 And welcome everyone to this session for the OER Domains Conference, we are the next presentation is with Jim Luke reflecting on market versus Commons rhetoric care and the professor's dilemma, so take it away Jim. Thank you very much Helen. I am so happy to be here. I took kind of a year off. I don't know how many of you have heard there was a pandemic and from conferences and for many reasons. And I almost I think I made a mistake. I am so glad to be back. And these are my people so what I'm going to talk about today. One of the things I've been wondering and thinking about over the past year, two years ago the last time I talked to a lot of you I was in Galway, and I talked about, in effect what our social imaginaries how we think of organizing higher Is it a business firm, or is it a commons or something along those lines. What I want to talk about today is how the rhetoric we use affects that so George like of talks about metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language, but in thought and action, our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. In other words, most of what we say about things are actually metaphors a lot of times we don't even realize we're using metaphors, but that shapes our imagination and how we think about things. So, thinking about this I put out a call last week on Twitter, saying, hey, what metaphors do you use, or do people use. And I know I have some favorites, favorites in the sense of they annoy me. But, so I wanted to see what others said and I got a bunch back. And here's what I've got back is, is, here's a good sampling of them. Example, a lot of people had multiple, or multiple responses on some of these things like, and I've grouped them together. So, I'm actually going to look at these as kind of grouped as I've grouped them. So pathways I heard about guided pathways. Definitely in the US workforce development pipeline course delivery and modality all three of those if you think about them. Those are metaphors that are talking about something that's linear. It's a delivery process, it's a production process. Heard a lot about contact hours, content, various variations on content, higher ed is some sort of marketplace of all kinds of things. And if you put those together, those tend to suggest product, they're focusing on things that get delivered and sold. Heard about evidence base, success, retention assessment, a lot of return on investment. Those are all measure type things. So a lot of metaphors regarding how do we measure what we, the success of what we're doing. And then it started getting a little weird. There were ones like, eat your own dog food and information about brand. And I think those are very much coming from the venture capital consultant business community. And I'm not really going to talk too much more about those today because that would be low hanging fruit to attack, which by itself is a bad pun or bad inside joke. So also talk about silos and people were talking about everything's phrased as its research or teaching. It's face to face or online learning. Several people responded that there were a lot of military metaphors. Boots on the ground, boot camp, veterans of higher ed. Everything was a battle in higher ed. And then there were two, and I put question marks here because I wasn't sure whether people were being sarcastic by saying family or shared governance because generally they were submitting that with quotes. But it's also possible, I think, that they were suggesting these as aspirational, that these are metaphors for what they wanted. Whereas a lot of the others were the annoying ones that they wanted. They intuitively don't like, but hear and get used a lot. So, like office right, I think that metaphors, the language you use shapes our imagination. But I want to go one step further and not only in our imagination, but that forms in our selection of a social imaginary. So I want to take from Charles Taylor. So social imaginaries, the ways people imagine our social existence. In other words, how we fit with others, how things go between us, what are our norms, it's basically what are our roles, what are our expectations for behavior. So with that context and set, that kind of brings up the question, what's the higher ed imaginary, social imaginary, that's suggested or presented by these metaphors we've seen? And the imaginary to me is pretty clear. It's education, higher education is a kind of what I would call market hierarchy. A lot of people will say it's a business firm. Others might say, well, it's more like a government agency. Actually, I think you can mesh those together and I'm just going to call those market hierarchy. I've got a little more diagram of that in a moment. But some of the key features are, it's about production. And it's about a very linear production pathway and it's about a product, a product that gets delivered and transferred to people. And success is all about how well we do that production and delivery. And that we need to be obsessive about how we measure it. And that what matters is the money involved, the return on investment. But that this is all done in the context of a particular structure, which is it's a hierarchy. And there's a clear division of labor. And I dearly love, if you've never seen the Twitter account ethics in bricks, I dearly love them. And they kind of suggest this social imaginary. And we've got here, folks on a linear path being produced and a whole lot of them, a lot of them look like they've been given their content in their briefcases. The whole thing's being monitored closely and measured by a man masterminding at the control panel. And the typical classroom that we're seeing here. I love this one because the professor has been replaced by someone who's just a calculator. In other words, it's Homo economicus. So this is indeed very much a market hierarchy form. And I want to go a little further and think about what happens in the market hierarchy type of structure. And by the way, I should pause and say in the in the chat. Later on, we're going to have questions towards the end. If you have questions, but also any suggested metaphors that strike you that and how we might want to look at it. So the diagram I've got here that the key to a market hierarchy, whether it's a business firm, or even a government agency type thing is it's transactional oriented. It is focused on transactions. And those transactions involve delivery of something in return for something. So in our cases, it's usually content transfer, some sort of information transfer, we even go to the extent of people are to, you know, books describe it as knowledge production, knowledge transfer. When that's the focus, then the what becomes important is control, it becomes enclosure exclusion and extraction. And I'm going to illustrate it here by the document by the diagram because the ultimate goal is accumulation. Now what I like in this diagram is that basically you've got what the what the loop includes is the essence of the college or the university, the institution itself, and that's characterized by three key elements and to marginally attached things. The key elements are the hierarchy, the essence of the institution itself. Now a comment here is this has evolved so far, particularly in the last 100, 150 years that the hierarchy and the institution itself is actually kind of separate from the people involved. You would normally I mean, actually we think of corporations, well, the very name, it's a corpora, we've now attributed a body to the entity itself, which is separate from the individuals involved. So what I want to note here is that the faculty producing the information don't get all of the resort money resources, and they're marginally attached. Some are deeply inside like tenure track, full time, but many, many are marginally attached in just another transaction. Same way with the students or the receivers of research. So, in a market hierarchy, our roles are very much transactional. We are either a knowledge producer or conveyor, or we are a consumer student buyer, and we are to be working in our little niches. What I want to suggest though is what if our imaginary were different, what if we use thought of learning, and rather than education as a product and thought of learning as an activity, and thought of the imaginary as a commons or community. There, the norms are shared creativity, connections, reciprocity, flat, very flat organizations, you don't have hierarchy. And you get inclusion because people recognize differences, but they look for commonality in the connection. What becomes important in a commons or community is relationships. And I'm wondering what kind of rhetoric might we use if we thought of a commons or community. And some discussions with some fellow faculty got me thinking, instead of these linear production lines, what if we started thinking about fabric. After all, we make connections between ideas or thoughts in different classes, and we spin a thread or a narrative. Then from that we can weave a story. We can add more connections and weave and make students connect to the part of the fabric of the community, wherein we all become a part of one large tapestry. So in that sense, our roles would be collaborative, relational, reciprocal. The focus becomes being responsible stewards, and we all are in it rather than being marginally attached via transactions. And it becomes flat, so we achieve Paulo Freire's teacher-student-student-teacher dichotomy being abolished. So what that leads us to is the professor's dilemma, our choice of language. If we choose the transactional approach, that means care is a cost. It is something we give up, and we're not getting something back in return. So it's a cost. So the rationale, Homo economicus, the more we talk about things as transactional and market hierarchy, the less sense it makes to us to deliver care. It becomes a pure altruistic thing until we're exhausted. Relational, however, such as in the commons, care becomes a norm and something reciprocal. We deliver care because that's part of being a member of the community, and being a full member of the community. We have reasonable expectation that we get replenished, not in a quid pro quo tit for tat sense, but we get supported because of our relation in the community. So we don't have a lot of time. I would just say the research then on how commons works. Commons can work contrary to the market folks that keep saying, oh, it's tragedy of the commons. It will never work. People will are self-interested. The research from Eleanor Ostrom on commons as well as a lot of other folks is that people actually do seek out the relationships and do support a commons in community. But the key is communication. Communication builds trusts. And so what matters is our language. So that brings us to questions. Or in this case, the tapestry say the audience raises their hands in queries. So if we have. We have lots and lots of comments. That's good. That's good to hear. In the fact that you are one of the only economists I know and that other people have mentioned that we can listen to and really enjoy the, enjoy the conversation that you're bringing. Enjoy it and not all of a sudden want to, you know, grab a pitchfork and a torch and string him up, right? So Laura asked, when will higher ed. Oh, there it is. Why is it either or what if we are both and then some. That's actually something from a research standpoint I'm working on and trying to think through because there are practical standpoint that does have to be kind of a. Higher education, I think, particularly where we are now is actually a hybrid of these parts. There's also aspects of household structures that are involved. That's in, you know, in the professor and the student. I think it's possible, but it's very, very tricky. And what has definitely happened in the last 40 years is that the pendulum has swung way too far towards the towards the market hierarchy. But and I, I, we're going to have to find language to do it. And I just, I think being careful is part of it. But that's a good point. And what about the citizens that fund all of this as Mark Corbett Wilson asks. Well, you get into an interesting twist here. This is where the language gets. It becomes very important. And there's chicken and the egg issues about how do you bring about change? The reality is the citizens, the community, the larger community within which higher ed sits as you will within benefit tremendously. As a matter of fact, from an economic stand, both economic, when I say economic in this case, I'm going to talk about the value produced in the old sense, the way an Adam Smith or earlier would have talked about value as in does it improve people's lives, not money. That's a very different capitalist thing. There, I can't think of very many things beyond maybe public health and, you know, sanitation type things that generate as much externality, positive externality to support the larger community than education and higher education in particular. And that's been true for 3,000 3500 years. We have to get back to that and we have to get back to talking about that and doing that rather than focusing on the individuals. And Martin asks, is there a way of doing what you suggest that doesn't require complete structural social change? If I knew that, I would probably, well, there has to be. But it's a slow incremental process, I think. I think it's winning hearts and minds. By the way, I want to make a shout out here to everybody. Martin Weller has a book coming out about some metaphors. Martin, I think it's in, you said next February, fingers crossed. And I've read at least one chapter and it's great. So there was another metaphor added in the chat around tapestry and carpets and perhaps flying carpets. Oh, I like that. Yeah, I like that. Well, and I like the idea of flying carpet. So part of the context where this came at is I teach, of course, at a community college and they've been actively engaged in strategic planning recently and doing a bunch of stuff and which is another interest of mine. And what I've noticed is in the US, particularly, and I suspect from what I can read elsewhere, the focus on success is all being defined as student success, which don't get me wrong. I want students to succeed, but I thought our job was community succeeding. And if we redefine as our job is to make sure the community succeeds, then, you know, we're naturally going to bring along students. And I think that's part of the redefining things in changing our rhetoric. I really want to extend my thanks, Jim, for opening this conversation yet again. I remember attending when you presented some of these notions earlier at OER. And I want to really thank the community that has gathered here in this session and at this conference for their active engagement in shifting the thinking. I really appreciate it. Well, I thank you, Helen. I would just also advise people. So I think there is the link there, my blog, Econ Prof, EconPROPH.com. The slides are up there when we get the video. I'm going to post it and comments are open. We can continue discussion there. And this time I'm not going to take a year off because I was just given sabbatical for the fall. So thank you. Have a great day. Thanks, folks.