Historical Roots of the PSA Model – Part 1

When people first learn of PSA, they tend to view it as something without precedent. It is not. Like most “new” ideas, it is merely a mix of what came before. This first of a three-part series identifies one such precedent – Medieval higher education in Bologna, Italy. Part two examines emergence of the same in Paris, France. While part three explains how the 18^th century introduction of professions and professional societies instructs PSA. Together, they provide historical grounding for the PSA model of higher education (HE).

[NOTE: See Part 2 and Part 3 of the series.]

Especially in their early years, the Medieval higher education institutions (HEIs) of the western world were fundamentally both distinct from and similar to the institutions we now refer to as universities and colleges. There is no agreement on which was the first university to be founded among these early HEIs. It depends on one’s definition of a university. Without stipulation of definition, geography, or priority, there is for example the Taixue of ancient China in the 3^rd century BCE, the Islamic Al-Quaraouiyine of Morocco in 859 CE, the Indian Taxila in the 6^th century BCE, and perhaps best known in the west, the University of Bologna in 1088 CE. Though there are commonalities among the candidates, PSA primarily leans on features of early HEIs rooted in the monastery and cathedral school traditions of Medieval Europe, for which there is reasonable record of their origins and metamorphosis.

By the renaissance of the 13^th century, transformation was well underway from ecclesiastical tuition in the seven liberal arts to broader notions of what education should be and who should receive it. Curriculum was in some cases expanded and in others specialized. Expansion included the adoption of compendiums such as Boethius’ (477-524 CE), Consolation of Philosophy, and Isidore of Seville’s (560-636 CE), Etymologiae; but also, the works of Aristotle, Avicenna and other great thinkers. At various cathedral schools, for example in France, specialization was developed in subjects that include mathematics (Reims), classics (Orleans), and law (Bec). At the same time, the cohorts that had access to this curriculum gradually grew to include the laity from high and low society.

However, it is not the curriculum or cohort, but the constitution, that instructs the PSA model. In particular, the Medieval higher education power structures that were formed out of confluence and conflict.

Lacking the courage to manage the hazardous details of historical discourse, this post uses as its framework the 1923, Brown University, Colver Lecture, delivered by Charles Homer Haskins, of Harvard University. Haskins was the Gurney Professor of History and Political Science and a leading authority on medieval history. To identify precedent enlisted by the PSA model, parts one and two of this series select passages from his lecture entitled, The Rise of Universities (Haskins, 1923).

PSA and The Rise of Universities

Only in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries do there emerge in the world those features of organized education with which we are most familiar, all that machinery of instruction represented by faculties and colleges and courses of study, examinations and commencements and academic degrees.

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Throughout the period of its origins the mediaeval university had no libraries, laboratories, or museums, no endowment or buildings of its own; it could not possibly have met the requirements of the Carnegie Foundation!

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Such a university had no board of trustees and published no catalogue; it had no student societies—except so far as the university itself was fundamentally a society of students—no college journalism, no dramatics, no athletics, none of those “outside activities” which are the chief excuse for inside inactivity in the American college.

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And yet, great as these differences are, the fact remains that the university of the twentieth century is the lineal descendant of mediaeval Paris and Bologna.

Identification of a formal education system entails two fundamentals – teachers and students (or masters and scholars, in Medieval parlance). As, Garfield put it, “Give me a log hut with only a simple bench, Mark Hopkins on one end and I on the other, and you may have all the buildings, apparatus and libraries without him” (Garfield, 1871). While medieval HE did so organically, PSA wilfully embraces this fact.

Approaching the question of identification from an architectural point of view, Zuddas (2019) says, “As universities grew larger and became more internally subdivided, the un-questionability of ad-hoc space was specified and turned into what would be their single dominant spatial principle for the years to come: the principle of concentration (Zuddas, 2019, pg.1). It is in the crisis between concentration and dispersion – that is, in its spatial tactics - that the university has explicated its constant search for an identity (Zuddas, 2019, pg. 2).” An identity, says Zuddas, that ultimately manifested itself in the familiar notion of a campus - the historical roots of which will be explored in Part 2 of this series. 

Stanford University: 8,180 acres.

The PSA model does not require modern concentrated campuses of consolidated power. Instead, the model re-envisions the corporate identity found in the Medieval relationship between masters and scholars - a dispersion of power among the essential parties of HE. As for spatial tactics, this author also recommends dispersion, though PSA can easily embrace concentration. The model is capable of operating within the existing infrastructures of modern HEI campuses or the broader community of office spaces, public meeting areas, university campuses, high school classrooms, private residences, and the like – as of old in Bologna. The spatial dispersion envisioned by PSA is nicely captured in this video from, not surprisingly, an architectural firm.

Architecture 00, London

The masters of Bologna secured facilities for the provision of their education services, the purchase of which obliged them to take care in all aspects of their service, because as Haskins says,

A student class had now appeared… Far from home and undefended, they united for mutual protection and assistance, and this organization of foreign, or Transmontane, students was the beginning of the university. … Indeed, the word university means originally such a group or corporation in general, and only in time did it come to be limited to gilds of masters and students, universitas societas magistrorum discipulorumque. …The students of Bologna organized such a university first as a means of protection against the townspeople, for the price of rooms and necessaries rose rapidly with the crowd of new tenants and consumers, and the individual student was helpless against such profiteering. United, the students could bring the town to terms by the threat of departure as a body, secession, for the university, having no buildings, was free to move, and there are many historic examples of such migrations. Better rent one’s rooms for less than not rent them at all, and so the student organizations secured the power to fix the prices of lodgings and books through their representatives.

Victorious over the townsmen, the students turned [to the professors]. Here the threat was a collective boycott, and as the masters lived at first wholly from the fees of their pupils, this threat was equally effective. The professor was put under bond to live up to a minute set of regulations which guaranteed his students the worth of the money paid by each. We read in the earliest statutes (1317) that a professor might not be absent without leave, even a single day, and if he desired to leave town, he had to make a deposit to ensure his return. If he failed to secure an audience of five for a regular lecture, he was fined as if absent—a poor lecture indeed which could not secure five hearers! He must begin with the bell and quit within one minute after the next bell. He was not allowed to skip a chapter in his commentary, or postpone a difficulty to the end of the hour, and he was obliged to cover ground systematically, so much in each specific term of the year. No one might spend the whole year on introduction and bibliography! Coercion of this sort presupposes an effective organization of the student body, and we hear of two and even four universities of students, each composed of ‘nations’ and presided over by a rector. Emphatically Bologna was a student university…

…the professors also formed a gild…, requiring for admission thereto certain qualifications which were ascertained by examination, so that no student could enter save by the gild’s consent. …This certificate, the license to teach (licentia docendi), thus became the earliest form of academic degree. …Already we recognize at Bologna the standard academic degrees as well as the university organization and well-known officials like the rector.

Here we find prototypes for economic and associatory features of PSA. Application, offer and acceptance to attend a modern HEI entails the legal obligation to pay for the services rendered. From room and board to textbooks and tuition, students of Bologna paid for 100% of their education. Some financed their education through family wealth, some through sponsorship by patrons, some through subsidy by royal or papal employer, and still others borrowed or worked jobs to make ends meet – a description very similar to student finances of today, as they steadily return to the 100% figure.

To counter this, the financial requirements of PSA are one half to one quarter the current HEI model. This means that were the state to value this social good as it should, HE can be free of tuition and perhaps even free of all expenses such as room and board. [See http://bit.ly/PSAvsF2CO for a discussion of PSA expense-free HE.] At any rate, the financial flexibility offered by PSA makes possible numerous reasonable cost-sharing formulae or even, as it was in Bologna, the sole responsibility of students. [See https://bit.ly/FinanceLiberationHE for details of PSA finance.]

In the Medieval context scholars held masters responsible for their service; and given the dependence of master income on satisfactory service, the scholars of Bologna had much to say about the conditions of service, while masters were unavoidably responsive to their demands. With rising costs, underfunding, precariat labour, increased competition, and other negative forces at work in the modern HEI model, we see a return to the days of old. In advertising to and attempting to satisfy their paying students, HEIs place considerable emphasis on the amenities and amusements of the manufactured university experience - as they solicit alumni for financial donations.

Not only does PSA financial liberation help to alleviate medieval and modern pandering, it makes every attempt to appropriately harmonize power in the teacher-student education relationship by first eliminating the HEI as a party with standing. As we have seen, PSA does not require the corporate middleman that we know of as a modern university and college. The only corporations that need exist are those of the universitas societas magistrorum discipulorumque – though, as Part 3 of this series discusses in greater detail, the corporate entity advanced by PSA is an historically distant cousin, namely the professional society.

For now, it is enough to say that in PSA academics are licensed by a professional society of their peers to practice HE – as they were in the medieval period by the masters, or as HEIs are licensed through accreditation today. Doing so liberates academics from what has become an exploitative employment relationship with HEIs and returns them to their proper place as independent essential arbiters of education qualifications and standards – a place ironically acknowledged by their roles in HEI accreditation processes. [See http://bit.ly/AccreditationPSA for discussion of PSA and institutional accreditation.] Further, in concert with the myriad functions of modern professional societies, PSA disciplines and develops its licentiates. As is true of the legal or medical profession, PSA offers a forum for complaints from the student clients of its academic members and issues penalization or correction where appropriate. The society provides opportunities for professional development through training and credentialing. It also makes public the full performance record of academic licentiates, including pass/fail ratios, numerical and narrative student evaluations, disciplinary actions, awards, publications, community serve, and any other materials that might improve transparency in the formation of teacher-student relationships.

But the restoration of power is not one-sided. With the removal of the HEI middleman that operates as a layer of interference in the essential education relationship, students too are returned to their position of power over their own education. Once again, by paying academics directly for their service – under some formula made possible by the financial flexibility of PSA – students are like any other person seeking the services of a professional. They can select the individual that best suits their learning needs and goals; and pursue damages or correction where the service is not properly provided. They can make formally public their evaluation of the education service they received. They can, as a group, boycott academics that are unsuitable. They can negotiate favourable rates for education and other services. Under the current HEI model, the exercise of these powers is either non-existent or negligible. This wasn’t so in Medieval Bologna and it won’t be under PSA.

With its medieval roots exposed, as an employer, an issuer of degrees, a space for service, and an intermediary in the teacher-student relationship, the modern university is outed as a redundant historical artifact. As the essential interested parties in HE, teachers and students form their education relationship with expectations. The more intimate, explicit and mutually beneficial those expectations, the better chance for satisfactory outcomes in the relationship. PSA is an attempt to meet those expectations through re-introduction of precious medieval notions that both restore and renovate a proper education relationship.

As always, since a comprehensive model for HE can be tricky to formulate, I seek comment and collaboration on construction of the PSA model.

References

Garfield, J A. 28 December 1871. William College Alumni Dinner.

Haskins, C H. 1923. The Rise of Universities. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

Zuddas, F. 2019. The Project of Universality. In Chipperfield, D., Duplantier, M., et al. (eds.) HEC Campus: evolution of a model. Zurich: Park Books.