This post first appeared on aud.life

A response to this post by Joshua Kim:

The sentence that you pull here – your gotcha – contains an error that I do regret. But it’s an error introduced from collaborative editing; not an error in our criticism. My point as that The End of College itself does not offer any sort of analysis about race and gender. Identity, power, privilege are magically brushed away by the Internet.

The experts in the books are overwhelmingly male, and even when women were involved in the projects mentioned in it, their names are strikingly absent. Despite examining her important work on OLI, Candace Thille is not named. Despite being the founder of Piazza (described as one of the Silicon Valley startups that might shake up higher ed), Pooja Sankar also goes unnamed.

According to the index at least, here are the women mentioned in The End of College: Anna Karenina, Héloïse d’Argenteuil, Drew Gilpin Faust, Katherine Graham, Lana Turner, Gertrude Stein, and Daphne Koller. The Girl Scouts gets a mention; Victoria’s Secret gets two.

The erasure of Thille and Sankar is one thing. But it’s the treatment of Koller in the book that I found to be most troubling. As our review makes clear, Carey is overwhelming positive and largely uncritical of education technology. It works pretty well now; and it will only get better, he contends. It matters not that many in the latest batch of education entrepreneurs know little about teaching and learning. Algorithms and iteration will solve this, Carey argues - I say we ask we look more closely at who is writing those algorithms, and to what end we are iterating.

The only time that MOOCs are really challenged in The End of College, the only education entrepreneur in the book whose work is open for criticism: Daphne Koller.

Carey cites computer-assisted instruction pioneer Stanford University professor Patrick Suppes:

"Daphne Koller, Suppes said, “has not studied education at all. She’s completely naïve about the history of what’s happened.” She is, he allows, “smart about some things in computer science, though not all. But she doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about in education and doesn’t seem to realize it.”

She doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about. That’s a charge that we could lay at the feet at many in the book, and at many who have sizable platforms or funding to reshape higher education today. But as The End of College narrates “the end,” that’s a problem of Koller alone.

I’ve written a lot about the culture of education technology that insists on dismissing my work, that presumes that because I am a woman, I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. Or, as in this response to our review, that because I am a woman, I am too political, too emotional, and entirely out-of-line when I make arguments. I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about; or when I do, I just don’t say it with the right “tone.” My work is not “criticism”; it is “attack.”

Carey’s book erases women; Kim’s review here chastises women. And this is why the mention of Walter Lewin in our review is just not simply some footnote. It’s indicative of much larger issues that need to be addressed directly, not brushed away as too "uncivil" or too “hysterical.”