In revealing the historical roots of PSA, part one of this series looked to the emergence of higher education in 12th century Italy, where, “Emphatically, Bologna was a student university…” (Haskins, 1923). The final installment of the series looks at its professional pedigree in the 19th and 20th centuries; while this second post looks to Paris, France, for the medieval choreography of confluence and conflict that produced modern higher education institutions (HEIs). With power dynamics adjusted through economic and political maneuvering, Paris adds momentum to the shift in higher education (HE) from individuals to institutions – a shift that PSA aims to reverse.
Continuing to rely on the Medieval expertise of Haskins’, The Rise of Universities, we find that, “In northern Europe the origin of universities must be sought at Paris, in the cathedral school of Notre-Dame” (Haskins, 1923).
 |
| Notre-Dame |
…
In [1200], after certain students had
been killed in a town and gown altercation, King Philip Augustus issued a
formal privilege which punished his prévôt [provost or royal police chief]
and recognized the exemption of the students and their servants from lay
jurisdiction… [This was followed by] the first papal privilege, the
bull Parens scientiarum of 1231, issued after a two years’
cessation of lectures growing out of a riot in which a band of students, having
found “wine that was good and sweet to drink,” beat up the tavern keeper and
his friends till they in turn suffered from the prévôt and his men…. Confirming
the existing exemptions, the Pope goes on to regulate the discretion of the
chancellor in conferring the license, at the same time that he recognizes the right
of the masters and students “to make constitutions and ordinances regulating
the manner and time of lectures and disputations, the costume [or gown]
to be worn [by masters and students],” attendance at masters’ funerals,
the lectures of bachelors, … the price of lodgings, and the coercion [or
hazing] of members.
…
While the word university does not
appear in these documents, it is taken for granted. A university in the sense
of an organized body of masters existed already in the twelfth century; by 1231
it had developed into a corporation, for Paris, in contrast to Bologna, was a
university of masters.
In a city of powerful people like chancellors vested with church
authority and provosts who protected monarch interests, we find in these passages
further evidence of the considerable influence that masters and scholars
enjoyed. The studium generale – as the amalgam of master and student universitates
or corporations was called – brought prestige to the city and its authorities, supported
the economy across a range of industries, and provided personnel for the bureaucracies
of church and monarchy.
Precisely because of this, papal and royal interest in HE
intensified, as did the occurrence of conflict among the interested parties. Though
without the drunken violence common to student and townsfolk clashes, one quarrel
of note during this time occurred between masters and chancellors. As
chancellors of Notre-Dame attempted to exercise more control over the who, what
and how of education, masters resisted and tensions grew until finally a group left
for the monasteries in what became known as the Latin Quarter of Paris – so
called after their migration and language of instruction. Here masters were
outside the direct control of the chancellor, allowing them greater autonomy in
the practice of their profession.
College Employers
With the passage of time, there were gains and losses in the
power struggles among scholar, master, pope, and king. During the 12th
and the 13th centuries, there were two introductions that substantially
determined the distribution of power we now consider native to HE: corporeal colleges
and salaried lectureships.
Another university institution which
goes back to twelfth-century Paris is the college. Originally merely an endowed
hospice or hall of residence, the college early became an established unit
of academic life at many universities. “The object of the earliest
college-founders was simply to secure board and lodging for poor scholars who
could not pay for it themselves;” but in course of time the colleges became
normal centres of life and teaching, absorbing into themselves much of the
activity of the university. The colleges had buildings and endowments, if the
university had not. …But of course the ultimate home of the college was
Oxford and Cambridge, where it came to be the most characteristic feature of
university life, arrogating to itself practically all teaching as well as
direction of social life, until the university [universitas]
became merely an examining and degree-conferring body.
…
 |
| Sorbonne - University of Paris |
In the first post of this series, Zuddas (2019) was used to
emphasize that “spatial tactics” are essential to institutional identity. In
architecture, space can be analyzed through function, location and duration.
The introduction of customary college buildings instituted exclusive function
and intransience of location and duration. Though not much of these early college
structures remain throughout Europe and at the time they might have seemed a prudent
measure, imperceptibly the identity of HE had changed. It was no longer a university
of masters and scholars, but a corporation of edifices and endowments - a campus,
fixed in function, location, and duration.
As a spatial tactic in identity construction, the establishment
of these colleges helped to immunize papal and royal authorities from the
threat of collective boycotts, strikes and migrations which had empowered
masters and scholars. The college issued not only corporeal forms and facilities,
but also prescriptions and proscriptions. The college was shaping into a factory
that could be conveniently overseen, from which one required permission to
enter, and from which one could be expelled – expelled from HE itself.
As the first post of this series indicates, PSA identity spatial
tactics recommend dispersion of HE throughout a community – a true community
campus. At the same time, conversion of customary campuses to facility and service vendors for professional academics in independent practice is also possible.
Dispersion or conversion can relieve some private
pain points related to the restrictive spatial tactics of the current HEI
model. Students often need to move far from home and loved ones to receive HE
that is consequently more expensive, while academics are frequently forced to
accept faculty positions apart from their spouses or abandon career aspirations
to accommodate those of their spouses. Greater freedom to choose where one
offers and receives HE can help to relieve such personal hardships.
Additionally, as will be discussed in a moment, dispersion
or conversion reduces the total cost of the HE system. PSA has developed practice
prospectuses for various locations - from small to large cities in developed
and developing countries. In every case, PSA is at least 50% and often 70-80% cheaper
to operate than the HEI model – while it increases academic income, reduces
student expense, and improves education quality. Comparatively, the medieval introduction
of college campuses was an unfortunate misguided tactic.
A second important shift in power came with salaried
lectureships. As we have seen, originally Bologna was an intimate exchange
between individuals, where scholars paid masters for their education services, giving
students an upper hand in the power dynamics. As Haskins (1923) says, “[T]he
masters lived at first wholly from the fees of their pupils.” However, the
swelling economic and political benefits associated with HE encouraged papal
and royal authorities to attract and retain masters within their jurisdictions –
a continued practice that results in brain drain. To this end, the salaried
lectureship became a key incentive. An informative account of the use of this
incentive is offered by Cobban (1985).
Salaried university
lectureships probably made their first appearance at the Castilian university
of Palencia, where, by a bull of Horonius III of 1220, Ferdinand III of Castile
was authorised to use part of the diocesan tithes for payment of masters at the
university for a period of five years, a grant which was renewed by the papacy
for a further quinquennium in 1225. In 1224 the Emperor Frederick II set out to
attract eminent [masters] to his new University of Naples by offering
privileges and what were almost certainly salaries (“donaria”). Salaried lectureships
were envisaged from the start at Toulouse University created by Gregory IX…[where]
by a treaty arrangement of 1229, Count Raymond VII of Toulouse undertook to
pay the salaries of a number of lecturers for ten years, although
the papacy had to pressurise the count into honouring his pledge.
…
Instituted by the communes and
with the general, though not at the outset universal, support of the lecturing
staff, municipally endowed lectureships were devised as a means of securing and
retaining prominent teachers and of countering some of the excesses of the student
power movement which, radiating outwards from Bologna, had become entrenched in
the majority of the Italian universities in the course of the thirteenth century.
…From the beginnings the salaried lectureship took progressive root throughout
the universities of southern Europe and, from the late fourteenth century, it penetrated
the northern university scene… In the sixteenth century most universities had
come to operate with a considerable quota of salaried lectureships, and the
original system of payment by student fees was largely superseded.
…
The growth of the salaried
lectureship in all its kaleidoscopic manifestations helped to promote a deeper
sense of cohesion and professional status among Europe’s university lecturers
and did much to relieve them of the vagaries of a livelihood dependent upon student
fees.
…
[The] salaried lectureship
brought with it the concept of tenure which, above all, transformed the
profession of university teacher from one of minimal security to one wherein
longer-term career prospects were realisable…
Cobban’s detailed description of this capacity building tool
is worth comprehensive exploration in another post. He reveals multi-tiered
tenure systems, elaborate selection processes, substitute lecturer networks, examples
of corruption, and more. For now, it is enough to focus on select aspects that
instruct the PSA model.
Obviously, along with this change in the economics of HE
came changes in the power dynamics. Though students exercised some level of participation
in the selection of candidates for salaried lectureship positions, their influence
over the conditions of service from masters and townsfolk was waning. What solidarity
existed in the universitas societas magistrorum discipulorumque
was fading, since now when students might threaten to leave the city with purse
in hand, their masters might be less inclined to follow. While Cobban seems to characterize
the introduction of salaried lectureships as an improvement in the professional
lives of masters, the fact is that the who, how, what, and where of their labour
were now subject to the capricious control of cross and crown purses – being delivered
from student excesses to saint and sovereign estrangement.
Increasingly at this stage in the emergence of modern universities,
if you desired a career in HE you were selected and salaried by higher authorities
that also founded and financed the colleges within which you were affixed in
the provision of your expert services. Outside of this nascent institutional employment
arrangement, which matured into the modern HEI model, there was diminishing hope
of earning a respectable living as an independent master.
PSA Responses
PSA is an attempt to calibrate the power gauges in HE. Given
the history that has been provided here, it should come as no surprise that it
does so through two key features of the model - its economics and politics.
In terms of economics, PSA liberates HE from the financial burden
imposed by the modern HEI model of universities and colleges with their bloated
administrations and campuses, thereby dramatically reducing the public and
private burden to fund HE. As PSA private practice models and HE system public financial
data demonstrate, there is substantial money to be saved. Consider that in the US
with a full-time equivalent faculty of 680,510 and a full-time equivalent
student body of 10,565,751, if the reported institutional revenue from tuition
and others fees ($80,997,047,166) or the reported expense of instruction ($114,448,214,832)
was paid directly to academics offering their services under the protection and
direction of a professional academic society, they could respectively earn respectable
incomes of $119,024 and $168,180. These figures represent 20% of the total revenue
and 28.5% of the total expenses reported by public HEIs for the 2016-17
academic year in constant 2017-18 USD. See the table below for possible
existing HEI model funding sources of PSA:
|
Source |
Per
FTES |
Total
FTES |
Per
FTEF |
|
Revenue |
|||
|
Total
Revenue |
$37,797 |
$399,353,690,547 |
$586,844 |
|
Appropriations
& Non-operating Grants |
$10,523 |
$111,183,397,773 |
$163,382 |
|
Tuition
& Other Fees |
$7,666 |
$80,997,047,166 |
$119,024 |
|
Expense |
|||
|
Instructional |
$10,832 |
$114,448,214,832 |
$168,120 |
|
Instructional,
Research, Public Service, and Academic Support |
$18,959 |
$200,316,073,209 |
$294,361 |
|
Instructional,
Research, Public Service, Academic and Student Support |
$21,036 |
$222,261,138,036 |
$326,609 |
[Formula used in calculations: (Source
per FTES) x (Total FTES) ÷ (Total FTEF) = Per FTEF (Practice Funding/Revenue).
Source: Snyder, et al., 2019, pg.386, 387, 394.]
With this sort of systemic financial liberation and practice
revenue, academics (or masters, in the Medieval vernacular) could once again
offer their education services directly to students, in the absence of expensive
HEI middlemen.
In terms of politics, PSA liberates HE from the oversight
burden imposed by the modern HEI model of universities and colleges with its unnecessary
interference in the education relationship, thereby bringing teachers and
students back to more intimate, mutually beneficial relationships sustained through
professional society and private academic practice. The third installment of
this series will explore the professional society roots of PSA in greater
detail, so for now a sketch will suffice.
The professional society, like its gild or universitas
predecessors, enjoys the same legal status as a modern university or college – that
is, a corporation in the original Roman sense of the term. It is not a physical
entity, but an abstract relational one. However, unlike a modern HEI, it does
not employ its members, but licenses, disciplines and develops its members in
the collective and individual provision of their expert services to the public.
This is the established form of self-oversight for professions that offer services
with at least as much social value as HE, such as medicine, law, psychiatry,
engineering, and dentistry.
In anticipation of Part 3 of this series, consider the
sketch provided here of a modern legislatively sanctioned Professional Society
of Academics (PSA) as Haskins (1923) contrasts the masters of then and now.
If, as some reformers maintain, the
social position and self-respect of professors involve their management of
university affairs, the Middle Ages were the great age of professorial control.
The university itself was a society of masters when it was not a society
of students. As there were no endowments of importance there were no boards of
trustees, nor was there any such system of state control as exists on the
Continent or in many parts of the United States. Administration
in the modern sense was strikingly absent, but much time was consumed in
various sorts of university meetings. In a quite remarkable degree the
university was self-governing as well as self-respecting, escaping some of the
abuses of a system which occasionally allows trustees or regents to speak of
professors as their “hired men.” Whether the individual professor was freer
under such a system is another question, for the corporation of masters was apt
to exercise a pretty close control over action if not over opinion, and the
tyranny of colleagues is a form of that “tyranny of one’s next-door neighbor”
from which the world seems unable to escape.
Fair enough, but if tyranny there must be then let us choose
our tyrant. More than that, if the PSA model is viable, then the price of self-inflicted
tyranny purchases numerous benefits for not only academics but students and
society at large. This blog is devoted to demonstrating those benefits, which
include: respectable remuneration for academics and their assistants, reduced
educational cost for students, financial liberation for all parties, responsible
education service, improved education standards, expansion of academic service
providers, expansion of access to HE for domestic and international students,
improved mobility for academics and students, and more.
Through the passage of time, the intimate, economic,
political, and education relationships between teacher and student have been subordinated
to the interests of HEIs, with their concentrated campuses, exploitive employment,
corporate sponsorship, high cost, and state neglect. But the HEI model is
unsustainable, unresponsive, and unnecessary, as history and PSA have shown.
This is not to say that the PSA model is perfect. The claim
is only that it is superior to the HEI model we have inherited. As always, I
invite comment on this claim and collaboration in its confirmation.
References
Cobban, A. R. (Spring 1985). "Elective
Salaried Lectureships in the Universities of Southern Europe in the
Pre-Reformation Era." Bulletin of the
John Rylands Library of Manchester. Vol. 67.2: pp. 662-687.
Haskins, C H. (1923). The Rise of Universities. New
York: Henry Holt and Company.
Snyder, T. D., de Brey, C., Dillow,
S.A. (2019). Digest of education statistics 2017 (NCES
2018-070). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics.
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