a re-discovered piece from 2008
[Sadly most of the links have degraded. The Web has moved on, but towards an apotheosis – demonic? – that I think was anticipated in this post, which I retrieved from an old lastpost post I wrote in about 2008. I apologise for all the broken links. The gist, I hope, stands on its own and is down to me. We are playing a later phase of the same game today.]
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I think Michael’s [Feldstein] line is right, that big investors do not get involved with the detail of “small potatoes”, usually (see his comment down this page).
I am suggesting that there are sets of affinities that encourage people and their friends, firms, institutions, communities, governments and enterprises to act in certain ways. Blackboard provides a means towards control of the curriculum should someone want to. The patent application was, possibly, late dot-com chutzpah. Its subsequent deployment strikes me as strategic and in line with neoconservative affinities.
Among Blackboard’s investors are those with no more axe to grind than making money. They just see a good investment and are probably following the herd; Carlyle and Federated bought it so it must be good. Investors who were in before the IPO, may have had more complex motives.
At the very least they spotted an affinity; Microsoft picked one L/CMS and backed it.
Carlyle bought Blackboard in 1999. Blackboard still has the press release. It tells a lot about their ambition at the time. Carlyle’s modus operandi is to target the public sector (military, education, health) and to use high-level political contacts (John Major was their European Director until 2005) to help move public services into private hands (WTO U: GATS and Higher Education, Public Citizen, undated, accessed today – particularly notes “Carlyle Group’s “Blackboard” firm”).
The appearance of Federated on the scene puts maybe 15% – 25% of Blackboard in the hands of politically active (neoconservative) investment outfits. Federated, who has shown they can swallow a $100M fine for fraudulent trading (more detail here), won’t be interested in the day-to-day e-learning detail, but the fact that 75% of the US HE LMS market is in their acquisition’s hands won’t have gone unnoticed. And there is an East Texas connection. Federated’s trading partner in the mutual fund scandal was Veras Investment Partners, now defunct (link to cached Google page) of Sugar Land, Texas (the settlement is here). Of course, the filing of the patent infringement suit against D2L in the East Texas District Court jurisdiction may only be coincidence.
Neoconservative contempt for academia is well documented. There is a concerted effort to influence and control the curriculum. It is not only about teaching “intelligent design” alongside Darwin. Gwendolyn Barry writes in Academe 91(4), here:
Bills … based on the so-called Academic Bill of Rights advanced by neoconservative David Horowitz, would involve the government in oversight of curricula and teaching, and in faculty hiring and promotion in both public and private institutions of higher education. In many states, the legislation was prompted by students working with materials disseminated by Students for Academic Freedom. That group maintains that students often experience discrimination at the hands of politically biased, propagandizing professors and curricula. [links added by me].
Horowitz eloquently defends the Academic Bill of Rights, until the conclusion of this piece in the Chronicle, where he reveals his own leanings:
Is there a college or university in America — including the University of Colorado — where at least one professor has not introduced controversial matter on the war in Iraq or the Bush White House in a class whose subject matter is not the war in Iraq, or international relations, or presidential administrations? Yet intrusion of such subject matter, in which the professor has no academic expertise, is a breach of professional responsibility and a violation of a student’s academic rights. We do not go to our doctors’ offices and expect to see partisan propaganda posted on the doors, or go to hospital operating rooms and expect to hear political lectures from our surgeons. The same should be true of our classrooms and professors, yet it is not. When I visited the political-science department at the University of Colorado at Denver this year, the office doors and bulletin boards were plastered with cartoons and statements ridiculing Republicans, and only Republicans. When I asked President Hoffman about that, she assured me that she would request that such partisan materials be removed and an appropriate educational environment restored.
As Esther Kaplan observed in the Nation:
When Bush political adviser Karl Rove was asked by The New Yorker’s Nicholas Lemann how he defined the Democratic base, Rove responded, “someone with a doctorate.” And so, according to the ruthless logic of Rove’s “strategery” shop, mainstream scientific, professional and policy organizations, whose constituencies tend to lean Democratic, have been removed from influential federal advisory positions and replaced by ideologues.” (Kaplan, Esther, 2004, Follow the Money, The Nation, 1 November 2004).
I am not suggesting that there is a joined-up conspiracy. I am suggesting that there are sets of affinities that encourage people and their friends, firms, institutions, communities, governments and enterprises to act in certain ways. Blackboard provides a means towards control of the curriculum should someone want to. The patent application was, possibly, late dot-com chutzpah. Its subsequent deployment strikes me as strategic and in line with neoconservative affinities. In fact the patent pending status must have been one of the reasons Microsoft and the venture capitalists backed Bb in the first place. Should the patent not have been granted they could have quietly sold up.
rWorld2 