This post first appeared on aud.life

While it hasn’t risen to quite the furor of the recent round-and-round from Siemens and Downes, I’ve been watching Weller and Moe’s discussions on the Eddie Murphy analogy with a certain amount of bemused interest. I can’t help but read the exchange as a parody of the debates about “what counts” as good MOOC research. It’s never good to feed the trolls, I realize, but I do want to weigh in briefly, because even as a joke, I fear it serves to reinforce some of the problems I see with how ed-tech analysis is frequently crafted and shared.

In their posts, Weller and Moe debate whether or not Eddie Murphy’s career – largely dismissed as “not very good” by both authors – makes for an appropriate analogy for MOOCs. As Weller writes in the first post in this series, “The ‘stick Murphy in it’ attitude of studio bosses back in the 80s seems to me rather akin to the ‘stick a MOOC in it’ attitude I’ve encountered with research bids, or discussions around innovative teaching.” Moe responds with a quantitative analysis, looking at box office figures and Rotten Tomatoes ratings and comparing Murphy to another former SNL cast member – one also frequently decried as making bad movies – Adam Sandler. And Weller responds, fine tuning this analysis with a look at IMDb ratings and movie release dates.

So we move from an observation – Eddie Murphy’s career took a downward turn in the 1980s – to an analogy – his appearance in a string of bad movies is akin to administrators and entrepreneurs trying to put “MOOC” in every press release and initiative – to a measurement framework – how do we quantify this. Bonus points for including graphs.

But I want to back all the way up to the assumption on which this analysis rests: that Eddie Murphy movies just aren’t that good (where “good” is defined as a blend of box office success and critical reception). I don’t think that claim is accurate or, more importantly, relevant. No matter his string of box office flops, I think that Eddie Murphy has remained a cultural icon. His is a star text that should be read – a reading that must include his work on television, incidentally – as a counter to traditional portrayals of race, class, and masculinity. He’s not the groundbreaking standup comic that Richard Pryor was, to be sure, but Murphy’s work is still incredibly subversive, perhaps even more so for his popular success in portraying in the 80s a brash Black male that challenged powerful, racist institutions like police departments and stock markets. Eddie Murphy found success among white viewers – both moviegoers and SNL fans – but his comedy did not coddle their feelings.

We cannot talk about Eddie Murphy without talking about race, class, and gender – in the roles he plays as an actor and in his own star text. Yet, Moe and Weller mention none of these. That’s a flaw with too much ed-tech analysis, I’d argue, as it scrubs away issues of identity or posits itself as identity-less or objective while actually re-inscribing the position of the white male academic.

“There’s this little box that African-American actors have to work in, in the first place, and I was able to rise above that box.” – interview with Rolling Stone, 2011

Eddie Murphy, like all stars, does not exist in a vacuum. Like all stars – even those on the list of top grossing actors of all time – Eddie Murphy is not fully in change of the movies that he appears in. He’s not in charge of scripts; he’s not in charge of production; he’s not in change of the studio system. And Hollywood is a system. We can’t really talk about a star without thinking about that system, without situating that system in history, culture, politics, economics.

I’d say the same thing goes for MOOCs, higher education, and education technology. There are several systems there that are worth considering – systems that have their own histories, cultures, politics, and economics. I just don’t see how Eddie Murphy here is synechdoche, particularly if the analysis focuses on “good” or “bad” and not on race, class, and power.