 Welcome to the Mises Academy podcast. I'm Danny Sanchez, Director of Online Learning at the Mises Institute. For this episode I interviewed Peter Klein, Executive Director and Carl Manger Research Fellow at the Mises Institute about his Lou Rockwell.com article, Universities to MOOCs, We Will Assimilate You. It seems that the state and its crony allies have really tried to create a machine and it seems that a lot of the really quality education has come through gaps in that system, gaps in that machine. Mises talks in his historical setting of the Austrian School of Economics. He talks about the importance of the Privatdosen, so I'm not sure how to pronounce that. Right, private lecturers. That they were sort of outside of the system that they weren't paid by the university and they had less regulation under the ministry of education and that the really good teachers were Privatdosen. Right, it is sort of a hybrid system where they were in some sense endorsed and certified by the university, but they were paid privately out of their students' lecture fees. Of course, as you mentioned, Ludwig von Mises' famous seminar in Vienna in the 1920s was entirely private. It was conducted in Mises' office in the evenings. Students didn't get any academic credit. It wasn't something offered through the university. It was purely a private gathering of scholars. And if you want to talk about a particular setting in which huge advances were made in research and scholarship in the Austrian tradition or just in economics more generally, that was completely outside the normal university system. You have something like that and that's all to be applauded, of course. And then in America, he also wasn't able to get hired by university that he and Hayek had to be funded by private institutions. So that's another instance of sort of a gap in the system. And the Mises Institute is sort of a gap in the system too that all the education that we're able to do is not through the official channels, that it's through private donors. I was reading the Libertarian Forum and Rothbard was selling, there were ads for Rothbard's cassette tapes of lectures that he did. And so it was kind of neat to see that that was almost like a precursor to the Mises Academy. Yeah. And that's one of the things that, of course, is so great about the Internet in the space in which we're talking about. I mean, there's this whole, you know, Thomas Dot tradition of people circulating cassettes and newsletters and so on. If you're outside kind of the mainstream in some area of research or scholarship or activism or whatever, of course now it's much easier to disseminate those kinds of materials. And the quality is obvious to the consumer, right, of the kinds of courses that are offered at Mises Academy and other educational materials that are provided by the Mises Institute and other kinds of private organizations. It's just simply much easier for students to access that material than it ever was before. But as you said, I mean, I think this idea of playing in the gaps, looking for the gaps and exploiting the gaps, that's a very useful way of thinking about it because at the Mises Institute, right, we don't aspire to duplicate Princeton or Auburn University or any other established institution. We're a different kind of player. We have a different strategy. We have particular niches that we want to occupy. We do things in a different way. We don't offer degrees. We do offer some kinds of certification and maybe we'll offer more and better kinds of certification going forward. But we offer a specialized product and we're really, really good at it. And people who see the value in that product and want that product will continue to get it as they have been already. And it's not that we are going to somehow supplant overnight the established university system. We're kind of competing around it. We're engaged in a kind of flanking maneuver, which we think ultimately will be very successful, at least for some parts of the population, those who want the kinds of things that we can offer. But in aggregate, all the different organizations that are filling the gaps in doing workarounds, could those gaps eventually become bigger than the system itself? Oh, absolutely. But we can only speculate on what will happen and how long it will take to happen. But something we can anticipate is that the incumbents will continue as they have already to do what they can to block a fundamental transformation of the system. I mean, before the MOOC became popular, online courses were mostly offered by University of Phoenix and other sort of vocational schools, which were routinely denounced by universities, not for the reasons what I would consider the right reasons, for example, that they rely heavily on government student aid to support their tuition payments. But, you know, on purely elitist grounds, those are not real courses. That's low quality education. I mean, the people who teach for University of Phoenix, oh my goodness, I mean, they're nobodies and you're getting... Consumers being sold a bill of goods. And I always think, I mean, yeah, I guess these are the same people who say, well, Walmart exploits his workers, but these people who say that have never shopped in a Walmart, they don't know that the patrons of Walmart think Walmart is great because it provides stuff that they can afford that they want. The snobs don't shop at Walmart because they're rich and snobby. And of course, the snobs don't need to send their kids to the University of Phoenix, but that's not the point. I mean, it's not serving the children of the snobs. So, my prediction is, in lots of ways, in ways we can't anticipate precisely, whenever an innovation comes up that cannot be easily co-opted into the established structure, you will hear it denounced by the leaders of the established structure for whatever reason. Just one more question before we wrap up. Mises talked a lot about how social change always happens through ideological change, that everything happens through shifts in ideas. And we see that that's why the state wants to have control over the education system and control over what Hayek called the secondhand dealers and ideas, including teachers and journalists. We've seen with the internet that there has been a rise in internet journalism and decentralized journalism that bypasses the major networks and sort of the mainstream media that the gatekeepers haven't been able to silence. This includes bloggers like Glenn Greenwald, who started out as a blogger. And we see that that has already had profound impacts in policies. I recently saw an interview with Julian Assange where he was talking about the profound impact of the WikiLeaks leaks from Chelsea Manning that the Afghanistan logs that were leaked had a direct impact on the change in conversation about should we... The conversation used to be should we scale up in Afghanistan or should we scale down, but then the conversation shifted to how fast can we get out after the Afghanistan logs were leaked. And he said that the leaks referred to as Cablegate directly led to the ending of the Iraq War, that originally the U.S. government was trying to negotiate a way to stay in Iraq, but after Cablegate that just became a non-starter, that the local government just said no. And we see profound effects of Snowden leaks through Greenwald. And we see in the case of Syria that a war that in the days of the mainstream media dominance of the big networks and the big national papers that would have been so easy to have been sold, it proved to be such a hard sell in the age of the Internet. And so I'm just wondering if Internet education might have a similar impact to the impact that Internet journalism has already had. Well, Danny, I would expect that it would for the simple reason that just as you described in the pre-Internet era, the dominant big city newspapers and the three networks and so forth in the U.S., all having more or less the same point of view. I think you see the same thing in higher ed. I always think it's sort of an ironic joke almost that universities proudly proclaim that one of their main objectives and one of their big mantras is diversity. We're all about diversity. Well, what they mean by diversity is something very specific. They certainly do not mean diversity of opinion or diversity of ideas on most of the major social and political ideas of our day. There's a huge amount of uniformity within almost all of the mainstream universities. Of course, there are always some fringe faculty members like me who have crazy ideas, but most people have sort of one sort of... There's one dominant paradigm in almost every issue. There's every discipline. There's sort of a standard narrative on almost every issue. Just as Internet journalism brought a tremendous amount of diversity in the media space, Internet education, guerrilla education, guerrilla teaching has the potential to bring a lot more diversity into the academic space, into the research space, into the teaching space. There may be radical new ideas about a number of different scientific areas of inquiry and policy issues that normally have a hard time getting a hearing when you have gatekeepers, a small set of gatekeepers, that now will have much more of a chance to flourish. It's great to end the interview by quoting an evil communist, but as Chairman Mao famously said, we should let a thousand flowers bloom. It's great to see in the education space more and more flowers beginning to bloom. They're not all going to look alike. Color, shape, size, fragrance, whatever, but rather than having just a small garden that is dominated by a certain set of us, a small set of established elites, want it to have a much bigger and more diverse garden in which a lot of different ideas, a lot of different teaching methods, a lot of different techniques can compete against each other and let the market decide what's the best. Thank you for listening to the Mises Academy podcast. To enroll in online courses, to access other episodes of this podcast, or for more information, visit academy.mesis.org.