so absolutely, I think one of the first things that I was asking was why, like, why is this administration pushing back so hard in a way that Columbia and NYU and University of California, as much as there had clearly been, you know, conflict in those places, it was not as aggressive as it was at Temple. And that was the question I was trying, that sort of got me working on this essay, was why? Why are they so eager to antagonize their grad workers? And what I discovered or what I, you know, what I believe is they really thought they were disposable. So that they could just fire at them all or drive them away by A, not agreeing to their demands and also be cutting their tuition and medical care and then in the fall semester generate a crop of new ones. Right. This was an opportunity for cost cutting, and that either those workers would come back at, you know, equal or lower cost, or they would prove that that, you know, getting rid of them or them resigning in some way would provide an opportunity for trying new forms of instruction and building new relationships probably with ed tech firms. Okay. Okay. Thank you. That's very, very clear and that really helps. In the chat, by the way, before we get to some questions, there's been some interesting responses. Mark Wilson, our good friend there, mentions the Powell Memo of 1971. Sarah Sangregorio mentions that their school has a new MS in human resource analytics. It's weird to, she says, it's weird to me because I sighed and I quote, how we use people analytics, unquote. And Mark Wilson says academia collaborates with us on this. But let me take where you just left off as a buildup for a second question, which is what's the style of deploying educational technology here? Is it to replace human instructors? Is it to reduce the student experience directly? What's the plan here? Well, I do think it varies from institution to institution. And I think that it's really important to acknowledge that this is not just a temple problem, right? Temple was, in some ways, the vanguard at this moment. And I think Wingard epitomizes, you know, a set of ideas, ideology that we are going to see at a number of different institutions going forward. And I think that there's a few things. One is an increase of remote instruction. And one of the things that happened during the tug-of-strike was that the replacement instructors that were hired, oftentimes massively unqualified, were immediately given a platform. I think they were using a platform called Panopto, a really wonderful name to think about in this context. And the strike, among the many disruptions that the strike was used to rationalize, was to move students back to at least to some degree to remote instruction. And I think absolutely, as I'm sure many people here are well aware of, the opportunities associated with the pandemic and post-pandemic for ed tech companies that are providing some form of synchronous or asynchronous remote instruction, those opportunities were present for several years and there's a strong incentive to keep them going. And so one place that I think absolutely we will continue to see colonizing of the university is through remote instruction, whether synchronous or asynchronous. The other thing, obviously, automation, that the hope for some of these platforms like Coursera and Udemy is eventually to get to the point where you can have faculty, professors, instructional designers, creating classes that basically work automatically. That there's slides, there might be lectures, audio, video content. You have to pay for it once, but then you can deliver the course over and over again. And the only thing that you're going to have to pay for repeatedly is braiding. And maybe even that can be automated to some extent. So we've got remote instruction, we've got automation, and the third place is absolutely surveillance. In what ways can we use ed technology to police and surveil student behavior? And obviously lockdown browser has been a popular one in recent years. Other ways of sort of giving a justification for the university to enter into students' homes, into their dorms, into their lives in various ways, under the auspices of making sure that they don't cheat, making sure that they don't plagiarize, making sure that they are doing their work. And so I would say, for me, those are the three vectors that worry me the most, right? You know, remote instruction, right, and some of the things that we lose, automated instruction, and then surveillance. Wow, that's a battle plan, a plan of campaign. Just if I could, as one literature person to another, use the word colonization. I'm wondering if you just unfolded what you meant by that word in this context. So for me, this has to do with how I think about, you know, I think there are several entities collaborating in, you know, in this situation. One are administrations and boards of trustees who are trying to think about like how to manage the costs of their institution. Another are these ed tech firms who are creating the software, the platforms that are, you know, are being used to help cut those costs, or at least to redistribute those costs. And then the third is the sort of investment class, right, venture capital, hedge funds, private equity, right, who are necessary to get these platforms off the ground, these tech startups, and to keep them going until they can become profitable, because most of them aren't, right, and some of them are still a long way, right, from being consistently and reliably profitable, right. And for them, this is where I start to think about the sort of idea of colonization, right, that the sort of venture capital, private equity model that has sort of existed and proliferated over the last 15 years or so, which I call in the piece the Frankensteinian mollusk, right. It is based on the idea that we, that of disruption, right, they like to call it disruption, right, the disruption of existing industries. I think it's more accurate to call it something more like parasitical capitalism or parasitical entrepreneurship. Uber and DoorDash are maybe the easiest examples of this, right. You take an existing industry like taxis or restaurants and you create what my colleague Michelle Chihara calls a runway of trust, right, because you're venture funded, right, because you don't need to make money immediately, right. You promise that you can make the industry more efficient and more profitable and sometimes in the short term that is true, right, that both consumers and workers are going to benefit and for a brief time they might, right, but over the long run the model is just to take a larger and larger cut, right, and that cut is going to come from the drivers, from the restaurateurs, from the cooks, from the service staff, in this case from the faculty, right, from the administrative staff, right, and to sort of change the ways that business is done in such a way that the tech firm and their investors are getting a cut of every transaction in that industry, but their value-added declines, right, as time goes by and it becomes very minimal and all of that, you know, that cut that the venture capitalists or the private equity firm is taking, it's all coming at the expense of the people doing the bulk of the work, right, or it forces a rise in prices which then means it's coming out of the pocket of customers or maybe if we think about how this will look in education out of the pocket of students who are already debt strapped, as are their parents, right? Well, this is, so friends, you can see this is what a terrible host I am, I picked one word out of our guests wonderful, wonderful discretion, and, and then this leads to a whole other analysis, thank you, Matt, that's a, that's a brilliant, brilliant take time, but the, let me cease my interrogation and let me turn the floor over to everyone in the audience. Now you have a sense of what Professor Siebold is thinking about, the critique that he's issuing. Let's hear some of your questions. We've got two from Glenn McKee, let me just flash this one up, because this is a good quick question and this may be a nice tactical one, massively unqualified replacements of Temple, were those violations reported to their accreditor? At this point, all of my awareness of this is anecdotal, although I know that there are, so my understanding is, and again, this is me sort of speaking as somebody who has sources inside of Temple, but who is not reporting this and who has not, has not confirmed all of this, my understanding is one of the negotiations of the conclusion of the strike was that there would be no further litigation on this topic from the grad workers themselves. But also my understanding is there is some investigative reporting being done by both local and national press on this topic and again, not by myself, I'm not aware of the actual, what is actually in process, but a lot of the anecdotal stories that I heard were quite, quite disturbing and I would agree, also potentially grounds for litigation. That's very delicate. They are true, but I need to reiterate that if they are true piece, right? That's very, very well put. And when I said tactic, I just want to put that out there that Glenn may have identified a nice strike tactic that's available. In the chat, Glenn also recommends the late David Noble's work. David Noble was a Canadian critic of technology, very well researched. I don't always agree with him, but I admire the work. So please follow that up if you're interested. So that's an example, by the way, of a text question. Let me bring up another text question because this comes from our good friend in the Northeast, Karl Heichanen. And Karl, excuse me, Heichanen, are there any companies that are behaving honorably as well as making money? I think he means in the education space. Yeah, yeah. I think that's it. It's a really excellent question. And I think that the, rather than pick out one specific company, because I'm not sure that I, I don't know that I have enough knowledge to pass judgment on all of these different hundreds, possibly thousands of ed tech ventures that are being developed right now. But what I will say is I am aware of some tools which I think I, which I quite like and which I am aware of, to some extent, how they got started. And the thing that I would always want to look for, is when you have an ed tech venture, when you have an ed tech tool, a technology, has it been developed with the input from faculty, from students, from the people who are going to be utilizing it? Is it's objective based upon some sort of pedagogical or curricular value that has been outlined by the faculty, by the staff, by the institution? Does it serve some kind of purpose that is beyond just the subscription fee that that firm is going to get from the college? What is it doing that is different? I think actually, I did a little bit after meeting with Brian yesterday to do a little tech check. I did a little looking into Shindig. And I think one of the things, absolutely Shindig was part of the sort of a private equity venture capital structure that I described a little bit earlier. But I noticed that when I was reading about Steve Gottlieb, the entrepreneur who got it started, he comes out of the music industry. He comes out of performance. And from the start, he was thinking about what are the events that this is going to be used for? And actually engaging with people in those industries about what they needed, what would make a platform like this useful, doing beta tests that involve them. And it was a very, very long drawn out development process that seemed to be involving people in the industry at every stage. And so I think that's one thing that I would be looking for is to what extent are these technologies being developed with lots of input, lots of testing, lots of beta versions that involve the actual professionals in that field, right? Do they feel as though they have some sort of stake holding? And one example that I can give you from education is a tool that I've been using the last few years, which is Open Apps Access, which is developed from within a university. I think it was developed at Harvard, Harvard, although don't quote me on that. It's called Perusal, and it's a text annotation platform where you can collectively annotate a document, right? So the instructor, the professor feeds a PDF or some other kind of file into Perusal. And there's all of these different ways in which the students and the instructor can simultaneously engage with the document. And you can either do that synchronously or asynchronously. You can do highlighting. You can do annotation. You can even insert sort of like video or pictures or other kind of media so that when students are reading or engaging with the text, they get sort of pop up windows. They give them relevant information. And so there's, you know, that to me, like that's something that I now use in my classes all the time, right? And I think it was clearly developed by faculty who were really thinking about how to get students to engage with the text in a way that was convenient, right? That was interactive, that was collaborative, that would actually add to the student satisfaction and success, right? And so that's really what I absolutely don't want to give the impression that I think all educational technology is bad, right? You know, this is not a sort of Luddite position that I hold, but I do think we have to really think about who it's benefiting, right? Good question. Quibona. In the chat, Mark Wilson also recommends hypothesis, which also emerged from higher education. Carl, that's a great question. And Matt, thank you so much for that, for that really excellent answer that people should be quoting. I think just as a great way of thinking about this. So if you're new to the forum, those are two examples of text questions. Now what I'd like to do is have a video question. This is from our good friend, Tom Hames, who posed a great question. And I always want to put them on stage just to add color of all kinds. I'm wearing gray today. What are you talking about? Hello, Tom. It's a gray day here in Texas. Hey, so the question I had was this. I think there's a general agreement that higher ed or education in general can't stay where it is. I mean, that there are too many forces pushing it. We've had many guests on this show who have discussed the economic pressures, the political, emerging political pressures, all of these things people opting out, the college is not meeting people's needs. And, you know, Wingard is clearly selling a direction. And I call it doubling down on industrial education. That's because the problem right now is that the systems that we have in education are based on an industrial model. We're churning out student widgets. The world today, if it ever was, didn't really doesn't really need student widgets. And students don't like being treated like widgets. It's funny about that. So my question to you is this. What's the what do you see as the third way? I mean, Wingard's way is definitely a way that has been touted. And I know Chris Newfield calls it the great mistake. You know, we're, you know, this is the same thing where basically we're selling education as a jobs training program. And so what do you see as an what is the alternative in your mind? Well, I, you know, I'm not going to pretend as though I have the answer here. But I definitely agree with Chris as somebody who I have frequently been in conversation with that skillification, as it is sometimes called, is not the direction to go. And in fact, we are increasingly seeing people coming out of the corporate world, people who you would expect to maybe lean towards that jobs priority, right? Skills priority, right? You know, people who are executives at places like Google, right? Or even this was this came out of the mouth of Mark Cuban of all people, you know, a kind of randy and libertarian entrepreneur just a couple of years ago, which is this is we need to be training students for the old three C's, right? Like communication, critical thinking, creativity, as hesitant as I am to associate that with a kind of old, old liberal arts metal, there used to be a fourth C, which was like a cannon, right? And I want to be a little bit, you know, hesitant about trying to bring that back. But clearly, one of the things that these companies are looking for is students that have a kind of broader training that includes certainly some, you know, some some computer training, right? Some technical training, at least at the sort of ground level, right? But they are, they are anticipating that they are always going because the technology is developing so quickly, they are always going to have to do that technical training in-house, right? And so if we train students in sort of coding and computer science and and platforms, right? And we get them, you know, up to date on the most recent sort of, you know, management software or whatever, by the time they're the second or third year of their job, they're going to have to learn something entirely new, right? Because things are sort of changing and developing at that kind of pace, or those skills might even become obsolete, right? If they are replaced by, you know, the sort of, you know, the new fear factor in the room that is AI, right? And so I absolutely am of the mind that we, you know, we need to build curriculums that have a more rich general education component that are giving students the capacity to spend time in the sciences, the social sciences, in the humanities, in the arts, right? And this sort of well-rounded set of skills that will make them, I think the other sea that we need to talk about here that really affects our students is confidence, right? That will give them the, you know, the faith in their skills, the capacities, the experience that when they are faced with a sort of rapidly changing professional environment, they have the confidence to, you know, to engage that, right? And to, you know, to face new challenges, new problems, right? To feel as though their skills are transferable, right? Not that I, you know, I learned this accounting program in college that now is thrown out the window two years later and where do I go from there? But rather, I have a set of skills that are, you know, are going to be adaptable to each new situation, to each new job I might have. And of course, this is another thing we've seen over the last, you know, several decades is career paths change far more often than they used to. And so a lot of our students may have two, three dramatically different careers over the course of their lives. And again, things like communication skills, collaboration skills, creativity and critical critical thinking, like those are the things that they are always going to be able to, you know, lean on and draw from. Right. Yeah, we need to, we need to make anti-fragile students, is what I said in the chat. I mean, that's because we don't know what's coming at, they don't know what's coming at them. We don't, we can't predict what's coming at them. You know, even in the current environment, I've talked to engineers and architects who say, yeah, somebody has an architecture degree, but we don't let them do anything meaningful for five years because it takes that long to train them how to do architecture because they don't learn that in school. And I've heard that from a number of fields. And the reality is that until you're in the trenches on some of these jobs, you really don't know what they're about. And, and, and that's really hard to deal with you have, and that's why I agree with you, we do need to get back to teaching people how to be fundamentally sound and adaptable to a lot of different things. And I know Kyle and, and, and Glenn are jumping up and down because they think job, I mean, psychology is to be a job training program. The problem is that we can't train them for specific jobs. I mean, there's some, I think you can do specific, you know, certifications for, I mean, there are some jobs that require specific training. There's no two ways about that medicine, technical skills, you know, if you're doing just that one thing, but then even there, you still need to have the adaptability because medicine changes like rat more rapidly than most fields. I mean, think about what medicine looks like today versus what it looked like even 30 years ago. And, and, and you have to build doctors who can handle that, right? If they can't handle that, then it's going to be a real problem for them keeping up with the technology that's happening there. So I mean, it's, it's hitting everywhere. But yeah, I mean, we just have to teach people how to be human. In a lot of those specializations, we're talking about postgraduate degrees. And I think that that's another, you know, one way that I do think universities could become more adaptable is to, you know, to think beyond the sort of degree system that we currently have, which is the, the, the BA, the MA, the PhD and the various kinds of certifications that might be, you know, that might be able to be sort of added on and, and oftentimes to appeal to, you know, to, to non-traditional students, as we often call them, right? People who are coming back to school, right? Who, who have already done a BA, right? And, and who, you know, who need to be retrained for a different job or, you know, for a new, maybe in a new profession altogether. And, and I definitely think there, there is a place for universities to do sort of skill, skills-based certifications, right? That is different from the sort of fundamental role of the university that goes back to the, you know, the 19th century and the sort of, you know, the sort of liberal arts model that we, you know, that, that we maybe romanticize to a certain extent. But I don't think we can just do, I don't think that's all we should be doing, right? There needs to- Right, no. The, the university, you know, has the potential to adapt to, to various roles and that, you know, that will make space. And I think this is another really important part of what I think about is the future, is like making space for a more robust faculty. That, you know, university faculties are shrinking work intensification, as I'm sure is true in a lot of realms, is, is getting to such a case where we are, we are as individuals are falling behind in terms of our ability to professionalize because we are asked to serve so many roles and wear so many hats within the institution because we're constantly understaffed because of the sort of austerity regimes of our education, right? And I know that this does not affect education only, but it is affecting education and that affects the quality of education that we produce, right? And I think that's the only one. We have to teach people to learn how to learn. Scholarship is a skill too. Yes, but hang on a second before that, for, for both of you, well, we have, we have a question that came up addressing exactly what you're both saying. This is from Keele Doomsch. Creativity, collaboration, critical thinking don't require college to learn. Matt and Tom were ignoring the huge costs of using college, especially for your degrees to learn those things. Right. And I don't, I think the problem there is actually the cost more than anything else. I think, I think that we can do this a lot more efficiently than the traditional four-year, four-year degree. It's just that a lot of, I think a lot of colleges, especially those who are competing at the mid to lower range of what we call the college system, community colleges, public four-year institutions, especially not the big state ones, but the smaller ones, they feel much more driven in the direction of the Wingard model because they feel like that's the only way they can survive is by linking up with those corporate entities. And that's the, not only is it a funding lifeline, but it's also a legitimacy lifeline of sending students into those environments. And I think the problem's not so much the harbors of the world, it's the smaller universities that are struggling to maintain that and that they lose sight of that general idea of that call it a liberal arts education, call it a well-rounded ability, learning how to learn. And it all becomes question of cramming in these skills that this employer thinks they need. Of course, one of the things I said last week on the show was the problem with listening to employers on this is the employers don't necessarily know what they need either. They don't understand what makes a successful employee successful until they see it. And then they think, hey, this guy's really talented, but they can't really put their finger on why this person is really talented. And it's usually a lot of intangible things. And I mean, somebody who's a specialist who's like a psychologist or someone who really knows could figure that out, but the general HR person HR person couldn't necessarily put their finger on it. You know, I would also say if you yes, absolutely, it is possible for young people to develop the set of skills that I would kind of regressively calling the three C's on their own. Some of them will. And of course, every year I'm going to have a couple of students for whom I am just helping them on the margins. That they are self-starting, that they are curious, that they have creative and critical thinking skills already that they are going to develop as lifelong learners. They are oftentimes the ones who are also training to become teachers. That's a small, small subset of students though, a tiny, miniscule one in aggregate. And I think that actually the vast majority of students who are going to college now would not develop those skills if they just entered the workforce or at least would not develop them as quickly and as effectively. So my question back would just be like where are they going to develop those communication skills? Where are they going to learn to speak and to write and to collaborate if not at college? I don't want to romanticize college but there needs to be a space where that happens. And I think Well, it should be happening in high school too, our current the current structure that we have has pushed all of that towards college. Yeah. Well, it's also pushed it threatens to push it aside, but yeah. Well, thank you both for answering question and Kil as always, thank you for the really direct question. Tom, let me give you a break and get back to your dogs in the blue room. Friends, that's an example of video questions. So if you'd like to join us on screen, just click the raise hand button the bottom of the screen and we have more and more questions partly in that you clearly lit a fire among participants, which is which is awesome. We have a really good question from Sarah Sangrigorio, which rolls down to one specific technology. Actually, I don't have issues of analytics just the issue of people analytics used for me all of the reasons. Do you see a way that we can help influence decision makers to use data more responsibly? It's a really excellent question and it's one that I have actually spent a ton of time thinking about, which doesn't necessarily mean that I'm any more confident in my answer. But I do think that what we sometimes called neoliberal rationality or economic rationality is the term that I prefer. One portion of that is an over reliance and too much faith in metricization. A kind of faith in statistics, in metrics, in data, in quantifiable evidence, which I do think deserves always to be part of a decision making process, but oftentimes the people making those decisions can't see past the data that is put in front of them and especially oftentimes that data has very big holes, big gaps. Either it hasn't been effectively gathered and oftentimes, as any faithful economist, mathematician, statistician will tell you, every metric has its limits. It's metaphorical that it is giving you a degree of information and it's not giving you all of the information. One of Deidre Miklowski's favorite metaphors is don't get caught just looking for your keys under the headlights. Your keys might be out in the dark somewhere and that I think is something that happens a lot when it comes to how data is used in the university. We have some enrollment data. Let's base all our decisions off of that without thinking about what that enrollment data is in capturing or what that resource data is in captioning or what that traffic data is in capturing. That's a critical thinking question. One that I think we're too often, we focus on what we have without asking what don't we have. Oh, that's well, that's a very, very concise way of putting it. Noma Meyer just asked to see that question again so here let me just put it on the screen. There you go Noma. In fact, whoops, you shouldn't be able to see it now. Sarah, as always, thank you for a very, very thoughtful question and Matt, I think you just gave the kind of advice a mentor should give anybody proceeding along data analytics lines. Thank you very much. Friends, we're running low on time and there's some questions here that are remaining so I'll make sure I get to everybody, give everybody a shot. Ed Finn, hello Ed from I think in Indiana right now offers a good question. Is there any way we could merge technology and master's teachers to make them effective? Isn't it up to faculty, technology administrators to determine if a platform fits the mission? I mean, yeah, I think that as I mentioned earlier, I have far more interest in platforms that are being developed consistently with input from faculty and students by the way, right students? Students need to be part of that conversation as well because there's a lot of things that I might like about a platform that my students might not. And I think that's one thing that we certainly discovered with remote instruction during the pandemic was there were faculties, especially in certain types of classes that adjusted to developing certain kinds of courses. I never think it's going to be a universal thing, right? But there are certain kinds of courses that I thought, you know, I might be able to teach this asynchronously or remotely or in a hybrid way. Like there were certainly, but almost universally, my students, at least in aggregate, didn't want to learn that way, right? And so that was always the question sort of like, if we are going to develop more hybrid models, more technological models, remote models, there needs to be a lot of input coming from students as well. And so absolutely, I think that what I will add to that is, yes, faculty should be involved in those conversations and it is on us to adjust. But I also want to reiterate a lot has been put on us, especially in recent years, right? That faculty are increasingly not only serving classroom roles, but they are serving quasi-administrative roles. They are sometimes serving, you know, mental health counseling roles. They are sometimes wearing a lot of hats simultaneously and that sort of intensification and diversification of what it means to be a professor has accelerated in recent years. And if you're asking us to retrain, which is sort of what you're suggesting, right? Where we're learning to use ed tech in a way that fits with our pedagogical values, with our curricular approaches, right? That is thoughtful. We have to have time and incentive to do that, right? And that's something that I think is really in danger right now. You have a dropout rate amongst faculty and not just contingent faculty, not just adjunct faculty, but also tenure track and tenure faculty, an unprecedented dropout rate because the conditions of work have gotten to such a place in the last five years that a lot of people just can't do it anymore. That is actually not just a great answer, but that's an almost perfect bridge to the next question. And if we have time, we've got two more questions to go, but this is one from, okay, Matt, this is from an English professor, so you know this is trouble. Let me bring Brian Dayo from Grand Valley State. Hey, Brian. He has a terrible typo in his first name, but besides that, you had a question about academic labor. Yeah, so just real quick, I follow you on Twitter, Matt. Nice to see you. It's not exactly in person, but virtually. But a colleague who you interviewed on your wonderful podcast, The American Vandal, said this very recently, it really struck me. This is Annie McClanahan, and she says, put simply, on-linification and ed tech are going to be the site, all caps for higher ed labor struggles or for utter destruction of the university in the next decade. And we need to be making decisions and mobilizing and asking questions now, all caps, with that in mind. I just wonder if you could weigh in on that comment. Yeah, I 100% agree, and I know that I actually saw Annie say that and I've had conversations with, one of the people who has sort of been most influential on my thinking about higher ed, about labor, about its relevance to financialization and debt. So this is somebody who I'm very frequently going to agree with and I utterly agree with her in that capacity. What she calls, I think on-linification is not the greatest word. And I wonder if maybe we can, we can find another jargon for it, but I 100% agree with the thrust of what she's saying. And I think that this is where faculty unions and faculty organizations, like they, we need to be putting our attention and making sure if, if there is such a thing as faculty governance and shared governance, which a lot of institutions still give lip service to. Then this is one area where the faculty should have an equal, at least an equal seat at the table, if not be leading the institutional strategy and mission, where they are making decisions about what kinds of platforms we are going to use, what kinds of online courses we are going to offer, what is going to be the sort of digital strategy for the institution. And I think that, I think Annie's right. Our colleagues, by and large, are not yet fully aware of that coming fight. But I think that progress is being made. And, you know, not again, I think that we need to give the credit primarily to like grad worker and contingent worker unions that are waking people up, right? Yes. And that's, you know, I don't write this piece if I, you know, if I, if I'm not drawn, I don't have my attention drawn to the situation at Temple. And, you know, based upon what I have heard, the Temple faculty probably don't hold a no confidence vote if this information isn't starting to trickle out, right? In some cases, through reading my piece, or pieces that were done by journalists at the Philadelphia Inquirer, right? That, you know, that faculty at Temple, I think, were woken up by the Tuxa Strike and they were woken up in specific on the, you know, what Wingard was thinking about for the future. And I don't think, if they don't hold that no confidence vote, I don't think he steps down, right? And so there, I think there's a sort of direct correlation from Tuxa Strike drawing attention to Wingard's larger plans to faculty actually acting according to their shared governance responsibilities. And now, hopefully, demanding that they have a seat at the table when it comes to questions like, you know, installing Panopto or which platform we're going to use or what courses are going to be available online and so forth. I hope they will be more vigilant on those questions going forward at Temple, at least, right? And, you know, certainly, again, I agree wholeheartedly with Annie on this question. This is Annie McClennan? Yeah. Very good. Brian, thank you so much for the great question. And I love the fact that this is the first time we've had three English profs in a row on this station. Thank you so much. But I have to say, Matt, that with great regret, I have to wrap things up. We were back at three o'clock and we have to finish our conversation. Let me first thank you so much for offering such great answers and really thoughtful responses. Your critique is something very, very powerful that I think people need to know. And I would love to see it in so in larger form in a book or a video series. But let me ask just quickly, you're doing so much work. What's the best way for people to keep up with you? I would say the last few years since it launched, increasingly the podcast is where you can hear me thinking through everything I'm working on in some way, shape, or form, direct or indirect. And you can meet the people like Annie who are having an influence on me. Although there are lots of ways in which we try to structure and form the podcast series, one way is just sort of who are the people who I'm reading, who I'm interacting with, who I'm going to conferences and symposia with, the ones that I want to talk to. So I would say that's the first place. And if you just want to get a full list of everything I'm doing, matsiebel.com has it all. Very good. Very good. Well, thank you. Thank you so much. I wish you luck with all these different projects that are coming up. And I hope we can bring you back on the forum in a year or so. It's been a pleasure. As these keep changing. Thank you so much, man. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you, everybody, for all of your comments, all of your thoughts. Let me just wrap things up by pointing out a couple of things. We have programs coming up. Just go to our forum The Future of Education by US to learn more. If you'd like to keep talking about these issues, including neoliberal pedagogy and the administrative use of technology, just please hit us up using the hashtag ftte on Twitter or Instagram or on Mastodon. We'd be glad to hear it. If you'd like to look into our previous sessions and we have a bunch that touch on this, you can go to tinyorl.com slash ftfrchive and find that. Above all, thank you all for thinking with us together. Really appreciate the conversation. Hope you're all well. Hope that your April was gorgeous, especially for those of you in the North country. And we'll see you next time online. Take care. Bye-bye.