David Noble is a critical historian of technology, science and education. He is best known for his seminal work on the social history of automation. He currently teaches at York University in Canada. Historiography means literally history-writing (Latin: historia, story; Greek: γραφειν, (grafān), to write). English usage: 1) Sometimes the word is used straightforwardly in the above sense, for example medieval historiography from the 1960s means medieval history-writing from the 1960s, or in other words, the body of text produced during... York University (YorkU) is a large comprehensive university, located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. ...

Forces of Production

In Forces of Production (1975) Noble recounts the history of machine tool automation in the United States. He showed how CNC (computerized numerical control) machines were introduced both to increase efficiency and to discipline unions that were very strong in the USA in the immediate postwar.

Forces of Production shows how management wanted to take the programming of machine tools, which as "machines for making machines" are a critical industrial product, out of the hands of union members and transfer their control, by means of primitive programming, to non-union, college educated white collar employees working physically separate from the shop floor.

Noble's research showed that in practical terms, the separation was a failure, and that the angered and alienated union machinists, who felt that their practical and night-school knowledge of applied science was being disregarded, sat back while watching the programmed machines produce "scrap at high speed".

Noble then went on to show that management compromised with the unions, in a minor violation of the USA's 1948 Taft-Hartley Act (which reserved all issues except pay and benefits to management discretion), to allow the union men to "patch" and even write the CNC programs.

Although Noble focuses strictly, in Forces of Production, on the narrow and specialist area of machine tools, his work may be generalizable to issues in MIS software where the end users are restive when told to accept the product of analysts ignorant of the real needs of the business, or the employee.

Activist Politics

In 1983 David Noble founded the National Coalition for Universities in the Public Interest with Ralph Nader and Al Meyerhoff to try "to bring extra-academic pressure to bear upon university administrations who were selling out their colleagues and the public in the pursuit of corporate partnerships." Ralph Nader Ralph Nader (born February 27, 1934) is an American activist lawyer who opposes the power of large corporations and has worked for decades on environmental, consumer rights, and pro-democracy issues. ...

Noble's leftist politics and bold tactics have given him a rocky career. He has been fired by both MIT and the Smithsonian Institution and was blocked from giving the commencement address at Harvey Mudd College because the administration claimed he was "anti-technology". At York University he is said to have been referred to as "anti-science" and "anti-intellectual" by the university president, Lorna Marsden, and his appointment to the J.S. Woodsworth Chair in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University was suspended following what Dr. Noble and others saw as irregularities in the hiring process.^[1] The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, is a research and educational institution located in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. MIT is a world leader in science and technology, as well as in many other fields, including management, economics, linguistics, political science, and philosophy. ... The Smithsonian Institution Building or Castle on the National Mall serves as the Institutions headquarters. ... Harvey Mudd College is a highly selective, private college of science, engineering, and mathematics, located in Claremont, California. ... York University (YorkU) is a large comprehensive university, located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. ... The Honourable Lorna Marsden (born March 6, 1942) is a Canadian sociologist, academic, and former politician. ... Simon Fraser University (SFU) is located in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, a suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia. ...

York University

In recent years at York University, Noble has criticized the way in which "second-tier" universities accessible to the majority have been forced, owing to budget pressures absent at well-endowed "first-tier" universities, to adopt overly corporate-friendly policies. According to Noble, these policies subordinate the educational mission to a more careerist vision in which students are taught "practical" subjects, but in such narrow ways that they are, in effect, less broadly employable.

In his 1998 paper Digital Diploma Mills, Noble writes: "universities are not only undergoing a technological transformation. Beneath that change, and camoflaged by it, lies another: the commercialization of higher education".

At considerable personal risk, Noble has made his case that high technology, at these universities, is often used not to improve teaching and research, but to overcontrol and overwork junior faculty and graduate students, expropriate the intellectual property of leading faculty, and, through various mechanisms such as the recorded lecture, replace the visions and voices of less-prestigious faculty with the second-hand and reified product of academic "superstars".

In his broad-based critique of an academic-industrial system of which Noble may be a victim, Noble has in recent years made statements offensive to many. In particular, as is the case with MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, Noble has questioned Israel's strategic role in Western institutions on a broad basis.

In late November 2004, at York University, Noble garnered controversy for handing out flyers entitled "The York University Foundation: The Tail That Wags the Dog (Suggestions for Further Research)" at a campus event. The information sheets alleged that the Foundation, York University's principal fund-raising body, was biased by the presence and influence of pro-Israel lobbyists, activists and persons involved in Jewish fundraising agencies, and that this bias affected the political conduct of York's administration in important ways. In particular, Noble connected the alleged Jewish influence on York Foundation to the university administration's treatment of vocal pro-Palestinian campaigners on campus and to a later-scuttled project to build a Toronto Argonaut football stadium on the campus.^[2] York University (YorkU) is a large comprehensive university, located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. ...

Noble and York University again appeared in the news in October, 2005 with regard to his vocal opposition to and York senate appeal of the university's policy, adopted in 1974, of cancelling classes during the three days marking the Jewish High Holidays.^[3] Noble stated he would defy the policy and hold classes nonetheless, but then instead pledged to cancel his classes on any religious holiday that his students could think of.^[4] Look up October in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The word Jew ( Hebrew: יהודי) is used in a wide number of ways, but generally refers to a follower of the Jewish faith, a child of a Jewish mother, or someone of Jewish descent with a connection to Jewish culture or ethnicity and often a combination of these attributes. ... The High Holidays refers to the ten-day period in Judaism which begins with Rosh Hashanah followed by the ten days of repentance, ending with Yom Kippur, the day of repentance. ...

Most recently, Noble has been involved in creating an organisation called York Public Access as an alternative to what he identifies as an increased corporate slant in the approach taken by York University's official media relations department.

Pursuing his critique of the role of the university, throughout 2005, Noble has been active in bringing attention to what he feels is the continuing corporatization of the Canadian public university, in advocating for the importance of academic freedom and the socially crucial role of the tenured academic as public servant, and other social justice issues. Noble's latest book is a sweeping history of the myth of the promised land, connecting the disappointments of the ancient Western religious story of redemption and salvation with the rise of global capitalism and the response to these disappointments by recent social justice movements. Social Justice is a concept that has fascinated philosophers ever since Plato rebuked the young Sophist, Thrasymachus, for asserting that justice was whatever the strongest decided it would be. ...

References

1. ^  http://chronicle.com/free/2001/05/2001053101u.htm
2. ^  http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20041120/YORK20/TPNational/TopStories
3. ^  http://excal.on.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=849&Itemid=2
4. ^  http://www.insidetoronto.ca/to/northy/story/3086823p-3580325c.html

Books

• America By Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (Knopf, 1977)
• Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (Knopf, 1984; pbk. OUP, 1990)
• Spreadsheets for Agriculture with Charles Course (Longman Scientific & Technical, 1993)
• A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science (Knopf, 1992)
• Progress Without People: In Defense of Luddism (Charles H. Kerr, 1993)
• The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (Knopf, 1997)
• Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education (Monthly Review Press, 2001)
• Beyond the Promised Land: The Movement and the Myth (Between the Lines Press, 2005)

Oxford University Press (OUP) is a highly-respected publishing house and a department of the University of Oxford in England. ...

External links

• Digital Diploma Mills excerpt