 Thanks. So, in the greatest rock and roll album ever produced, Quadrophenium. I want to start off there with a little bit of opinion. I'll have a few. Anyway, in Quadrophenium, the key character, Jimmy, struggles with trying to find his identity, and the album gets its name from the idea that there's four persona, four images, four ways of seeing himself that he's struggling with, and he's trying to find the real, who, you know, can you see the real me? We have the same issue in higher education. Kate Bowles yesterday morning challenged us to think about the marketization of the university and the expanding university, assuming this morning challenged us to think about alternative economics of this stuff. I've actually been, I am an economist, and I've been kind of, I didn't choose the research life, the research life has now chosen me. So I've been kind of trying to do that. And the first thing I want to do, so the price of admission here is you do have to suffer through a mini economics lesson. So the first two slides. The first thought is economics is not just markets. That's something that's been sold to you in politics and popular media and stuff like that. There's a rich literature of a whole bunch of stuff. As Kate Woodworth, who's author of Donut Economics, points out, there are four methods for general categories, the provisioning of goods in our world, goods are not necessarily material, it's things that improve welfare. Market is only one of them. So what I'm going to hypothesize is get a little bit closer to that. So the second economics lesson here is a bit of almost all my economics classes have to begin with translation. Because there's a lot of terms in economics that we've fought through for a long time and we've got fairly clear definitions that are clear to us, but unfortunately the words are used differently elsewhere. And so I'm going to talk about institutional analysis here. There's been a lot of buzz, there's a lot of talk about the system. In general economists, that's not necessarily helpful to us to talk about the system because all of these levels are systems. So what we tend to talk about in institutional economics is that there's different levels. And like into the work level and then there's an organizational level and then there's institutional level. If I could offer two, and in most of you in casual conversation, when you say your institution, you are probably referring to what an economist would think of as the organization. Because you're thinking about your institution as my university, you know, Lansing Community College or something like that. That is what we would call the organization. When we say institutional we're talking about a different level. So I'll offer you two brief, hopefully brief, metaphors to try to get this across. Think of the world of sport. You may want to play a position, that's your work. The choices you make in order to play goalie or some other position, that's your work. That's the work level. The team you play for is the organizational level. But the game and the rules that go with the game. So for example, the rules of soccer or I'm sorry, football, that's the institution. Chelsea is the organization or, you know, whoever else that or if sport doesn't work for you, think in terms of music. You may play an instrument. That's the work level and choices are made at that level. The institutional level is classical orchestra or rock and roll band. Those are two different institutions. There's kind of a set of formal, sometimes formal, but oftentimes informal rules as to what constitutes each of those institutions. Now within that institution of rock and roll, you may have something like the who or something like that. So I'm going to focus here on institutions. Getting back to quadrophenia, here's the point I would like to make. Higher Ed is the unique beast, relatively neat beast in that it is actually a blend of all four major institution prototypes. And it always has been. And when I say always has been, let's go back centuries, even millennia to the beginnings of higher Ed. And that's been not, it's not a bad thing. It's been kind of necessary. The catch has been that for centuries it's been rather stable as there was a big core that I'm going to argue is the commons. And then around that was a little bureau thinking and a little bit of firm thinking that were necessary to buffer and make the commons possible. So to illustrate these four kinds of thinking, let me go through the prototypes briefly. There's tons to each one of these. There's what I call the state and the bureau. And the state and the bureau, and there's on the other side, the market and the firm, I find it ironic. Kate's keynote talks about people turning higher Ed into trade, measuring it as trade flows. And I had chosen this symbol for the firm thinking and market thinking, which is a map of world trade flows. Kind of ironic there. Interesting. They're very similar but they have different objectives. Firms look to, I mean the ultimate goal is accumulation of wealth. It doesn't have to be for profit. It could be accumulation of something else, prestige or whatever. And they look to, I mean that's the name of the game. The state and its extensions on the other hand are all about control and universality and maintaining stability primarily of the society. Now what they do share is that in both cases they're very interested in scale. Because the one who wants to accumulate as much as possible, the state wants to make sure everything stays stable and controls it. And scale in both of them translates into hierarchy and control. That brings measurement. Now, there is an alternative way of provisioning things. There is the commons. For those of us in the western developed world, it's oftentimes easy to miss the idea of a commons than that it's real. Let me remind you two out of the seven billion people on this planet over that depend for their livelihood, for their existence, for their subsistence on a commons. And that's not necessarily meaning poverty. They don't live in the state firm dichotomy that we oftentimes think of. So, most of you are familiar with the idea of individual initiative and you can relate to that. I want to talk a little bit about the commons, but before I do that I've got to dispose of a myth. Garrett Hardin's the myth of the, or his paper, the tragedy of the commons. If you are an environmentalist, a biologist, an economist, a sociologist, anything else, if you're teaching Garrett Hardin's tragedy of the commons, stop. There is no scientific basis. There is no historical basis. There is no empirical evidence. It is a fantasy of Garrett Hardin's imagination, and it's not only that, but it's the fantasy of a man who envisioned a wall on the southern border of the United States long before Donald Trump for many of the same reasons. What he imagined and fantasized as a commons isn't. It's actually an environment in which there's free access. All of the users are isolated. Nobody cares about anybody else. In fact, there's not even communication between individuals. It's absolutely free access. There are no social norms. Everything is monetized and everything can be unlimited monetized and everything is transactional based. Eleanor Ostrom won the Nobel in large part for her work researching the commons. The only woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics. In her research and the research of the Bloomington School, they've gone out and researched over a thousand, many, many more actual commons throughout the world, all over the world in all kinds of situations. This is not a commons. That's not how it works. And those are sustainable things. So, what is a commons? Well, there's a lot of features, and I could go off for an hour or probably a couple hours, but I could go a couple days on any one of these. One of the features is a commons does need some bounding. It does need some buffering from the larger economic system. But the core of a commons is not about the resources. It's not about the things, the objects, the stuff. It's about a collective action problem. It is what I hope to be writing about as, in our case, the professor's dilemma, or the scholar's dilemma. It always involves that, and it's basically the issue of cooperate versus compete. And how do you resolve that dilemma? What a commons does is it establishes norms, rules, sometimes the rules are formal, sometimes they're informal. Sometimes they are supported by the state, sometimes they're independent of the state. And reciprocity is inevitably one of those. One of the outstanding features of a commons that I think is very relevant to our thinking is the commons does not scale. It scopes. Now in economics that's an important distinction. Scale is doing the same thing over and over and over again on mass quantity, it's mass production. Scale inevitably involves hierarchy, which inevitably involves transaction costs and control issues, which inevitably gets to communication issues, which gets to metrification and quantification. Scope is doing a very high volume of things that are all somewhat similar but all somewhat different. So it's horizontal rather than vertical. So how does this apply to higher ed? What I want you to do is envision, in my vision and what have been all temporary research, I'm trying this. Think of the academy. The core of the academy has always been teaching and learning, which really, and I know I sound kind of Paulo Freire and all this, Freire and all this stuff, but teaching and learning is really the same thing. The reality is those of us in the core, and I'm going to say faculty writ large here, so this includes librarians, those low level administrators that still think like faculty and stuff like that. We're in this because we just like learning. We went to school, we got stuck. It's like, you know what? This is a sweet job. They're paying us to learn. But the catch is that's what we get to play and do this. Now why on earth does that happen? Well, what happens is the larger society, and this goes back to the beginning of any civilization, not just western. Go, you know, India, China, Japan, Korea. I haven't tested yet, but I haven't found the research, but I'm confident ancient African civilizations probably fall in the same boat. The libraries came first. Now basically the society finds it convenient to provide us scholars with a common pool, a set of common pool resources. We in turn play. We learn. Now in the process we kick off a whole bunch of externalities. Externalities meaning things that this is not really what we were trying to do, but hey, it happens. And what society finds out is this is pretty cool. What do we kick off? Well, in the process of learning, we generate artifacts, because sometimes you have to write or create in order to actually figure out what you're learning. The other thing is a lot of times you learn better when you can actually talk to somebody. And so we talk to each other. We talk to each other as professors. We talk to students. I know I've learned the most when I've taught students. So we talk and what we generate is an output of those who don't want to stay in the academy, but are now educated, whose lives have been transformed. And that really wasn't what we were trying to do, but hey, it's pretty cool. But we also kick off all kinds of externalities for the society like civilization. Now what are those common pool resources the society provides us? Very simple. Time, space, place, texts in the library. Neat thing on the text. This is basically our capital goods. The neat part is, is we generate the artifacts. And those go back in the library, which make more material for us to study from, which we generate more artifacts, which go back in the library. Which is a pretty cool slip thing until somebody comes along and invents a printing press. Now a printing press is a tough one because it's expensive. And so somebody has to run it. Now it does have the side benefit of it kicks off even more copies for society. But it also gets the nose of the firm further into the enterprise, into the endeavor, who then begins the extraction of value. Now what we've had, and what they set up for a long time was, we set up peer review processes, primarily in my opinion, because we had to ration the printing press. Challenge these days is, we don't need to do that anymore, folks. We can print everything. Now the challenge is, can we read it all? How do we ration that? But the publisher, of course, doesn't want to go out of business, so they're telling us, oh, you've got quality, and they're going for more. We've got to take over, oh, we've got to take over the curriculum design. We've now got to take over, actually displace the faculty. So there's a lot more I could do here. I'm about ready to get the word here. One thing I can tell you, though, is out of the Ostrom work about a commons. The one thing that is essential, absolutely for the perpetuation of any commons, we've got to resolve and maintain our norms and governance of how we behave and how we handle the collective action problem, and that translates into, do we help each other, or do I spend all of my time just writing my stuff? It means it's the difference between do we spend some time in the governance of our organization, or do I maximize just my pure output, self-output. But also, the key to any commons is communication. In lab experiments, over and over again, as well as the field work, it's communication person to person, real people to real people that establish the norms, that enforce the norms, that make that possible. So I'm going to finish with a quote from Stephen Cawking that I got from the Pink Floyd album, so we've gone from the hood of Pink Floyd. Our greatest hopes can become reality in the future. All we really need to do is keep talking. Jim, can you give an example of a bounded commons in education? Well, historically, the bounding on the academic commons was the fact that we all had to be in one place, and that's actually one of our challenges institutionally. Institutions are not designed, they emerge, and they're usually incredibly stable over time until all kinds of technology or something else changes. And the fact that we can do this open technology has actually challenged that, which now means it's kind of free range. But generally, yeah, I mean if you look at natural commons, I mean natural resource commons and stuff like that, they're all very well bounded. I mean the people who are members of the commons community know what the limits are. If you're not part of that community, don't go fishing in that bay. They won't do something or that kind of stuff. And that is actually, I think in some of our respects, if I would translate, and this is real early, I would not put this as conclusion yet, I think we need to seriously have conversations about licenses. I'm not at all convinced that CCBI is helping us, because that's basically free access to everything. And that's basically saying, hey, everybody come on in, and you have no norms and no obligations and no responsibility for reciprocity. You know, I'm a little more attracted to CCSA, and I'm not even sure of that, but you know, this is stuff where the open source community has already been through a lot of that. But yeah, it's going to be a challenge for us to define what's new. And one of the slides I skipped over, one of the challenges for us is to not just try to replicate the past. I was impressed last year at OER at Bristol. There's this ship that was one of the first big steamships, and the investors required that there be masts on it, because they were afraid passengers wouldn't stale on a steamship that didn't look like a sales boat. At times, I wonder if we're not doing the same thing at times. I thought I'd get this lovely young man to come running up and down the stairs. I mean, I think what you've talked about here is so important, and it struck me that in the earlier session where we were hearing about the overview that the Hewlett folk had done on the research and the implementation that's happening that this wasn't in that database, and it seems to me this is a very important area of work to be growing. So what should we be investing in? What should we be asking for funds to invest in? What are the kinds of activities and actions and research and implementation that we should be doing to grow this? Well, you could send mass qualities of money to me, but that's probably not the most effective. That's a good question. I don't know. I don't know that I've gotten to that point. We need to talk about it. We need to work on these structures. I don't know. Okay, Jim, I'll change the topic then. It's an excellent question, Laura. I think I understand what you meant by peer review arose from the need or desire to ration the printing press, but I would love to hear you elaborate on that thought and tell us what you think about peer review today. I think the concept, I mean, meritocracy is often the cover story for what is really maintaining a hierarchy of power. And I know, for example, now I have a bias. I am in a field where that hierarchy of power and that gatekeeping of peer review has been abused to the point of perpetuating a particular orthodoxy view, the market fundamentalist, to the point where you can't get mainstream textbooks that say anything else. I mean, you just now, I mean, core and respect are doing some stuff, but yeah, it's been a challenge. So I think we need to think, yes, there's another of the issue there, which is we can't read everything. How do we know what's good? Well, let's try to think more in networks. I mean, in general, I read something to teach in class and I make the decision myself because I'm qualified to teach and I know whether this is going to work. I mean, I forget his name. There's a guy at SUNY that used to pleads with his fellow faculty. He's like, how do you know if the quality of the textbook is any good? Read it. But beyond that, how do I filter and do the other stuff? I don't look anymore for, oh, well, it's in this journal. I must read it. No, I'm doing things in a much more networked base. So there are things like if Brian Lamb posted something or James posted something or Billy does or Bonnie, and I see that in my network, whether it's Twitter or somewhere else, I'm going to go, oh, well, that's at least where they're glance. Because if they thought it was important, I trust them. And I think we need to re-establish this trust stuff. This idea of measuring it all is a fool's chase. We're trying to measure things that can't be measured. I think at this point we have to close the commons, I'm afraid. Thank you. Thank you, Jim.