Educational futures after COVID-19: Big tech and pandemic profiteering versus education for democracy

To address the dramatic economic contraction brought on by the global pandemic, governments at all levels have taken on tremendous debt in order to provide economic stability and prevent a more dramatic collapse. It is likely that, as the initial phase of the pandemic passes, familiar neoliberal austerity claims about the necessity to trim education budgets will gain greater force and acceptance. However, I suggest that these neoliberal policies demand sacrifices of the wrong constituency: Given that Big Tech has amassed huge sums of money over the course of the pandemic, how is it morally justifiable that tech companies benefit from the pandemic while educational institutions shoulder the financial fallout of pandemic government spending? In this paper, I first outline how Big Tech profits from the education sector during the pandemic even as it undermines the democratic function of education in doing so. I then situate these more specific critiques within a broader consideration of the role technology plays in undermining a democratic society. In conclusion, I argue that a pandemic profiteering tax for Big Tech represents the best short-term solution to get ahead of the "austerity curve” and ensure that the COVID-19 crisis serves as an opportunity to deepen our commitments to promoting the democratic function education. Without such commitments, the pandemic will become the turning point at which Big Tech effectively coopts public education for its own ends, to the detriment of democracy. My underlying claim is that technology is in conflict with both democracy and education. This runs against the widespread notion that technology will help promote learning, and that technology helps inform and connect people and therefore helps promote democracy. In what follows I dispel such notions. © The Author(s) 2022.

Introduction: The University at the End of the World

The authors organized a conference, “Global Higher Education in 2050: Imagining Universities for Sustainable Societies,” at the University of California, Santa Barbara, March 4–6, 2020, right before the campus was closed for eighteen months in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The event's premise was that the futures of higher education will be plural, must be responsive to large international divergences, and must be actively created by global majorities rather than policy elites. This introduction describes the papers' common project of identifying the key elements in the higher education status quo and features that might lead toward unexpected futures. We summarize the three horizons methodology that guided some of the work. We also outline the activities of the third day, the workshop that sought a means of linking the present to the future. This work continues beyond the horizons of the papers published here.