As many of you know, I’m a great admirer of Mike Konczal, a friend who combines the best aspects of the wonk and the theoryhead. His eagerness to draw on ethnographic and other unconventional approaches to public policy questions is very refreshing, and it reflects my own sensibilities and biases. But we often disagree, and we strongly disagree on how to think about Anya Kamenetz’s wonderful new book on how to remake higher education, DIY U.

Mike is writing a longer post on DIY U itself, but he’s written a preliminary post on the “romance of the public domain,” a term he borrows from legal academics Anupam Chander and Madhavi Sunder. Chander and Sunder’s basic insight is that not everyone can draw on the public domain equally, and so it is possible that free and open access can entrench existing hierarchies and inequalities. This is very clever argument, turning on its head the progressive enthusiasm, which I share, for free culture, a richer, more expansive public domain that would enable the borrowing and remixing that drives cultural and technological innovation.

But scholars obscure the distributional consequences of the commons. They presume a landscape where every person can reap the riches found in the commons. This is the romance of the commons — the belief that because a resource is open to all by force of law, it will indeed be equally exploited by all. But in practice, differing circumstances — including knowledge, wealth, power, access and ability — render some better able than others to exploit a commons.

The problem, as Chander and Sunder understand, is that manufacturing a property regime that will yield outcomes superior to the free and open interplay afforded by a commons is a pretty tricky problem. And it is a planner’s problem, which is to say it places power in the hands of an elected or appointed regulatory elite. One has to assume that this regulatory elite does not access to perfect knowledge, and indeed that its membership is as self-interested, cognitively overburdened, etc., as anyone else.

At the risk of sounding absurd, one wonders how Chander and Sunder would approach the “problem” of Lance Armstrong, a man with an extraordinary heart.

His oversized heart can beat over 200 times a minute and thus pump an extraordinarily large volume of blood and oxygen to his legs. His VO2 max—the maximum amount of oxygen his lungs can take in, an important measurement for an endurance athlete—is extremely high.

Our oxygen-rich atmosphere is a commons, yet Armstrong is better placed to exploit it than yours truly. Here I’m being a cranky libertarian. Clearly the better comparison is the way the rules surrounding cycle-racing are structured, and the resources devoted to training and equipping young cyclists. But the fact that different resource endowments, skills, and proclivities are distributed unequally across populations and institutions doesn’t strike me as shocking news, and it doesn’t strike me as reason to empower regulatory elites — particularly regulatory elites that are vulnerable to capture. In the realm of culture, we see this in endless copyright extensions that entrench the power of media incumbents, hence the reforming agenda of the free culture movement.

My sense is that Mike is drawing on cutting-edge theory to tell a very familiar story. Call it the producer’s lament. Basically, traditional producers — of handicrafts, of pop albums, of community college education — grow accustomed to making a product in a particular way. When cheaper alternatives threaten to put them out of business, we hear a wide array of arguments, many of them conflicting and contradictory (but hey, whatever works!), about why the new mode of production is profoundly dangerous or unjust. Clay Shirky has vividly described how this discourse has played out in the book-selling and publishing industries, as has the always excellent Tim Lee, and, in a roundabout way, Mike is making the case for the community college deans who see that their noble but profoundly problematic business model is threatened. (Mike, I’m guessing, would have been there with Gandhi in defending handlooms in 1930s India, and that is part of why he’s great.)

Mike ends his post with the following:

Is education simply a matter of hitting “cntrl-c” and “cntrl-v”, and absorbing that information through a non-space of the Internet? Or do the institutions that transmit and reproduce this information play a pivotal role? Will a self-directed educational goal primarily benefit those with stable homes and the time and capital to cultivate this? Is “DIY U” accessible according to need? This is the framework I think of as I read and explore this work.

Is it fair to say that those with stable homes and the time and capital to cultivate cognitive skills benefit from the existing educational regime? And if we can educate at least some of these students at lower cost to a higher student, wouldn’t that free resources for the students who need closer supervision and more unconventional pedagogical strategies? Regardless, Mike will surely have many interesting things to say in his next DIY U post.

I’m sorry to say that Mike quotes an anonymous community college dean who casually insults Anya Kamenetz for writing an accessible book for a general audience. So I’m afraid we start off on the wrong foot.

I don’t know her personally, but Kamenetz’ authorial persona is of someone who attends a lot of conferences in far-flung places, has access to some highfalutin’ people, and can’t be bothered with the details. That’s probably a lot of fun, but the details matter.

And you wonder why this anonymous community college dean is not a beloved public intellectual!

When you boil it down, her argument is that the “unbundling” of the package of goods offered by colleges will free up students to become their own field guides, bravely traversing the open and free internet to get the information when they want it, how they want it. After all, she gets “incredibly generous” free responses by famous people to her own emails, so it’s all there for the taking! Just get those distribution requirements and climbing walls out of the way, and look out, world!

Note the shift to caricaturing an argument he finds distasteful. I wonder if “Dean Dad” would choose this tone of voice to address a female colleague in his community college — I have to assume anonymity helps. “Unbundling” is about allowing specialization. As transaction costs decline, it becomes easier for large firms to disaggregate, and for smaller firms to specialize in a narrow range of tasks and to grow more efficient at accomplishing said tasks. Assuming all goes well, and competition is a messy, iterative process, the end result is an increase in productivity.

”Dean Dad” then takes us on a fascinating tour of his mental model of the economy.

The innovators that Kamenetz celebrates almost uniformly rely on either foundation funding — she notes correctly that the Hewlett foundation has outsize influence in this field — or on colleges and universities. Companies won’t do it themselves, since they need a shorter-term payoff. People won’t do it for themselves, since most don’t have the capital and leisure. (And even if they did, they’d lose access to lab facilities, peers, experts, and potential mates.) It took an explosion of educational institutions, from the K-12 system to land-grant universities to community colleges, to attain the level of mass literacy we have today.

Private colleges and universities are essentially foundations. They are not as specialized as they could be, and they are not as scalable as they could be. If Harvard University remade itself into an institution dedicated to improving the quality of instruction in the developing world, would it do more good for the world than providing a small number of students with a quality education in a country club setting? My sense is that maybe — maybe — the answer is yes. Of course, this new model Harvard would lose a large and valuable stream of funding, namely donations from individuals who want their progeny to attend Harvard.

Companies won’t do what themselves? Having criticized Anya’s imprecision, it would be nice to know what companies won’t do themselves. I’m guessing he means “provide low-cost or free instruction.” The trouble is that for-profit firms like StraighterLine, profiled by Kevin Carey, are doing exactly that.

And the story that “Dean Dad” tells about the explosion in mass literacy is, alas, pretty flawed. (I have to assume that “Dean Dad” didn’t study the the history of the explosion of mass literacy in the first half of the nineteenth century.) It is true that an explosion of institutions did make a difference, many of them fee-paying, a non-trivial number of which were for-profit. But there was also a great deal of informal instruction, what we would now call homeschooling. The incentives for literacy grew stronger, due to economic shifts and the expansion of the franchise. Community colleges were created long after literacy reached near-universal levels. To be sure, functional illiteracy remains a problem. But the history “Dean Dad” offers is highly misleading.

But “Dean Dad” does seem to have some passing familiarity with Ronald Coase, which is nice.

Economists teach us that institutions exist to lower transaction costs. Yes, they’re prone to all manner of pathology; longtime readers may have seen me refer to some. But if you’re looking for a place that combines geographic propinquity of teachers and students, the availability of financial aid, lab and studio facilities, philanthropic support, tax support, and some level of quality control, you’re looking for…a college. You could try to cobble together something on your own, of course, and some of that is to the good. But to assume that turning loose tens of millions of high school grads to email random and now unpaid professors for “incredibly generous” emails that will prepare them for the twenty-first century is just silly. It does not work like that. It will not, and it cannot.

Economists also teach us that transaction costs change over time, and institutions change in response to these shifts — provided that incumbents don’t use coercive power to prevent these shifts from happening, which is where “Dean Dad” comes in. Once again, we have the canard that Anya assumes students will email incredibly generous professors to get an education rather than that new institutions will emerge — institutions that will, alas, mark “Dean Dad” to market.

Part of the maddening inefficiency of colleges is precisely that they don’t capture the gains from what they do. That’s by design. Although they have budgets and payrolls and all of that, they operate largely on a ‘gift exchange’ logic. (Kamenetz nods obliquely to this with her ‘secular religion’ analysis.) They’re eleemosynary (or what she calls “welfare”) by design. Professors who are paid by colleges often share some of their expertise with the public at large, out of a sense that it’s just a good thing to do. (For the first several years I did this blog, I didn’t make a cent from it.) That’s great, and to the extent that some enterprising types can use that generosity to pursue their own quirky ideas, go for it. But if you take out that institutional underpinning — by which I mean “salaried job” — the whole thing collapses. I can write this blog because I have a day job. [Emphasis added.]

Note to Inside Higher Ed: I know a number of deans who would be willing to write a blog of similar quality at lower cost. Some of them are based overseas. Email me.

Part of the maddening inefficiency of colleges is that we don’t have structures of transparency and accountability to determine whether or not public dollars are being deployed effectively. And the training community college professors tends to deemphasize effective classroom instruction in favor of highly specialized research. This engenders tremendous frustration on the part of people like “Dean Dad,” who may have envisioned a very different life for himself when he began his academic career. The defensiveness, the elisions, the insults, and the oversights may well flow from this psychic injury.

But really, it’s wrong of me to speculate. I do wish that “Dean Dad” would extend the same courtesy to Anya Kamenetz.