A German Physicist, Canadian Philosopher, and Model Walk into a Wall

Sometimes in a desperate effort to garner support, I send personal correspondence to people or organizations that might benefit from the Professional Society of Academics (PSA) model for the provision of higher education (HE). This is not the higher education institutional (HEI) model of universities and colleges. PSA might be described as the HEI model turned inside out, with institutional employers recast as vendors now employed according to the prerogative of professional academics who practice HE in solo or partnered HE practices in a new HE system sanctioned by state legislation – as has been comparably done for the social goods of law and medicine.

We do not need universities and colleges, and I mean come on, look at them...

Watch them…

[Faculty and students being good little Fascists. From: https://perspectives.ushmm.org/collection/higher-education-in-nazi-germany]

The correspondence below is an email attachment sent to Dr Sabine Hossenfelder. She does many things like physics, raise children, and popularize science on a successful YouTube channel. That’s how I met her, surfing. I like physics. The stuff I like most, I understand least. And so, I was exploring her take on some central questions.

She also posted a video that has garnered over thirty-thousand comments in the past month. In it she recounts some of her experiences in the academy and how these conditions required her to adapt to a mixed academic career – that’s “mixed,” not “fucked,” at least not from my point of view. Her story is unfortunately common on the traditional academic side, but fortunately unique on the entrepreneurial academic side, which she has used to finance her own academic interests and personal life.

This is wonderful for the Hossenfelder family and a handful of other comparably placed people, I suppose. But this is not proper footing for the social pillar of HE – or maybe it is, the philosopher’s door is always open. At any rate, PSA presents a viable and desirable candidate for proper footing; though it is a work in progress, as I suppose is the mixed academic life of Sabine.

From here forward find the correspondence, edited only with media and two single-word typos:

 

April 27, 2024

 

Dear Dr Hossenfelder,

My name is Shawn Warren. Thank you for, “My dream died, and now I’m here.” Your experiences and those in the comment section reveal the tortured state of higher education across the globe. I have developed a model that can change this and I could really use your help with it.

As academics, we are expected to think outside the box. I understand you do this and that you understand most in academia do not. And now I’m here, using an unconventional channel to get some traction for an unconventional idea, with the help of an unconventional academic.

I implore you, bear with me. In the end, we might be of use to one another, but as fantastic as it sounds, we also might be of use to many millions of people.

If I may, this is the place I would like higher education to be and here is a foundation:

Higher education is a social good. Universities and colleges are pieces of technology used to provide higher education. These institutions are not identical to higher education (i.e., teaching, researching, and community servicing). On these points, I suppose we can agree.

But as you and 30,000+ comments make clear, this traditional institutional model for higher education is broken and breaking us. The alternative I have in mind ameliorates much of this misery. Less modestly, it annihilates universities and colleges on any metric that matters. In this correspondence, I can only whet your appetites and point you to embedded links for substance.

This first lure feels a bit like a three-card monte of, Follow the Expert. Notice that to be a licensed practitioner in the professions requires the expertise of higher education provided by academics who are employed by universities and colleges that issue qualifying credentials. Yet, as academics we cannot earn a living from our hard-earned expertise as our (professional) graduates do in the mainstream of legal or medical services, with the expertise we impart.

Why is that?

Some of us have more liberating, though no doubt laborious, online (side) gigs to help finance independent practice in higher education. The vast majority of us do not. Over the years of my contingent employment in academia, I have owned businesses, cleaned high-rise windows, and delivered newspapers at four in the morning, ate my McMuffin and then drove to campus.

All of this and so much more is the longtail of the academe.

Unlike the licentiate of a legislated profession, I cannot hang a shingle and peddle my expertise, at least not in the main, not for credit, not for degrees…and so not for a living. Even if I could and you have done something like this, the personal accomplishment is laudable but a terrible foundation upon which to settle a social pillar.

The nave of higher education is built on our inheritance from institutions like Paris and Oxford and is, as the kids say, trash. This centuries-old institutional model has high employment contingency, gross under and vulnerable funding, every “ism” we loath, rising student debt, limited access, corruption, fraud, murder, genocide, and so much more that is, as you say, bullshit. And as the spike in repeated views says, you are not alone in being “moved half around the world because that’s standard for postdocs,” while the tail is a thick line of poignancy from 8:44-10:00.

It should not be like this.

Since ought implies can, I developed a piece of technology that has come to be called, the Professional Society of Academics (PSA). It is derived from yet another piece of technology, the professional model used to provide social goods such as legal and medical services. This model exhibits a more direct, more elegant claim to legitimacy and authority in higher education than does any university and college, or government for that matter – fist to the air. It is a workable model in every regard and it offers benefit to stakeholders that no higher education institution can hope to muster. There are many reasons to encourage the independent professional practice of higher education, alongside or in competition with the traditional university and college employment model under which we have labored for centuries.

“I failed” works as bait because it rings true for many in the academe. As a suave, PSA combines for academics the best of both worlds, where we are not employees of exploitive university and college intermediaries, but rather enjoy the independence that comes with state-legislated professional society and practice, as we build careers and exercise professional prerogative in the delivery of mainstream higher education expertise (i.e., courses, credits, research, degrees, funding, conferences, grants, community service, the whole lot).

So, now we can and I think we ought.

By my lights, you have arranged something like this. You are an employee of MCMP. And while this sort of position once caused you pain, I’m confident that is no longer the case. Should another capitalist-leaning institutional employer try to exploit you, or some faculty demigod brutally demand compromise, with tangible confidence you can say, fuck off, and then hire an excellent attorney. (Or so I suppose and hope.) You can do this because you have cursed and coaxed out another means of feeding your children and preparing for retirement.

I admire that. I want to use that to extend that to all who can’t manage that.

When you were expected to comply with being pimped out for publication, what if the higher education system enabled you to tell the lot of them to piss off (as you did), but then walk across the street to hang your shingle, advertising areas of academic (or musical) interest as you conceive them? If earning a living as an independent professional were the norm, how might such abuse even develop in academia? What leverage could this devilish employer-employee duo have used against you, as you walk into your own successful higher education practice? What if you hung that shingle on the door of your office at MCMP and asked, “How much do you want for the space? And what’s the cost of a seminar room three times a week?”, while you reap the material rewards of your labor, rather than waiting for, fighting for, suffering for, negotiating for, prostituting for trickledown from institutional employer revenues that you principally generate in the first place.

This is starting to feel like another round of three-card monte, or a criminal enterprise. But I’m betting, not for you, who are an entrepreneur by ordeal. You know exactly where I’m going with this and that it is at least prima facia feasible. Harvard, Oxford, Munich and Bonn can all be cast as vendors for academics in professional society and practice. As things stand, attorneys and physicians who have solo practices are also (as a side gig) faculty employees of higher education institutions.

Why is this work divided? Why isn’t the academic work folded into the professional, or the professional into the faculty work? Why is the academic work not professionally overseen and licensed as is the work of attorneys, physicians, dentists, psychiatrists, engineers, architects…? Why can’t my ex-wife’s practice be both a legal and a higher education concern?

The important questions are not about the viability of this model. After all, loosely put, the suggestion is to simply turn the present institutional model inside out and make higher education about individuals, once again. The real questions are about whether PSA should be implemented and if so, how. And though such an arrangement might not appeal to you as a career choice, there is in this model a sea of possibility for others.

You are now independent of the needless, destructive, inefficient, expensive, racists, sexist, elitist, exploitive, misdirected, broken institutional model. You practice on the longtail of the knowledge industry as an entrepreneur (“edupreneur,” somehow stuck in America). This is true even though you have a foot in the institutional nave of higher education. You are simultaneously an entrepreneur and an employee. This is familiar to me.

Suppose instead the option were available to open an independent academic practice capable of offering the full complement of higher education services (with a YouTube business as an integral part of the practice), or suppose you found a few like-minded academics with whom to form a professional academic firm: Where are the conflicts of interest, personality, authority, etc.? Of the myriad ones that universities and colleges impose upon us, which conflicts would fade to insignificance or nothingness? What compromises remain when the institutional employer is eliminated as a constant in the higher education equation?

As I close out, it would be remiss of me not to employ some click bait:

“Germany is collapsing!! Worse country in the EU!! No hope!!”

Nations around the world face some version of a perfect shit storm right now, but Germany is among the worst positioned. With pride, the German higher education system is free. With perspective, nothing is free. Imagine how a model like PSA could help Germany, and frankly, how a country with a higher education system like that of Germany could help PSA.

One of the federal states, perhaps in the east of the country, could became leaders in academic reform or revolution and open their higher education system to even more purpose and productivity. Imagine what it would mean to be able to cut the total (public-private) expensive of higher education by at least half. Imagine what research could be done with the savings, or how any number of other worthy undertakings might benefit from improved public funding. PSA etches this sort of financial environment for systems in the United States, Canada, Australia and the Untied Kingdom, where I have run the numbers, right down to the monthly utilities for (my) independent, professionally protected, directed, and licensed higher education practice (in philosophy).

I, you, we, no academic needs universities and colleges. Society doesn’t need them. We never have. PSA shows us how to do it on our own terms and do it better.

People contact you regarding Academic Reformation and you respond with deflation. Fair enough. But I’m compelled to volley, you have far greater reach, far greater influence than I, than most. If not a leader, then perhaps a 21^st century Mersenne. Surrounded as you are by philosophers, maybe one of your colleagues is or would be interested in this idea or knows someone else who might be interested – a graduate student looking for a thesis topic. I will take any sort of interest in the model. I’m betting something like PSA is of interest to you, but I fear it might be of greater interest to the late 2000s you.

I am retired now. Having cleared my debts by hanging 100 meters off the side of a buildings in Canadian winters and having banked enough money from the work – more money and stability than I ever managed in a university – I moved to Asia where I found love, full-time academic work in Chinese universities, and opened an education business. These days, as a residual of my community service obligation, I host a philosophy club at the Universidad de Cuenca and work on development and promotion of the Professional Society of Academics model. Life is good. But this is not so for most academics and students around the world.

Sabine, I want nothing in exchange for this model. Sincerely, take it, improve it, sell it, try it, publish it, construct a piece of legislation around it, apply mathematical philosophy to it, use it as an amusing thought experiment in class or the faculty lounge. But please do not dismiss it. The model is free to all, no strings attached. I have an idea and reasonable confidence it can prove useful. I am an expert in nothing. Others can do more with this idea than I can ever hope to accomplish, and so much more needs to be accomplished.

Thank you for your time with such a lengthy correspondence.

Best Regards,

Shawn

PS, I have liked, shared, subscribed and followed. If you are interested, I have some ideas on how benefit might come from our direct collaboration.

This ends the correspondence. I have not heard from Dr Hossenfelder. I'm not surprised. I only have two videos on YouTube, both shit, and both on PSA. As always, the door is open to anyone. Maybe swing by Philosophy Club. Or leave a comment and say how you might have responded to my letter.