In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Technology and Culture 45.2 (2004) 473-475



[Access article in PDF]
The Digital Revolution and the Coming of the Postmodern University. By Carl A. Raschke. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Pp. x+129. $19.95.

"OU?" or rather, "où?" ("where?") is the question that Carl Raschke's book kept provoking during the afternoon that I spent with this short study of the "hyperuniversity." Raschke seems to answer this question by suggesting that cyberspace is the "where" of a postmodern education. He finds models in two "OUs": Britain's Open University and the Oklahoma University system, which have both taken giant steps in fine-tuning their distance education programs. At these institutions, the material, architectural spaces of education take a back seat to a "hypercognitive," simulated knowledge space, "a knowledge space that is unrelated to physical space, and, as with hyperreality itself, involves a movement of 'simulacra' that are not traditionally associated with the usual 'divisions' of subject areas and curricula" (p. 100).

But Raschke does not put all his eggs in the distance-education basket, which is the case of many other studies on the future of education. So, [End Page 473] answers to the question of "where?" (where will we see the postmodern university?) in Raschke's study are not limited to the OUs in the book, which means that the book itself is not limited to a glorification of cyberspace. And that is what makes this Raschke's study truly revolutionary.

In his bold preface, Raschke suggests that "people stick with their existing educational system in the same way a man and a woman persist in an abusive relationship. The painfully familiar seems preferable to the frighteningly unfamiliar" (p. vii). While this statement reminded me of Donna Haraway's cyborgian suggestion that teaching Christian creationism is a form of "child abuse," Raschke's work is not a dismissive, posthuman polemic, but a careful, historicized vision of academic (r)evolution. Raschke proposes a radically postmodern "transactional" education model by opposing it to four conventional archetypes of teaching and learning: "mandarin," which is based on rote transmission; "academic," from the Greek tradition of a liberal education; "clerical," rooted in self-development; and "industrial," where skills training comes before moral development (pp. 53-56). In contrast to these archetypes, in transactional education "teaching and learning are not separate activities, or even abilities, in the generation of knowledge. The universe of transactional learning is no longer bidirectional, but multipolar with the numerous ripples and eddies of intellectual experience roiling about the centre of investigative activity we call the 'learner'" (p. 57).

A postmodern education, then, is nonhierarchical, interdisciplinary, distributed, and transactional. Although Raschke, thankfully, does not resort to cyber-emancipatory rhetoric, he does suggest that the Internet, which has no "'head', nucleus, or centre," seems to be a perfect place for this mode of knowledge production (p. 7). Based on this, Raschke draws his curricular models from distance education.

Even though the Internet may not have a head, I do, and I'm still more interested in imagining this mode of education happening with "real" bodies and "real" spaces, even if it is only as a transition to a completely disembodied educational apparatus. Is it necessary to relinquish the materiality of the university? Before Raschke turns to the OUs for models of the hyperuniversity, he quotes an article from Educause, which suggests that "universities that succeed in the market will, like large suburban residential developers, have preserved the 'feel' of ivied halls while strongly satisfying the kinds of consumer desires which are transforming the whole of education" (p. 24). I immediately started imagining my own small, residential campus as a sort of Disneyfied simulacrum of a university, where students would go for a nostalgic fix of academe between online courses, and professors, like Mickey Mouse and Snow White, would walk their rounds in tweed jackets, musing thoughtfully with pipe in hand. A more productive, nonimaginary, line of thought led me to the University of Denver, where Raschke is a distinguished faculty member. [End Page 474]

In his acknowledgments, Raschke gives specific...

pdf

Share