PSA Takes Its Liberalism with a Dash of Neo

This latest explication of the Professional Society of Academics (PSA) model for the provision of higher education (HE) responds to a common charge pressed by individuals and organizations like Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education (SFNDHE), the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the California Faculty Association (CFA), that seek to address substantial problems in the higher education institutional (HEI) model of universities and colleges. As the Plaintiffs in this case, they tend to respond as SFNDHE did when offered links to exposition of PSA:

As an example of an individual Plaintiff, back in 2014, Sarah Goldrick-Rab of Temple University referred to me on X (Twitter) as a "goofy guy," "unstable or otherwise not ok," and "laughable" – though she also admitted to not having read the PSA document that offers critical analysis of her inferior F2CO proposal for two free years of college – a proposal she was invited to the Obama Whitehouse to discuss and which to the best of my knowledge has never been implemented.

SFNDHE likely went to the PSA blog and read the introduction which includes the term ‘entrepreneur’. Of course, the three-sentence introduction also contains a link to a thirty-page exposition document entitled, “A New Tender for the Higher Education Social Contract” – written ten years before the SFNDHE made its call for a new deal and four years before Michael Meranze of UCLA made his for a new social contract. Had SFNDHE bothered to read any postings on the PSA model, then they would have discovered that the model invites collaboration among the groups it identifies and that PSA is neither profit-seeking nor neoliberal – at least not in the simplistic sense that most use this designator.

Because the neoliberal-privatization-for-profit charge is common and grossly misunderstands PSA, this post is written to wave off such superficial engagement with the model. People love labels, especially if those people are academics and those academics are affected by the labels. Among the academics, philosophers are trained to do conceptual (or label) analysis, to ferret out assumptions, to draw connections where none are plain. The philosopher can thread a needle in novel ways and so readers are encouraged to maintain a philosophical mindset.

 

Preliminary Conceptual Housekeeping

No extensive analysis of the complex concept of neoliberalism will be undertaken in this post. As conceptual clarification, an analysis offered by Olssen and Peters will be adopted without review. In the current context, their overall tack is to loosely compare the liberal and neoliberal academies.

Whereas classical liberalism represents a negative conception of state power in that the individual was taken as an object to be freed from the interventions of the state, neoliberalism has come to represent a positive conception of the state’s role in creating the appropriate market by providing the conditions, laws and institutions necessary for its operation. In classical liberalism the individual is characterized as having an autonomous human nature and can practise freedom. In neoliberalism the state seeks to create an individual that is an enterprising and competitive entrepreneur. As Graham Burchell (1996, pp. 23–24) puts this point, while for classical liberalism the basis of government conduct is in terms of ‘natural, private-interest-motivated conduct of free, market exchanging individuals’, for neoliberalism: … the rational principle for regulating and limiting governmental activity must be determined by reference to artificially arranged or contrived forms of free, entrepreneurial and competitive conduct of economic-rational individuals.[pg.315]

Notice the use of such labels as “entrepreneurial,” but also “contrived,” “competitive,” “enterprising,” “economic,” and “private.” Published in 2005, this article provides plenty of tailwind for SFNDHE to be triggered by the term ‘entrepreneur’ – but perhaps the organization is not populated by philosophers.

With this cursory contrast in place:

This means that for neoliberal perspectives, the end goals of freedom, choice, consumer sovereignty, competition and individual initiative, as well as those of compliance and obedience, must be constructions of the state acting now in its positive role through the development of the techniques of auditing, accounting and management. It is these techniques, as Barry et al. (1996, p. 14) states: … [that] enable the marketplace for services to be established as ‘autonomous’ from central control. Neoliberalism, in these terms, involves less a retreat from governmental ‘intervention’ than a re-inscription of the techniques and forms of expertise required for the exercise of government.[pg.315]

For a sense of the impact of these techniques on (the people in) HE:

Ron Barnett (2000) utilizes Lyotard’s concept of ‘performativity’ to argue that marketization has become a new universal theme manifested in the trends towards the commodification of teaching and research and the various ways in which universities meet the new performative criteria, both locally and globally in the emphasis upon measurable outputs.[pg.316]

We find this in the increasing number of platforms for institutional rankings, as we find institutions that game the rankings or withdraw from them. There is also a growing presence of direct state management, with many states introducing legislation similar to the Texas Senate Bills 17 and 18 that ban DEI offices and challenge tenure. Neoliberal productivity and performativity measurement functions are used by government to support reward or punish of HEIs through funding adjustments that impact everything from mission, collegiality, and curriculum to tuition, salaries, and parking. Leaning on the notions of “protective state” and “productive state,” Olssen and Peters draw out further distinction between the liberal and the neoliberal:

Importantly in this context, Buchanan’s state has a positive arm. Hence, while the stringent constitutional safeguards on the protective state make any change in the status quo or redistribution of property almost impossible, the positive arm of the productive state effectively extracts compliance from individuals in order to engineer a market order. In doing so it cuts across the traditional guarantees of classical liberalism regarding the spaces it sought to protect—a domain of personal freedom, the rights of privacy involving freedom from scrutiny and surveillance, as well as professional autonomy and discretion in one’s work. [This] effectively undermines and reorganizes the protected domains of their classical liberal forebears.[pg.319]

If it is true that “classical liberalism” (hereafter, liberalism) promotes personal freedom, privacy rights, professional autonomy, and work discretion, and the Plaintiffs seek to defend these spaces from neoliberal encroachment, then PSA is the model for them. To the extent that these groups aim to protect a liberal vision for the HEI model, the alternative PSA model is for them.

To see this, we can look at two answers to the question, “How should HE be shepherded, developed and delivered?” One answer is a “how” that refers to liberal spaces and another answer is a “how” that refers to university and college spaces – the first is philosophical, the second is functional.

From the start, the design of PSA has been guided by the protection and augmentation of freedom, privacy, autonomy, and discretion – along with democracy, the right to earn a living, the right to free HE, equality of access to HE, expanded access to HE, and freedom of (social) mobility. In this way the Plaintiffs and PSA agree on the first how: HE belongs within the liberal space. Obviously, this is enough to clear PSA of the neoliberalism charge. In fact, the liberalism championed by PSA is more substantial and secure than the Plaintiffs can ever hope to supply through industrial action, government lobbying, or tweaking and taping of the HEI model.

Though this superior PSA liberalism is argued for many times over on this blog, Plaintiffs continue to charge it with neoliberalism. Assuming they have not violated basic reasoning standards by issuing their charges before engaging the model, the second answer to the how-question might offer insight into their persistence. A confluence of factors contributes to the trouble here, only some of which will be addressed. To begin with, there is the framework of HE core conceptual truths that are often ignored by those who engage PSA from within the perspective of the HEI model. To properly interpret PSA, this framework of seven basic truths must be admitted:

1) HE is a relationship among academics, students, and a wider community.

2) HE is teaching, researching and community servicing.

3) HE is neither liberal nor neoliberal spaces.

4) HE is neither university nor college spaces.

5) HE is not provided by universities and colleges.

6) Academics are the principal labor for the provision of HE.

7) Academics are the principal authority in HE.

Beyond these propositions, everything else is optional, accidental, mutable – which is not the same as saying, trivial.

Next, the liberalism of the PSA model might be overlooked because Plaintiffs seem to take liberal spaces as thematic to the telos of authentic university and college spaces. More precisely, Plaintiffs extend to universities and colleges the liberal “domain of personal freedom, the rights of privacy involving freedom from scrutiny and surveillance, as well as professional autonomy and discretion in one’s work.” The unqualified application of this characteristic liberal space to abstract legal entities is understandable.

As a consequence of branding, longevity, corporate law, Hollywood movies, literature, and features of language use, we do talk about these institutions as though they are persons or beings capable of possessing such liberal characteristics. Millennia of philosophical tradition has treated this sort of verbal-qua-conceptual-qua-metaphysical phenomenon, but there is no need to uncap it here. What is relevant in this context is that the application of liberal characteristics to not only concrete real human beings like academics, but also abstract relational legal beings like universities and colleges, might contribute to confusion when interpreting PSA. Raised awareness of this dualist application of liberal characteristics to legal beings and human beings, combined with admission of the seven truths, forms a flocculant for muddy conceptual waters that can conceal PSA.

The Plaintiffs say that universities and colleges have substituted their liberal spaces for neoliberal ones which are then imposed on academics (and others in HE) – creating a neoliberal trickledown. The Plaintiffs want to restore what they take to be the proper liberal character of these institutions, but estimate that for this to be successful they must also restore the liberal character of another legal being, the government – creating a liberal trickledown. As we shall see, this two-tier restoration project is a result of how the HEI model structures relationships among these legal and human beings, most notably in terms of operation, legislation, subsidization, and accreditation.

But again, another drop of flocculant reminds us that protecting (neo)liberal spaces is not the same as protecting HEI spaces, protecting HE is not the same as protecting HEIs, protecting academic authority is not the same as protecting government authority, protecting academic authority is not the same as protecting HEI authority, and so on. The dualist application of liberal characteristics and the seven truths must remain at the fore of thought when engaging PSA.

 

What Plaintiffs Seem to Think of Universities and Colleges

We do speak and think of HEIs as racist, elitist, sexist, innovative, conservative, liberal, neoliberal, and so on, but they are not – no matter how branding, longevity, law, Hollywood, literature, and language might make it seem. Strictly speaking, human beings, not legal beings, possess these characteristics.

The Ku Klux Klan is considered by many to be a racist organization, with a history of racist deeds, but strictly speaking the legal being is merely the Charter that formally declares the racism of human beings. The legal being called the KKK has no will of its own, no philosophy, no racial views, no conscience, no consciousness, no ability to strategize, no bad experiences with people of color, no slaver great grandparents, no ability to convert its members to Buddhism, no ability to burn a cross, though it has the legal standing to hire or fire, sue or be sued, as it has its own symbolism or branding, and plenty of fictional and non-fictional cultural presence. But the reality is, no one fears the KKK, only its members. No one shares a kinship with the KKK, only its members. No one morally condemns the KKK, only its members. No one forbids their daughter to date the KKK, only its members.

Because this conceptual crossover between legal and human beings can be difficult to recognize and root when reasoning, further illustration is offered.

Many say things like “Research out of Harvard” or “Oxford research” or “McGill secured funding” or “Tsinghua collaborates on research” and so on. But return to the attribution dualism and seven truths. None of these institutions do research, secure research funding, publish research or collaborate on research. Academics do these things. Recognize this fact: It is impossible for an HEI to do research. None of the research behaviour alluded to would be happening if it wasn’t for academics. The best facilitated university laboratory in the world is no more than an equipment storage room without research academics. This point is perhaps more striking where the research involves only the laboratory of the mind, some books and discussion with colleagues at a conference. My field of philosophy does not need a Large Hadron Collider, though it explores the philosophical dimensions of quantum physics.

At the risk of belaboring the point, it is also natural to say things like: “Northwestern is firing;” “Leeds wants to close programs;” “Cornell agrees to;” “Toronto is ranked highest in teaching;” “Stanford produces the best;” “Melbourne says;” “Queens plans to;” “Heidelberg will announce its research goals;” “Tokyo issues a statement;” “Peking intends to increase security;” and the like. Some of these phrases can be seen as shorthand for statements that have greater precision such as, “The human beings X, Y, and Z, who are employed by institution A, B, or C, have properties 1, 2, and 3.” So, “Toronto is ranked highest in teaching,” strictly means something like: The University of Toronto employs a faculty that is populated with a number of identifiable human beings who are considered the best at teaching (based on some comparative measure).

It is important to notice that the linguistic shorthand masks this underlying precision and so can contribute to the dualist slip which applies the properties of human beings to legal beings, and which subtly substitutes the shorthand for the reality. But make no mistake, in reality, it is impossible for universities and colleges to teach.

That said, some of the phrases are not shorthand, but accurately apply to the legal beings, though not without ambiguity. For example, from at least a legal point of view, “Northwestern is firing,” is not a conceptual slip, since academics apply to the institution for employment, the employment contract is signed with the institution, the institution bank accounts deposit employee salaries, it is the institution that the union fights to stop the firing, it is the institution that is sued for wrongful dismissal, and it is the institution that gets the reputation as a ruthless (neoliberal) employer.

Even so, the distinction between legal being and human being is not clear. After all, human beings populate the hiring committee, personnel department, finance department, executive branch, and in-house legal team. At the same time, under instruction from members of the executive and Board of Governors, the legal team defends the institution against any number of threats to its best interests, which in this case are seen to contradict the interests of faculty employees who are to be fired by the institution.

Consider just how pervasive and penetrating is this conceptual quagmire. It is akin to the attribution that happens when sport fans talk about their favored or hated teams. New York University or the New York Rangers and the University of Manchester or Manchester United are examples of this subtle, but powerful, verbal-qua-conceptual-qua-metaphysical slippage. Though not a single human being remains who constituted these teams or institutions when they were founded, people still talk as though there exists throughout this history a being with various characteristics attributed to it which are more naturally attributable to human beings. This is the power of legacy and dualist attribution to legal beings. The HEI model, with its Paris and Oxford, has a long legacy as the only game in town – though PSA aims to change that. …Did you catch it?

In answer to the question, “How should HE be shepherded, developed and delivered?”, Plaintiffs seem to insist, “By (liberal) universities and colleges, that’s how.” The hypothesis presented here is that this answer leans on conceptual slippage which identifies universities and colleges as legal beings that teach, research, and service the community. Notice that the Plaintiff answer uses the preposition ‘by’, as does number four of the seven truths, “HE is not provided by universities and colleges.” But with greater precision and so conceptual clarity, HE is provided with the use of HEIs, as it is with the use of public funds, and as it should be with the use of PSA. We do speak as though HE is provided by HEIs. But neither HEIs nor PSA provide HE. To repeat, it is impossible for a legal being to do the teaching, researching and community servicing that defines HE.

To be an HEI or a model like PSA is to be a tool, a piece of technology used by human beings to facilitate HE, as benches, PowerPoint, textbooks, and electricity are used. At the same time, the labor arrangements and conceptual slippages of the HEI model have positioned human beings as tools used by universities and colleges to produce and deliver HE. But the reality is that masters or academics have provided HE for longer than HEIs have existed, giving us good reason to think that they are necessary, while universities and colleges are optional.

But pushing conceptual analysis further, though it is true that academics pre-date HEIs and they (not HEIs) provide HE, like so many other domains, it is also true that technology strains the view that human beings are necessary. Perhaps one day artificial intelligence or neural implants can reduce or replace the relevance of academics to HE. If so, notice how academics (not HEIs) remain necessary, only the concept of ‘academic’ is reduced to a set of HE functions with multiple realizability in animal or algorithm. This analysis introduces an interesting topic for philosophical discussion and forms the basis for yet another argument in favor of PSA.

In this context, even if (human) academics are described as just another (replaceable) means to the end of HE, then the PSA model is designed to tool this means-ends relationship with greater precision, proximity, efficacy, cost-effectiveness, quality, equity, and liberalism than the HEI model can ever hope to engineer. Historically, currently, and for at least the near future, human academics provide HE, they are the necessary means, the necessary tools used (by society) for its provision – the rest is optional, including universities, colleges, and PSA.

No doubt not all Plaintiffs are confused by attribution dualism or overlook the seven truths. But I suspect that to some degree such fumbling contributes to incorrect interpretations of PSA, including its being charged with neoliberalism. When the PSA and HEI models are superficially compared, it is common to see universities and colleges as institutions that protect social interests in HE, while legal and medical professional societies are seen as institutions that protect individual interests in occupations.

Notwithstanding the explicit ethos of public service that backed the formal creation of these professions, history offers ample evidence of a professional model where attorneys and physicians exercise private, protectionist, capitalist, competitive, entrepreneurial values, often at the expense of public interest in legal and medical services. The professions might have been a reasonable, even noble, idea on paper, but in practice, they have not met all our social expectations. These institutions are in stark contrast to what the Plaintiffs see as the proper character of universities and colleges, including the fiduciary relations they are expected to hold with the public. In this context, it is easy to throw out PSA with the professional bath water.

Setting aside review of this negative picture of the professions, what needs to be acknowledged is that from their inception to the present similar criticisms stick to the HEI model of universities and colleges and the human beings that compose them. The HEI model has never been as the Plaintiffs imagine it could or should be: whether historically it was the town businesses that curried favor with masters by offering free liquor, accommodation, and companionship or the Chancellors who marked final exams with an eye to pleasing the influential parents of students, or today how Presidents of HEIs curry personal favor with power-elite as groundwork for future career paths, institutions that sell their accredited degrees through dubious international programs, or the tax-exempt status granted corporate-leaning HEIs, this and so much more stinks of corruptive violation of the public trust. The Plaintiffs must acknowledge that universities and colleges have for much longer been made of the same glass as the professions.

Likewise, it is reasonable to believe that one day PSA might invite such criticism. This is why the model includes design features based on the lessons learned from the faults and fortes of these predecessors, while it remains open to other mitigative or corrective features yet to be conceived. At the same time, even if the model lacked such constructive measures – that the Plaintiffs might casually cast as neoliberal – and it operated as universities and colleges have for centuries, even the most liberal of HEI models stands humbled by the benefits PSA offers HE and the people it affects.

The SFNDHE, AAUP, CFA and PSA – or rather, the human beings behind these legal beings – agree on the liberal how, but disagree on the institutional how. The Plaintiffs want to steer the legal and the human beings toward a HE sector with more liberal-leaning governments and HEIs. PSA wants a more liberal HE sector too but aims to achieve it with an institution that provides a more secure liberalism based on a clearer cohesion in the means-ends relationship between academics and the public good of HE. The conceptual analysis in this section is meant to underwrite fundamental differences in the relations among the legal and human beings of the HEI and PSA models – differences that speak to many aspects of HE, including the ability of academics to construct a liberal HE sector using a dash of their so-called neoliberal, but undoubtedly professional, principal authority.

 

Relations Among Legal and Human Beings: Unions, Universities, and Governments

The PSA model includes an institutional component, the professional society (of academics), which can be referred to as, the Society. Like a university or a college, the Society is an abstract relational legal being composed of concrete real human beings with an array of characteristics, interests, roles and relations that are self and Society oriented. The functional and structural parallels between the Society and HEIs are many, but of concern at the moment are differences that help to dismiss Plaintiff charges and demonstrate the preference for PSA on liberal and other grounds. A fundamental distinction in the models is their respective relations among human beings and legal beings.

Take the relations between academics and universities or colleges. In the HEI model, academics are employees of these institutions. In this capacity, academics exercise a degree of shared governance of their institutional employers. This measured governance covers things like how scholarships are awarded, programs are managed, faculty are promoted, and students are admitted, but also, mission and value statements, property and industry investments, bond and service sales. Across countries, regions, and HEIs, the exercise of shared governance varies in strength and scope, while it is bolstered or busted by factors internal and external to the institution. This is evinced by academics relying on labor unions like the California Faculty Association to negotiate with institutional employers or lobby government officials for more favorable employment contract terms related to compensation, working conditions, and shared governance – all of which is supposed to coalesce into a measure of union-represented academic contribution toward institutional-employer-mediated stewardship of HE.

Based on the previous analysis, this makes HEIs a tool that are partially controlled by academics, who themselves are tools that are partially controlled by HEIs. A comparison of labor unions and PSA provides further insight into this quagmire of control and the relations between academics and the institutions of the HEI and PSA models.

Labor unions represent the interests of academic members. Unions do not employ academics and they do not have legislated authority to shepherd, develop or deliver HE. They are a tool used by academics to help protect and assert their personal and professional interests and responsibilities within the HEI model – a use that might result in positive spillover effects for others affected by HE, such as students or taxpayers. In this way, unions amplify the nonhomogeneous, aggregate voice of employed academics who are dues-paying members. More fundamentally, unions are the other side of the strange capitalist-leaning employer-employee relations arranged for under the HEI model.

As indicated, this is a model wherein the university has been conceptually elevated to the point that, as a legal being with its own interests and (neo)liberal characteristics, the institution uses human beings that it employs to battle other human beings that it employs in the promotion and protection of what the respective groups of employees perceive to be in the best interests and character of their mutual institutional employer. Conceptual elevation and convoluted representation contribute to the cacophony of interests that routinely conflict and undermine HE in the HEI model, such as the cyclical battles between, on the one side, (some of) the administration and Board of Governors and, on the other side, the unions that represent the interests of (some of) the academic employees – while both sides claim to have in mind the best interests of all HE stakeholders.

Wading through these muddied waters, the Plaintiffs insist that neoliberal trickledown has eroded the institutions, including academic participation in shared governance. But the historical reality is that shared governance has always waxed and waned, exposing yet another of the inherent weaknesses of the HEI model. After all, in governing the very institution that employs those who govern it, satisfying all parties is difficult when making judgements regrading institutional mission values, marketing strategies, funding allocations, staffing needs, program adjustments, capital construction, services pricing, corporate donations, union demands, government policies, geopolitical tensions and much more. This is undeniable as academic employees-slash-governors seek protection through a multitude of labor unions that operate alongside Academic Senates and tenure employment status; while not to be outdone, HEIs seek collective protection of their interests and characters through organizations such as the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges or Universities UK.

PSA exposes all of this confrontational, protectionist, power-seeking as unnecessary and destructive to HE. The American Association of University Professors has for decades decried the decay of tenure, though this employment status is in fact a rarity in the history of the HEI model and only necessary in the first place because of the confrontational relations between employer (institutions) and employee (academics). The AAUP has for decades complained about the increasing use of adjunct or contingent academic labor, though the scope of this concern is restricted to the subset of academics who are fortunate enough to gain employment of any kind in the HEI model. The AAUP and its fellow Plaintiffs work to improve the “state of the profession,” or with accuracy and precision, the state of those in the profession who are employed by HEIs.

Contrast this with law or medicine, where an attorney or a physician is the principal participant in the legislated public trust vested in the professions, whether they practice or not, whether they practice independently or as an employee. As the Plaintiffs struggle for solutions to select ills of the HEI model, their imaginations are held captive by the institutional boxes we have inherited. The solution has been in front of them all along: turn the profession of academic into a profession. Doing so softens or solves the problems that the curious employment relations of the HEI model cause for all those affected by HE and in ways that organizations like the AAUP and California Faculty Association can never hope to achieve for the academic profession.

But the Plaintiffs resist shaking the muddled employer-employee-mutual-governors relationship embedded in the corruptive HEI model, even though with irony they continue to seek greater governance authority over their employer. In such cases, the philosopher recommends further conceptual analysis.

Notice that in orthodox examples of for-profit capitalist ventures like McDonald’s Restaurants or mom-and-pop convenience stores, the legal beings and their assets are owned by a subset of human beings in the society called the capitalists, who employ other human beings called the proletariat in production. But, in the case of Dalhousie, Purdue, or Oxford, these legal beings and their assets have a mixed bag of owners, not to mention affiliates, debtors and controllers.

Thanks to centuries of varied forms of state funding, these HEIs are owned substantively by the public, officially constructed for the common good, like the common lands of national parks or those taken from the peasantry during the Enclosure Movement of the 17^th to the 19^th century in the UK. So, in a way (some) academics indirectly employ themselves, since they are the voting-taxpayer-owner but also the employee of these HEIs.

This would be true of McDonald’s if it went public, not in the Wall Street sense, but the social welfare sense of the term. Everyone in society would own McDonald’s in common, including the frontend employees that work behind the counter and participate in decisions that affect its business activities, such as compensation and working conditions for themselves. Notice how this is beginning to sound like a socialist arrangement for the means of production – which is consistent with PSA. In some shades of socialism, workers are equal owners of the private company and have democratic say in all aspects of how it is run, which sounds more like the relationship between members and their labor union or their professional Society than it does the relationship between (academic) employees and their (institutional) employers.

Of course, if I owned Saint Mary’s University (in my Canadian hometown of Halifax) I would have given myself a much-coveted tenured position 30 years ago, as would every other academic employee in public HE systems around the world. But the reality is that public institutions like universities and colleges are not owned by me and you in the same way that a convenience store is owned by mom and pop, nor in the same way that the socialist operated Mondragon University is owned by the frontend academic workers in that private institution. 

Instead, under the HEI model, SMU is created by acts of legislation that authorize, regulate and fund this legal being to oversee and produce service and degrees in HE, while current and former academic employees are banded together to form accreditation boards that essentially license SMU to continue on in this way, as other HEIs have through centuries of legislation, subsidization and accreditation. In short, the state has adopted an inherited model that vests the public trust for HE directly in these institutions and only indirectly in the academics, the entire body of whom are in fact the principal legitimate authority in HE, but of whom only a subset are employees with at best attenuated ownership or control of their public institutional employers. The upshot is an HEI model that invites stakeholders to spend considerable resources battling each other to promote and preserve their version of this institutional tool, with the effect being global infliction of significant continuous damage on all those affected by HE. This is the conceptual and structural reality of the HEI model – a reality PSA is designed to change.

PSA also does not employ academics, though it represents the personal and professional interests of academic members. In contrast to labor unions, as members of the Society, academics do exercise a legislative mandate that directly vests in them a public trust for HE. As stated, under the HEI model, public trust for HE is vested in the institution of which academics are employees and with whom they exercise a mutable, negotiated, often contentious shared governance that is increasingly mediated through union action.

In PSA, the state legislates the Society to hold the public trust for HE, while the entire body of qualified, licensed academic members hold the Society, whether they practice HE or not, and with no need for interfering, intermediary university and college employers. As one finds in the social goods of medicine and law, legislated professional societies are fundamentally no more than the members that constitute them, as is true of labor unions, but not true of employees at public universities and colleges or private McDonald’s Restaurants.

This is not to say that there cannot be conflicts in the PSA model. It is to say that these conflicts will be different in kind, severity and solution from those of the HEI model. For instance, there cannot be personal and professional conflicts of interest and character between the Society and the members of which it is constituted. Conflicts are among members only. In part, this is because the Society cannot be metaphysically elevated in the same away as universities and colleges, imbuing them with characteristics and interests that are often distinct from and in conflict with institutional employees.

Such use of language and the conceptual slippage this arrangement invites are not found in the case of the Society because: No one says that on behalf of its clients the State Bar of California (SBC) successfully registered a deed, drew up a living will, got a life sentence reduced, drafted a purchase contract, or any number of other legal services that attorneys provide to the public. No one says they have applied to the SBC for legal services or that they owe the SBC money for the legal services it rendered or that the fees the SBC charges are crippling access to the social good of legal representation. No one says that the SBC is being sued or disciplined for malpractice in the legal services it provides its clients. No one says attorneys need to form a labor union to protect their interests (or the interests of the clients they service) against their SBC employer. The SBC does not practice law nor does it employ attorneys to practice law. In stark contrast, we do say all of this with respect to NYU and SMU, linguistically leading us to conceive of them as the principal practitioners of HE – but it is impossible for them to be, they are mere tools used in the practice of HE.

That said, internal member conflict might cause the Society to dissolve or splinter into mildly, moderately, or massively distinct Societies that have greater or lesser affiliation with one another. One of the inherent advantages of PSA is that it allows groups of academics to dissolve or splinter in this way, without individual academics losing the ability to legitimately and practically continue to earn a living providing their HE expertise to society. This is a mix of neoliberal oversight and liberal practice.

The HEI model does not accommodate such dissent and diversity, such dissolution and affiliation, such a liberal and neoliberal mix. In the HEI model, if an individual or a group of academics has a falling out with their institutional employer, they cannot leave and continue to earn a living in HE without moving on to another institutional employer where their reputation as a difficult employee might precede them and where further irresolvable conflict might arise. This restriction constitutes an unreasonable violation of the right to earn a living and anti-trust laws.

PSA corrects this by enabling academics individually or in groups to earn a living contributing their expertise to HE independently of institutional employment in a model of curious conflicts. This does not mean that PSA requires wholesale replacement of the HEI model – though this might be evitable given the full range of PSA benefits. A more modest requirement is that there be no bar to professional provision of HE and PSA be founded to support both academics and HE alongside the HEI model, thereby breaking the HEI de facto monopoly and respecting the right of academics to earn a living based on their investment in career and community.

A recent example of such splintering in the HEI model is the New College of Florida (NCF). Demonstrating how the HEI model is vulnerable to government (political and financial) controls, in an act of neoliberal trickledown, conservative Governor DeSantis has taken steps to end diversity, equity and inclusion polices and programs across all levels of education, while placing tenure under continuous review. At NFC, this has resulted in around 40% of the faculty and 27% of the students leaving the institution. In collaboration with academics not directly affected, some of these former NCF faculty and students formed Alt New College, changing its name to AltLiberalArts, after NCF took legal action in protection of its name brand.

However, they didn’t do so as PSA would enable, as an independent group of qualified academics offering expertise to the public that contributes to legislatively recognized degrees issued under the public trust of their professional Society. Instead, as the HEI model requires, their move was to seek the legislated legitimacy of Bard College. As a (neoliberal?) private institute, this college is just another accredited, degree-granting example of the HEI model.

It is fortunate AltLiberalArts were able to negotiate a place under the Bard College umbrella and that, unlike so many private institutions, this umbrella includes a healthy endowment. But in reality, this college is another HEI that is just as vulnerable to political, economic, pandemic, and other storms that shred umbrellas. I hope this private grace works out for the people who have vested interests in AltLiberalArts, but I encourage them to refocus their efforts and resources on a solution that can truly be their own and bring about real change.

Others have not fared as well in the absence of such good fortune. Similar neoliberal-based splintering is found at public institutions such as West Virginia University, SUNY Potsdam, and University of Wisconsin, to name a few of the more recent instances in America; while economic and demographic troubles affect institutions like the public Cape Breton University (in my home province of Nova Scotia) where to survive more than 75% of the full-time student body is now international students, or private institutions like Lincoln College and Lincoln Christian University that have succumbed to storms, as more than 500 of America’s public and four-year non-profit colleges and universities show signs of financial stress sufficient to face closure, merger or acquisition. This is happening across a global HE sector that is dominated by the HEI model.

Whether the exit of academics (and students) is voluntary or forced, the PSA model provides an alternative to this unnecessary and fragile arrangement where qualified academics shuffle around wide ranges of geography looking for individual employment or collective legitimacy in institutions that embody the complex of conflicts that contributed to their exit in the first place. This must not be how the HE public trust is formed and fortified. This must change.

[YouTube video - PSA vs HEI - explaining the Socialist Version of PSA Model]

Recognizing that this analysis only cracks the conceptual door on the varied relations among the Society, the HEI, the labor union, and the academics, it is time to shift gears and more closely examine relations between PSA and government. The Plaintiffs who charge PSA with being neoliberal also lay this charge at the feet of government. On the one hand, Plaintiffs call for the government to reinvest in HEIs with funding that they claim is appropriate for proper operation of the model, while they also call for the temperance of government as it insists on “re-inscription of the techniques and forms of expertise required for the exercise of government” such as “auditing, accounting and management.” As Olssen and Peters say, this alignment between HEIs and government is a proper Kantian or Newman relationship, which can be crudely boiled down to: give us the money and leave us alone (to wrestle amongst ourselves for the prize of greater control over the HEI (model)).

PSA also essentially says: give us the money and leave us alone. The difference is it asks for far less public funding and offers in return benefits to HE stakeholders that the HEI model cannot possibly hope to match.

PSA can operate on half the total funding that the HEI model currently consumes and over which it continuously cries poor. This total funding includes everything from the government expense of bureaucratic oversight for accreditation boards, student loans, and technocrats to federal and state allocations for capital and operational HEI expenses. [See these posts for financial analyses of PSA: United States, Canada, and Australia.]

But more than this, the Plaintiffs constantly lobby for reinvestment levels that reflect expected growth since the 2008 Great Recession or some other catastrophe, like a pandemic, that has undermined the vulnerable HEI funding model. In this reinvestment scenario, PSA can operate on less than half the funding that Plaintiffs insist is necessary to make the HEI model whole. Since the benefits of PSA are argued for elsewhere on this blog only a cursory list of some notable benefits will be identified here:

i) improved compensation and conditions for academics and support staff; 

ii) protection for academic work against technological intrusion;

iii) improved insulation against political and economic storms;

iv) realization of the right to tuition and even expense-free HE;

v) reduction in the cost to provide HE by at least fifty percent;

vi) realization of the right to earn a living for all academics;

vii) better quality insurance and assurance;

viii) improved HE system integrity;

ix) better integration in local communities;

x) increased accommodation for international students; 

xi) more productive and secure international HE relations; 

xii) increased research funding across all fields of study; and more.

Frankly, with these sorts of HE improvements, even if the Plaintiffs’ assumption that PSA is neoliberal was true, the model is difficult to ignore, presenting a very tempting deal with the devil. But in this context, what makes PSA difficult to ignore is that both sides – the liberal and neoliberal – get what they most want, and for a fraction of the cost and a freight full of benefits.

The PSA model has a relationship with government that is notably distinct from what Olssen and Peters describe as the neoliberal use of “techniques of auditing, accounting and management” that disguise “artificially arranged or contrived forms of free, entrepreneurial and competitive conduct of economic-rational individuals.” A professional society like PSA or the State Bar of California (SBC) depend on the government for authorizing acts of legislation, as do HEIs. But after this “exercise of government,” PSA and SBC are free from unreasonable government “intervention” in the provision of their respective and related social good services. This is the point of establishing a public trust, one grounded in the ultimate authority of (academic) experts. To illustrate this, consider the relation between public funding and quality assurance under the liberalization offered by PSA.

Unlike the SBC where the social good of legal services is almost entirely financed privately, PSA expects to draw almost entirely from the public purse for the finance of HE. In part, this is because countries like the US, UK, Canada, Australia, even China are expected to honor their ratification of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which provides for tuition-free HE – something made possible by PSA through its extraordinary cost reduction compared to the HEI model.

One of the main reasons that the HEI model finds itself adrift in political and economic currents is that universities and colleges are expensive to operate and depend on substantial public funding. This financial dependence serves as leverage for (neoliberal) governments to control HEIs and so HE – like a parent that provides their child an allowance contingent upon proper behavior. It stands to reason that the greater the funding types and amounts the greater the leverage. As such, it also stands to reason that any model that can substantially reduce this funding can substantially reduce government leverage over HE.

Though not a necessary feature of PSA, another means of achieving the liberalism that Plaintiffs seek is through the use of student vouchers that place the public funding for HE directly in the hands of the people. With dramatic cost reduction and citizens using their own taxpayer money to make HE funding decisions, government control is substantially reduced. Of course, this does not come without an expectation of some form of quality assurance.  

As the Plaintiffs seek, in PSA academics are in control of what counts as proper content and evaluation in HE, but the government also gets its quality assurance oversight through such model features as objective crowd-source evaluation, public practice records, and disciplinary hearings. Legislators are not experts in the development or delivery of the various fields of study in HE and so delegation of public trust to the expert authority of an academic profession is reasonable. In fact, PSA is the natural progression of the protection and power-seeking that Plaintiffs do on behalf of themselves and others affected by HE.

Plaintiffs constantly argue (often through labor union mouthpieces) for a greater and greater share of governance of the institutions that employ and pay them with public funds. As stated, unabated continuation down this path would eventually see academics as the sole or principal governors of HEIs. At this point we are describing a means of production that is closer to socialism than capitalism – one of worker-owners, though complicated by public ownership. PSA splits the difference and says that since universities and colleges are unnecessary, inefficient, vulnerable and expensive tools for facilitation of HE, they should be replaced or recombined with the Professional Society of Academics, which is a hybrid means of production between public trust and funding and private practice and regulation.

As mentioned, the latter includes something called objective crowd-source evaluation which is explained elsewhere on this bog, but essentially extends and improves upon the evaluation best practices found at the graduate level of study in the HEI model. This means that all undergraduate and graduate student work that is used in the calculation of a final grade must be evaluated with anonymity for all parties by other Society-licensed academics in addition to the practitioner who directly provides the HE services (i.e., the licensed academic from whom the student has purchased HE services such as an introductory course in Elizabethan Literature, Inferential Statistics, or Macro Economics). Though other details are omitted here and others have yet to even be formulated by the PSA design, its roots in common graduate school evaluation practices are clear to see. However, the PSA roots sprout different quality assurance in the form not only of anonymous student course work evaluation, but also the grading of evaluation materials so that there is a statement from authoritative academics on both the student performance and the materials used to measure the performance (e.g., on a test of content knowledge the student receives a 70% on evaluation material that receives a 50%).

Plaintiffs are hard pressed to lodge complaint about this PSA relationship between academics and government. It provides government with a reasonable degree of neoliberal oversight in exchange for taxpayer funding, while this profession-formulated and executed quality assurance oversight clarifies and strengthens for academics the liberal “domain of personal freedom, the rights of privacy involving freedom from scrutiny and surveillance, as well as professional autonomy and discretion in one’s work.” Within these professional parameters, there is nothing artificial or contrived about experts licensing each other to deliver and issue opinion on expert service. After all, this is precisely what happens with accreditation in the HEI model. What PSA does is simplify things by eliminating the unnecessary, unstable institutional middleman, enabling us to license academics, not institutions, to practice HE.

Plaintiffs can gain no critical traction against PSA by pointing out that, when granted similar legislated authority over legal and medical services, attorneys and physicians abused the public trust placed in their profession. To repeat, as Plaintiffs continue to seek greater governing authority for academics in the HEI model, this places in the hands of academics comparable authority to that of the legal or medical professions, but without the benefit of explicit legislative terms, with continued use of the demented and destructive employer-employee relationship of the HEI model, and nothing like the benefits or assurances that PSA offers all HE stakeholders.

In their protection and power-seeking advocacy: Do Plaintiffs not worry that academics will abuse the HE public trust as they think attorneys and physicians have done to their respective public trusts? Do Plaintiffs imagine that academics are immune to such corruptive self-interested behavior? Do Plaintiffs believe that the power they seek does not need to be checked? Do they believe that the HEI model, with its plethora of self-interested parties, is the ideal or the only means of balancing and checking academic power within HE? Do they think that labor unions will temper potential academic corruption and abuse of HE? Do they think that with their favored government in place the protection and power they seek will be sustained through storms?

Perhaps the Plaintiffs think that outfitted with their respective characters and interests governments, HEIs, administrators, BoGs, and academics (to name a few of the stakeholders in HE) are in a power dance where each of the participants have practiced steps that coordinate to countervail corruptive imbalances or splintering conflicts, while optimizing HE production. Historically, this is not so. But further, from the point of view of PSA, this dance routine is unnecessary, with too many complicated steps that are executed by partners who fight over the lead. Succinctly, any corruption or splintering criticism that might be launched against academics in the professional model of PSA is equally applicable to the academics who with the aid of Plaintiff efforts manage to shear off an ever-increasing share of (liberal) power for themselves within the HEI model.

Plaintiffs do not need to convince me that HE should embrace liberalism. PSA has always been designed with liberalism as a guide. What they need to convince me of is that universities and colleges are the best way to optimize the realization of liberalism in HE. Plaintiffs do not need to convince me that HEIs are one way to protect liberalism in HE. They need to convince me that HEIs are the better form of protection. The trouble for Plaintiffs is that their very existence belies how the HEI model fails on both counts.

At the same time, Plaintiffs clearly support the HEI model, tuned to their political and economic version of it. Ironically, this means they do not shun oversight, quality assurance, management, measurement, and the like in HE. It isn’t that Plaintiffs do not want the government involved in HE; after all, they want (more) public money and support the introduction and enforcement of what they see as the correct sort of politically motivated policy, regulation, or legislation. It isn’t that the Plaintiffs do not want (government-approved) service quality checks; after all, they support accreditation in the HEI model. The reality is the Plaintiffs also take their liberalism with a dash of neo.

This post is meant to shake the Plaintiffs from their superficial, dismissive treatment of PSA and show them that what they seek and more is to be found in this alternative model for HE.

 

Call for Help

I am not an expert in economics, sociology, political science, political philosophy, organizational psychology, or any number of other fields that relate to the model I develop for higher education, which itself is a social good that touches nearly all aspects of society. So, I have repeatedly asked for help, discussion, criticism, and collaboration. I have contacted individuals. I have offered graduate schools the model as a thesis topic. I have contacted organizations that represent labor, student, government or taxpayer interests. I have contacted failing HEIs. I have contacted academics who are excluded from HE. I have tried begging, baiting, cajoling, condemning – with the more negative approaches receiving the highest responses. I have been blocked on Twitter, called a ghoul, described as a lunatic, as ignorant, as evil, as someone who does too much drugs. I find all of this to be extraordinary behaviour from those who call themselves academics and profess a deep concern for the stakeholders in HE. I find this extraordinary behavior from so-called professionals.

I pursue this model alone…and I am no expert. I am a philosopher who has experience working in this crumbling institutional model for HE, with a personal and professional obligation to try to mitigate the damage it inflicts on people around the world. I am now retired, enjoying weekly Philosophy Clubs that I host at a university and a local coffee shop here in Ecuador. My intellectual life is good, though it hasn’t always been and it remains so for many, many others. I will not stop until this model receives a proper vetting by those who are experts. The invitation is open to all.