Academic Freedom On A Model Diet - Parts 2-5

This is the second post of a series that uses interview responses from an expert on the academy to show how academics are failing us even in the most basic of functions. Hank Reichman is the academic I choose for demonstration purposes and he is interviewed by James Vernon.(LINK) 

This failure of academics is not easily detected. It is hidden in language and life that has evolved over centuries of reference to the inherited model of university and college service and stewardship for higher education. This institutional model is an only child of a dysfunctional heritage so deeply rooted in our concepts and cultures that the institutions have become synonymous with the education, research, and community service of higher education. The brand has become the product, like Kleenex or Tampons.

[NOTE: The plan was to write a five-part series, fading out on the fifth interview response because the job had been done (probably to the point of ad nauseum) or I couldn't bare the task any longer (again, from nausea). Instead, I dumped the lot here. So, there are four posts presented here as they were meant for separate publication, starting with this post two. Post one is found here.]

I aim to expose this mental magic for what it is: unnecessary and destructive. Though there are many unnecessary sources of destruction in universities and colleges, academic freedom is the focus of this series, because it is the focus of the interview. Hank has written books on the subject. I don’t have the resources or resolve to do for those texts what I do in this series for the text of this interview, but I'd bet on the results being the same: While they grow up to pick up a ball that has been rolling for centuries in a game whose rules they did not design and do not doubt, Hank and the Hornets assume the inheritance. This is a serious omission for academics. It is a breach of social contract.

I teach critical thinking. One of the toughest areas of thinking to instruct is the assumption. Inference is a tricky bugger too, acting like a ghostly glue between premise and conclusion. But the assumption is a hidden gem in reasoning, because finding them makes or breaks your position. Let’s continue to mine for gems and better positions.

Response Two from Hank

Hank: And what the free speech movement did was to throw cold water on that notion that somehow you could have academic freedom in the laboratory, the library, the classroom, but not have it on the quad and in the streets.

Me: What a watershed. What’s it been? Nine-hundred years of uninterrupted scholar and master submission to the institutions!? What a great relief to see this antiquated notion finally quelled in the mid-twentieth century, with a top-up here in the early 21^st century, and some footnote space for Soweto, Paris, Prague, Beijing, Oxford,… Thank the sages that the Free Speech Movement and the AAUP showed up on the scene, offering correction with a tradition of students streaming handcuffs and all-weather tents on manicured quads and faculty employees marching with stewardship placards hands and strike pay in pockets.(LINK - Rachel)

And if you think I disgrace the memory of four dead students on a quad, then, based on your own response (in company with that of your interviewer) you need to read some history or try to understand PSA. Or it is you who does the dishonoring, Hank. This is because a great wall between seminar and street is not only an historical actual in the west, but a present one in the higher education system of modern China. A system which, when it is permitted to operate at all, has been in the grace and grip of the Chinese Communist Party for three-quarters of a century. I’m sure you’ve heard of them. We get toasters, lanthanum, and students from them.

Notably, this is a system designed to exclude elements of the western education ethos and its expression, and yet a system still unable to escape the inheritance of exclusive institutional employers that bar independent higher education practice by qualified and sought after academics. I’m sure you’ve heard of the CCP, even with their failed attempt to rebrand as the, Communist Party of China. Certainly, the bankers of many western universities and colleges are familiar with this organization and its stock of person-citizen-students, western public institutional employers over which (somehow) faculty employees share governance and responsibility for all action taken in the name of a state-sanctioned, incorporated universitas of academics, who apparently entertain throwing my Jobian freedom under the bus for an assumption, or worse, employer revenue and a fucking job!

This hand-me-down heritage of higher education institutions serves nicely the ends of tyranny in all its forms. But when prompted, I’m sure the historians can point to many more examples of enrollees and employees throwing cold water than can I.

But please don’t talk to me about the history of masters and scholars “speaking out,” including the romantic sixties or the roaring 2020s. Talk to me instead about the soft, chewy center of this long, sordid, bloody, repetitive setting for freedom and its exercise. The thing you miss, because you assume it, is the common backdrop to this tragic parade of challenges to freedom in (higher) education. Namely, the institution-cum-state authority. The inherited, unchallenged institutional academic employment model of universities and colleges. Though it has been presented in different wrappings - a Church, a King, a Bureaucracy, Incorporation, Administration, Democracy, or Dictatorship - it is the same arrangement, with the same hereditary problems, including the use of physical or psychological policing to obstruct the freedom to “speak out” as Job.

Cupping such history, these institutional groupies want the laboratory ladled on the laneway, classroom combined with courtroom, and incorporation intimate with incumbent. I support the spread of higher education and on a scale that the vast majority of academics, administrators, unionists, politicians, and citizens don’t dare dream of even in private. I do not support the spread of unnecessary, interfering, middlemen that serve as front men for the state and hold a monopoly on our higher education, on our freedom to earn and learn. Particularly when there is a perfectly viable alternative model that reorients service and stewardship from institutions to individuals, from authority to agency.

But before I kick that can, yet again, further nuance is needed to make progress on the question of academic freedom. The Hornets think that academic freedom (AF) has been, as Hank notes in the interview, more recently expanded into a cocktail of academic and student freedoms (ASF), some sort of (employment and enrollment?) protection for a broader ability of people (who happen to be faculty and students) to speak out (on campus or commos?) as (person-)citizens. This is shocking thinking.

For instance, is it really true, as Hank implies, that the agora is the same as the alley? Not by the lights of logic or action (or legislation?). Some academic work is not for some public spaces. There are (academic) truths that are sought (or not), found (or not) and acted upon (or not) without public notification or consultation, in societies that pepper the (person-citizen) freedom spectrum from Democritus to Whole-Process People's Democracy. There are legitimate grounds for restriction and suspension of the exercise of freedoms (of expression). There are also unacceptable, illegitimate grounds. That’s the nature of such fundamental public communal activities and the policies and practices we use to navigate the choppy waters of freedom and its exercise.

It should be no surprise that AF, ASF, job or citizen freedom are not unqualified, whether exercised in private or public positions or places, and that such qualification is quaint when in a faceoff with Job. People can forfeit their citizen freedom for job freedom, as the Communist China higher education illustrates, just as people can forfeit their job freedom for citizen freedom, as a whistleblower illustrates. But whistleblowers are heroes and because we ultimately control no one, there is ultimately nothing to be done about autonomy and the expression of Jobian freedom – nothing that doesn't hasten the end of art and arithmetic.

“What the fuck are you talking about, Shawn!? James and I are examining one's expression as a citizen, not one's job or someone named, Job,” says a frustrated, Hank. But I think that often it is not clear which Hank is talking about, sometimes conflating, sometimes inflating, sometimes deflating in his treatment of the agents and freedoms on the table. In contrast, I hope to be clearer at least in the distinctions and relations among the freedoms from person (Job) to citizen to faculty (job) or student (job). Though there is a hierarchy of interdependence, overlap and tension among the exercise of these freedoms in various circumstances, it is not clear from this interview that Hank and the Hornets operate on this knowledge. In this fusion of freedoms, the recipe requires a Jobian ingredient that flavours the citizen or job dishes, in kitchens with differing palates for the expression of Jobian flavours in cuisine.

Second, for decades and in retirement, I attempt to my professional community service obligations by hosting an open-to-anyone philosophy club, meeting, group, gathering. I was schooled in this service by one of the creators and developers of PSA, Dr Peter March. We two have fallen out of touch after nearly two decades of extraordinary mentorship and friendship, little of which was shared in the laboratory, library, or classroom. Most of it was in places and spaces like Victorian parks, shopping malls, beach tents, dog walks, trips abroad, family birthdays, whiskey nights, squash courts,… I miss him. Admittedly, some of my education, my evolution with Peter happened to happen in the space of a quad paid for by me, him and our social heritage as taxpaying person-citizens.

PSA is born from this sort of education, this sort of P2P exchange, which I also was lucky to share with another creator of PSA, Dr Robert Ansel. Yeah, yeah, I can hear the witless retort from the back, “Thanks to a university!” Stop it. Sit up straight. Too much is at stake. Hank and the Hornets, want to put people in the boxes that gave birth to the AAUP and its parade of plasters over a century ago. This is a tragic mistake, because the sort of education I describe is rare in tightly wrapped boxes. The PSA response offers generous portions of education intimacy in higher education, served by and to whom, where and when elected by the relevant parties, who principally include individual academics and students and not institutional employers or enrollers.(LINK)

I met Peter and Robert at a university and paid them for the intimacy they served and stewarded. Using public and private monies, I paid them indirectly, through an institutional middleman. But we knew to our bones that they fed themselves from my pocket. Except as part of the foundation in PSA construction, we never discussed this commercial transactional service relationship. Person-citizen-job (academic or student) development of this sort, the opportunity to access such higher education relationships, surely this must be expanded in society. Such access and education should qualify as axiomatic in the academy, in both the PSA and inherited versions of how best to provide and protect the axioms. If only to make better citizens, right, Hank? 

Maybe this is getting a little over produced. In reality, the higher education institution model of university and college employers cannot hope to match the expansion possibilities of a professional model of service and stewardship when it comes to earning and educating. Expansion in earning. Expansion in learning. Expansion in expressing, in enrolling, in locating, teaching, credentialing, mentoring, protesting, researching,... 

If higher education was diffused throughout society as are the practice of law, medicine, accountancy, psychiatry, engineering, or dentistry, if the practice of higher education was not restricted to the bottleneck employment of institutions, but could be undertaken in solo or partnered practice with the support and say of peers who are principals in a professional social contract for higher education service and stewardship, then what (freedom) needs protection and from whom? Who or what is to impede the expansion of the service and stewardship of higher education across individuals, not institutions, across countries, not campuses?

Authoritarianism of all stripes loses an armament when academics are loosed from the exclusive employ of institutions, while academics and students can study with whomever, wherever, whatever they choose, and higher education is emancipated from inappropriate government oversight, precarious underfunding, labour exploitation, rising student debt, free speech police, corruptive collaboration, commercial interest, pandemic protocols, donor demands,…

Third, it took more than one reading to get what I think you mean by this response, Hank. Perhaps it’s the glaring oversight in historical perspective, with not so much as a nod to the chronicles of cold water and warm blood spilt on the stairs of institutions and in the streets among antagonistic interests in the inheritance. Maybe I spend too much time in PSA. Seriously, I could not follow you.

You strongly imply a distinction among the innate freedom of expression I posses because I am Job, my free expression in the classroom as a student, expression as a citizen on the quad, and still another in the expression needed to properly perform a job as an employee of an institution. I think you mix and match these pieces like Lego. Further, I think the combinations you lean on here are real and significant in context, but the context is formed by false assumptions, failure to identify and address false assumptions, and (perhaps forgivably) ignorance of an alternative model for higher education that does not rely on these assumptions.

This is crucial, Hank, you and I want to realize the same sort of freedoms in higher education. But your assumptions produce a less elegant equation for them than does PSA, which uses or abuses your assumptions to construct the professional model that contains its (my) assumptions.

You strongly imply that my Job and citizen freedoms are conditioned by state stipulated employment and deployment, when you report faculty who think to slip my freedoms across the table on a napkin to an authoritarian. This move is a personal or collective choice to be complicit in the compromise of my innate freedom of expression as manifest in the exercise of my citizen freedom in a location, time, way, etc., my freedom to earn a living in an location, time, way, etc., and my freedom to learn in an location, time, way, etc. Are there others?

This is exhausting. The whole show revolves around the institutional model, the inheritance, the assumption, but what I get from academics is dum dee dum dee dum dee dum about this apparently invisible elephant in the room. Maybe one of the books on this subject that you have given us does not treat all this as loosely as this interview you have given us. Still, I value the utility of informal text.

Unfortunately, being loose in your distinctions among spaces across law, perception, practice, occupation, expression, etc., that act as script for the exercise of citizen freedom in places across public and private quads, I find this response difficult to understand. But one thing is clear. The assumption of Legoland freedom does make it easier to think Job, citizen, and job freedoms can be assembled to build service and stewardship (job) structures, using blocks of academic freedom and student freedom or academic-student freedom. Lego calls these 1x1s and 2x1s, elements, as does Hank when he talks of Hornets who buzz, “...maybe we should sacrifice the broader ability of faculty and students to speak out as citizens in order to retain and protect the most important elements of academic freedom, the freedom and research and in the classroom and in teaching.”[Emphasis added]

To articulate as a viable response to the threat of freedom, the trade of one freedom for another has the following implication in this context: When I exercise my Jobian freedom and become an employee or an enrollee of some institution I can use my citizen block, not to build a better higher education model, but as a bargaining chip in a stand-off with an unnecessary institution, in an act that has ominous implications for earning and learning in the social pillar. All this so that I can better exercise the freedoms that I (and a reasonable agent) might estimate fulfills unassailable Jobian freedom to be and become, as incubated in the current institutional model for higher education.

Sometimes when thinking about the inheritance, the spin is physical in my head, like getting up too quickly when hungry or high.

If you pluck out universities and colleges, then we can archive this mad merry-go-round. The institution is not a deity. The institution is not your saviour. The institution is a problem. And please notice how if you push your preferred salvation to the point of paradise, you will find waiting for you there, the Professional Society of Academics, or some version of that you see as fit to the task. 

If as a citizen I can protest the shit out of X, Y and Z on a public bench in a park, then what the hell is denied me if ASF is restricted to the classroom and barred from the publicly purchased and pedicured college quad!? Is there something I can say in the classroom that I cannot in the public street? Is there something I can say in a classroom that I cannot say in an informed voluntary gathering of individuals for a Philosophy Club meeting in a public gazebo or shopping mall?

Woah! Head rush! Is this AF/ASF shit really just about a location, the university or college campus? Both the public and the private variety? Please tell me that ain’t so, Hank. Is it only physical university places or is it also virtual university spaces? How'd you like to be the schmuck who has to draw those lines? Or be the one who enforces them? How'd you like to be the one who makes it so the lines don't need drawing in the first place or space?

Conclusion

In the first post, I acknowledged use of the strawman fallacy to make the point that Hank and the Hornets needlessly suggest a slippery slope that shatters the social pillar. I cautioned Hank and not a few of his colleagues about ignoring their assumptions and casually entertaining the forfeiture of Job freedom for job freedom – what y’all call academic freedom (AF) and I helped sharpen with academic-student freedom (ASF). Though slippery and unnecessary, as an act of stewardship (or self-preservation), faculty employees of these institutions consider taking a step on the throat of “speaking out” in union work boots meant to keep them high, dry and sure footed, I suppose.

Of course, Hank and James know well that faculty employees, student enrollees, and institutional intermediaries (or envoys) share a spectacular history of varied violence inflicted on self, one another and society. But what’s important here is not this apparent oversight by historians, but that these academics behave like soldiers accustomed to actual and counterfactual violence done to citizen freedom in the name of job freedom, because that is what this is. Some shepherds suggest it, another reports it and a further closes the gate on any discussion of possible alternatives that do not need to suggest or secure the sacrifice of Job to job. 

Hank, I’m focusing on you not as Job but as an academic and more precisely as a point of view. Academics who read the responses in your interview walk away going, dum dee dum dee dum. Other academics read your responses and then check for messages from a bargaining unit, or the citation score on a publication, or the dress code for a faculty luncheon, or the deliver time for a campus food bank. I am offering thousands of words of analysis, evaluation and suggestion (for what it’s worth). I do this because you all need to get your heads out of the collective assumptions that are asphyxiating higher education. Denying it the freedom it needs: professional freedom, not academic freedom.

I'm always open to discussion, collaboration and the right revolution.

POST THREE STARTS HERE..........

Welcome to the third post in this series that explores academic freedom within the institutional model for higher education service and stewardship. The series uses an interview given by Hank Reichman as an example of the sort of exchange that is common in the academy on the topic. I have read none of Hank's work and probably never will. There is no need. Unlike Hank, my interest is in the model in which all faculty employees produce their work, the unchallenged assumption of this model, and the assumptions that the model relies upon and inspires.

None of the work done in the employ of universities and colleges questions this inheritance of institutions as the means of providing and protecting higher education. Given that academics are logically and practically the ultimate source of and so authority in higher education – as physicians are in the practice of medicine or attorneys are in law, and both thanks to academics in higher education – one might expect that these institutional tools are principally wielded by academics. After all, the personal and public stakes are high in this social pillar. We wouldn't want this social good left to the hands and heritage of non-academics (or to one model!!).

But no. Academics are in queues, not even shoulder to shoulder with each other, never mind the others who wield these institutional instruments. In service and stewardship to higher education, I currently stand in line behind those academics who manage to land some sort of faculty employment, the vast majority of whom stand in line behind a President or Board of Trustees, who stand in line behind the state authorities that endorse accreditation boards and troll-fund the system when the political, pecuniary, or pandemic state of the planet permits.

One can call this de facto hierarchical arrangement that torments us, shared governance, codify it in university handbooks, employment contracts, or state legislatures, but it is not shared and it is governance of the wrong people by the wrong people with the wrong tool. Governance is not shared with me nor with the adjunct faculty majority, not like one finds in a worker cooperative arrangement, such as Mondragon University, or in something like the People's College of Law, which sadly, has recently closed (with no response to my offer of PSA from years earlier).

What one finds is a hodgepodge of employees who struggle with mixed success to unify as a subgroup and across subgroups in order to effectively share in the governance of their respective secondary charge and employer, as an adjunct majority workforce subgroup has become so desperate in its impotence that educated and experienced people grope around in the darkness of the inheritance for something to right this absurdity, only to compound it with autoworker, not academic unity, representation, service and stewardship. Do you know what the academic's primary charge is?

I don’t need to read this historian’s work on academic freedom because, unlike me, Hank and the Hornets unwittingly assume the inheritance, lock stock and barrel: rules, contracts, strikes, protests, titles, confidence votes, campus police, incompetent professors, ideological hijackers, external consultants, donor controversies, frauds, fraternities, frankly, pick just about any headline on the condition of higher, tertiary, post-secondary education and you'll quickly get the picture, even without YouTube thumbnails.

This model is fucked. Always has been. Always will be. And, get this, the model is utterly unnecessary.

All of this absurdity is inspired by the university and college model for higher education. In fact, much of it is, if not an inevitable, then certainly a 20-20 predictable consequence of the inheritance and not (readily) eliminated or mitigated with (more) unnecessary-by-association absurdity in the form of institutional or governmental rules and contracts and legislation and protests, solidarity, divestment, investment, tenure, academic freedom, academic senate, bargaining unit,…

What I ask of academics (as faculty employees or not) is to entertain a (seemingly) simple thought experiment: How much of this higher education institution shitshow would people be facing if people could elect to quit or never work for an institutional employer in the first place but still service and steward higher education? Forget how. I suggest a way but forget that. Assume it is possible to teach, research and community service, as one does in institutional employ, while providing for you and yours in service and stewardship to this social pillar, but not as a faculty employee. What changes? I claim nearly everything does and for the better.

Hank’s interview is being used to help explore this thought experiment with you, using a particular how: the Professional Society of Academics (PSA). Hank and the Hornets will perhaps find it challenging to answer this what-if question because the notion is likely new to them and their assumptions run deep in motives, movies, songs, biographies, novels, aspirations, finances, graduations, publications, administrations, romances, nostalgias,... Me too. That is, until I witnessed the shitshow for myself in the early nineties and began to develop and promote PSA. These days, the project has taken on a no-holds-barred approach that often pummels Hank and the Hornets with YouTube thumbnails. Let's see how it goes.

Response Three from Hank

Hank: And [the] free speech movement sought to extend principles of free speech to political activism by students that was not necessarily part of their formal education. What I would argue, and I think many faculty members would argue, was an important and remains to this day a very important part of the holistic college experience of what it means to be an educated person.

Me: This one nearly killed me. I had to take a break and play some Civ. First, it has the successive phrases - "more than a few faculty members today" and "many faculty members would argue" - that are antagonistic in their respective points of view and penchants with respect to higher education. Academic antagonism of the intellectual variety is a good thing, of course. That is, unless you assume an exclusive, bottleneck employment scheme for 900 years! And what’s with the use of ‘principles’ rather than (natural or constitutional) rights? Where is my Jobian freedom? Are we discussing a handbook or a series of workshops on activist strategies and tactics? What are these principles, Hank? Are they ones that are not already possessed and exercised by person-citizen-students?

In other words, did the Free Speech Movement (reputedly) extend an inalienable freedom of expression to students, instruct in the use of a new “speaking out” handbook, or add supplemental conditions for the social status of “educated person”? I suppose the answer is, yes.

Second, suspend the knowledge you have of the FSM, pretending you know nothing of the events, the people, the history. Now interpret the phrase, “political activism,” as political speech or expression and we get: The FSM sought to extend principles (freedoms? rights? manuals? statuses?) of free speech to political speech by (adult) persons who happen to be students, who happen to be exercising the freedom (and right) on a public campus where for these person-citizen-students to be properly educated there must be instruction in the (effective, eloquent, ethical, existential) exercise of the freedom on grounds, vicinity, or name of said campus. This is a chimera of right, rubric and rune. One that will not be elucidated by analyzing my use of the phrase, “who happen to be,” because the assumption isn’t necessary, the institution isn’t necessary, and there is a ready replacement in PSA (maybe even a Trump card).

I cannot lose what is an innate freedom, a right of mine as a person, by exercising my freedom to learn (formally). Further, I might not know how to effectively, efficiently, or eloquently exercise my freedom or defend (and bleed for) my right to exercise my freedom (as codified in some convention such as a state constitution or employment contract), but that lays no claim on Job.

More to the point, I ask again: What does ignorance of protesting have to do with the design of a professional model that renders irrelevant a distinction in protesting as a student and protesting as a citizen, while it renders irrelevant the precious campus and copyright of a monopolistic employer and educator? People have for centuries struggled with this legal construct that is the institutional arrangement for service and stewardship called a university. PSA castrates the university, excising the institutional bar to being, earning and learning as a person sees fit in higher education. You see, as I have been saying, a higher education institution is not higher education. It is merely a tool. A professional tool enables me to practice without the tools of institutional employer or labour union. It's the right people for the right job using the right tool.

Obviously, I cannot forfeit Job freedom merely by enrolling in some institution of higher education, nor by taking a job in one. Did these persons of the sixties that Hank and James lean on for current mainstream thinking lose anything fundamental when they became students? Did they lose their right to life by becoming a person-student or was it person-student-activist that forfeited their right to life? Of course, these persons did not lose any fundamental freedoms or rights as students or activists, they lost them as persons, who are also daughters, friends, cashiers, citizens, lovers, tutors, rich, poor, deaf, dumb or blind,…and so to make distinctions in this way is to dissolve distinctions or hash them out as irrelevant to the context. What's important here is to recognize a major cause of this flawed thinking. I'll give you a hint: it makes an ass out of you and me.

Loss of life is a steep price to pay for knowledge and practices that have existed for centuries in response to inherited institutional challenges to freedoms and rights that themselves have existed since there's been persons, before a conventional tool like a state constitution, university charter or employment contract was ever conceived. What might our standards and sacrifices be if the institutions at the center of this inheritance were eliminated or subordinated (as unnecessary)? What might become of us in a professional model for higher education service and stewardship that has no need of campuses, hiring and firing committees or college brands? These are the sorts of questions that Hank and the Hornets are not answering as I ask them, never mind generating such questions in fulfillment of their social contract as academics (employed by an institution or not).

Third, I’m an educated person if I undergo a holistic college experience that includes practice, training, learning, manualizing in political activism that has been seeded in first principles and practices by the FSM. Bullocks! This describes neither sufficient nor necessary conditions for being an educated person, though we might argue this point all day. And that is the real point, under PSA.

Whatever you and I might consider a proper education is something that can be accommodated by PSA in depth and breadth that is simply not feasible for the inheritance. If political activism is a required credit, then PSA allows you and your student(s) to walk about the institutional campus, because in a professional model the institutional employer and educator is recast as the middleman vendors that it in fact has always been, or it eliminates the middleman all together through the usual use of competition or constitution. Thanks to PSA, an institution sculpted higher education is not the only option for students in a two-model system of higher education service and stewardship.

No doubt, any savvy I possess in politics, rhetoric, or activism is the result of watching and learning from two co-creators of PSA, Drs Peter March and Robert Ansel, as they battled their employer across various institution-based transgressions of service and stewardship to individuals and society. When Saint Mary’s University become my employer, these mentors thought it best for me not to openly participate in correction of our employer since I occupied the adjunct job class and so might not be rehired when my semester contract was finished, not to mention any number of other things that might be exacted upon me thanks to the exclusive, precarious employment of the inheritance. All this, while the education I received from Peter and Robert was not provided by SMU nor was it even very often in the proximity of SMU, though it was with traditional convention facilitated by SMU.

Now, if you are sitting there going, “That’s just why academics need a labour union. For greater job security and voice in the institution's...” then stop reading, because you are too far gone to be found. For instance, you can’t even see that the persons who need a trade union to bargain for the service and stewardship that is principally their charge are academics, yes, but academics who happen to be faculty employees, like persons who happen to be students.

Get your head out of your assumption.

Fourth, Sid Meier had to help with recovery from the conceptual whiplash inflicted by the shift or is it slip in categories from fundamental rights and their exercise in the political voices of person-students to some stipulated curriculum, pedagogy or experience that apparently informs what should constitute higher education (or being an educated person). I don’t mean to suggest the two are not related – rights and education, fundamentals and form – but the relations are not as seamless as this response from Hank suggests. A violent shift in categories suggests that the speaker does not consider this distinction or the pitfalls of hopscotching between the two categories without full appreciation of the assumptions that back them in the intellectual and social moves that Hank and the Hornets make.

Fifth, freedom of speech/expression, including the spread of its exercise and defense, might not be part of their formal education (as students elect), but for everyone (student or not, faculty of not) this freedom is theirs, it is codified in their constitutions (even in The People’s Republic of China), as it is in their movies, justice system, and Weltanschauung. Hank, are you saying that person-students participating in (political) activism (so maybe person-citizen-student-activists) is a special category of freedom of expression/speech, one lost to the uninitiated in activist strategies and tactics as a curriculum inspired by the FSM, lost to those who have not attended and (successfully) completed a college degree or gotten a proper education a la Hank? What do you mean by ‘extend’, since there is no need to extend to citizens who happen to be students the innate freedom or the right of free speech/expression (in any of its forms such as political, artistic, self-developmental, or bored-in-the-afternoonal) and its exercise in public places and spaces, such as a public (university) campus or commons? And before you answer, I repeat, stop assuming.

If you think there is something special in the moto and mascot, then the burden is on you to show it. This burden has always existed because we are Job, but the onus became much harder to meet when the inheritance was no longer the only show in town, with a viable, desirable alternative, even competitor, in PSA. Though universities and colleges, or rather the various distinct and often conflicted interest groups of the inheritance maintain the pageantry and polemics in order to keep wider open the public purse, PSA exposes this categorical assumption and effectively challenges it, so that the onus to defend some unique, optimal nature of these institutions can no longer be met with waves toward “holistic college experience of what it means to be an educated person,” or vague reference to being beacons of democracy, or engines of social change, or liberators of thought, or platforms for politics(?),...

I am not sure, Hank, even in this regard, if you are making a point about post-secondary pedagogy, social standing, or fundamental freedoms and rights. At any rate, it remains unclear how any of it has substantial relevance to our responsibility (as academics) to improve the presence and exercise of freedom in higher education, not in universities and colleges, on their campuses or billboards, or in their buildings and boardrooms, but in the social good called higher, tertiary, post-secondary education. I couldn't care less about universities and colleges, but I care immensely about this social pillar. 

A major problem with Hank and the Hornets thinking is the unexposed and unchallenged assumptions upon which it is produced. This failure in academic task and trust renders the gravity of institutions invisible. We know it is there, like the gravity of physics, as some sort of arrangement in the background determining, shaping, instructing our actions, hopes, plans, failures, successes,… 

Universities and colleges are the center of gravity for higher education and so without recognizing it Hank and the Hornets orbit the nebulous institutions, making heady decisions related to values, career, pedagogy, human rights, academic-student relationships, who should be killing who and by how much. The disanalogy I try to impress upon academics is that unlike the gravity of physics, the gravity of universities and colleges is not immutable, permanent, irreplaceable or optimal in the universe or the universitas. There is the gravity of PSA.

I invite you to answer the question posed in the thought experiment. I did thirty years ago and I still am. You are also welcome to join the wider social experiment called the Professional Society of Academics.

POST FOUR STARTS HERE..........

Response Four from Hank

Hank: And, indeed, universities not only provide formal training and education and research facilities, et cetera, but we also provide an environment in which young people in particular, but also ourselves, the faculty and staff, can exercise their rights in an environment that is, by its very definition, perhaps the most conducive to diverse and even dangerous thinking. Without fear of the kind of repression that might happen in a corporation in other places of work, in a shopping mall or what have you.

Me: First, wow, et cetera! All that convenience in one place and still universities are not the most conducive to diverse and dangerous thinking, though perhaps they could be. I love catching the possessive pronouns as employees or enrollees (present and past) effortlessly seam how a university should seem. Academics and students of these institutions love to possess them, to identify with them, to express themselves through them, even as them. That is, until a contract comes up for renewal or a virus goes viral and then it's all us or them.

And don’t overlook the young people, because that’s what’s in a university or college as designed and branded, as a stage in the life cycle on the way to a good job. Come on. Again, read some history, but please, read this, and this, because it is magnitudes more conducive to multiplicity and menace throughout one’s life than is a university down the street, that anyway might be closed due to a labour dispute or back taxes.

Second, the use of the phrase, “by its very definition,” is ambiguous. In one sense the definition of a university is in the eyes of the beholder, sculpted by what is taken to be proper provision and protection for what is taken to be proper higher education. Hank’s definition includes rooms, relations, and rights. The Caveman, as I like to call, Xi Jinping, of the Chinese Communist Party, that prick does not share our definition, except in brochures passed around by the self-deceived on both sides of the east-west higher education divide.

But I think that with the term ‘university’, you might (also) be referencing an etymology that taps a significant, deep-rooted artifact of western concept and culture. Only this might be to conflate a universitas with an example of one, like that found in the (modern) university - even one like this or this one. In using this phrase, do you think that the only universitas there is or can be is a university, is a Harvard or Hodge University (number nine on the list)? Either way, it’s a rocky shore you approach with unchecked ambiguity and assumption.

Third, the inherited unchallenged universities and colleges of the institutional model evolve from the agora malls and are now hard to distinguish from Starbucks malls with corporate employees. “Indeed,” the Hornets decry, “but the university, the universitas, is not supposed to be like that!” 

So you buzz about a logic of institutions that is like that because you assume a model which allows that, when higher education most certainly should not settle for that and doesn't have to thanks a logic of PSA.

This means we must have a model of service and stewardship for the social pillar that cannot (as easily or as often) slip into the pathetic, injurious states that it repeatedly finds itself after nearly a millennium of institutional heritage. This means we must stop the incessant mix of bitching and band-aiding that various interest groups use to mitigate and manage universities and colleges of the institutional universitas. This means we must enable academics to serve, steward and earn as the ultimate source of authority and accountability in higher education, in the professional universitas, and before unionphiles manage to convince academics to whistle while we work (when we work, where we work, for whom work, for what we work,...).

There is relevant difference in the work of a farmer, footballer, freshman, and fellow, but not a difference in the Job or citizen freedoms they possess and exercise as employees or entrepreneurs, in private or public. The exercise of which ultimately no one can stop (in ways I would permit) and which makes the whistleblower a hero. Further, when the Hornets buzz about how things are supposed to bee, they substantially reference how institutions are supposed to bee, but not how individuals are supposed to bee, unless they are referencing how some AVP or DVC is supposed to bee, when none of this should bee since none of it has to bee.

The Hornets routinely indict some institutional regulation, clause, procedure, decision, office, department, laboratory, or 10^th floor for fucking up the brand and bottom line, while the band members hit the stages and streets to wave fingers of condemnation at some level of government bureaucracy for failing to understand something about higher education that in some way stands to undermine the mission of the monolith and its fulfilment of a social contract based on a monopoly in academic freedom, or rather, the freedom of academics.

Good lord, this rubbish exhausts spirit, devotion and mass. Repeatedly, I beg you to apply Ockham’s razor and be done with it. But instead I get…

“The private institutions, in particular, they can limit our freedom of expression,” shouts a shop steward, who triumphantly adds, “And that’s why we need unions and solidarity!” 

It’s really disheartening because the rep is an academic, holding a Chair in Organized Labour Studies, or so I imagine for comic relief as a I sigh a reply, “That is, unless you’re a licensed professional, with an independent (public or private) higher education practice in Liberty Plaza, over by the Costco, with me and the rest of the philosophy, sociology, criminology, and phrenology departments.” Not surprisingly, the reply leaves this poor unionphile-cum-wannabe-Dean struggling with a statement that makes no sense in this universe or universitas.

But the struggles don't end there. Hank (un)wittingly pulls a slight of categories on us, as he did in the previous (3^rd) response when slipping from principle to practice. In this case he moves from universitas to university. The university he describes in its mechanics and milieu is an example of a universitas. Repeating for effect, a university is an example, a particular of a universal, in some metaphysics. The University of Waterloo meets the sufficient and necessary conditions to be a universitas. I understand it is the only sort of example you have known for higher education, Hank. It’s all anyone has known for nearly as long as there has been higher education. It is the inheritance.

However, this does put you and the Hornets in an embarrassing position thanks to an intellectual slip and fall. The terms, 'university' and 'universitas', are not synonyms no matter the etymology and another example of a universitas is found in the professional service and stewardship model common to law and medicine, and adapted in PSA to meet higher education specs (as best one can). If the term ‘university’ already had not been etymologically encased and legally licensed, the Professional Society of Academics might well be called the University of Professional Academics. But then it loses a nostalgic tie-in to the PSA (Public Service Announcement) of my youth.

Fourth, your response strongly suggests that all those employed or enrolled by a university or college (e.g., staff, faculty, students) must/should enjoy a different (more extensive, more forgiving, more expansive, more sophisticated?) freedom of expression than those employed in a mall, for instance.

Get over yourself and the assumptions that helped form the you who has made a career, a reputation, a place in the heritage that PSA challenges. I too have spent time being shaped by this exclusive institutional employer model. It proved both inspiring and infuriating, with contribution from both in PSA, where participants in the Athenian Mall or Scotia Square are the same. 

Sincerely, some of the best education I received was in my hometown mall where, Dr Peter March, a co-creator of PSA, hosted a weekly open-to-all gathering for philosophy (which he called a busk). There were grads, faculty, highschoolers, sandwich artists, grandmas, cleaners, clerics, clerks, bakers, candlestick makers… Though not always in the mall, this philosophy busk went on for decades and might still be ongoing.

The philosophy club I started at a university in Zhuhai, China, is still being hosted by a colleague, Dr Mathew Conduct. I miss him too. After I left the People’s Republic of China and its top performing institutions of higher education, I noticed that the weekly reminder I sent out to students and employees – the only people the institution allows to attend the Philosophy Club, the only people the institution allows on campus – had been changed by Mathew from one of openly unqualified philosophy to a more careful WeChat group message saying, “And remember, we can talk about almost anything.” 

Socrates would take the poison again. I’m still in the institution approved and monitored WeChat group (somehow) and noticed recently that things had gotten much worse on Chinese campuses. He has removed the quantifier.

But of course, Hank, you are not talking about a job on the other side of the world and its working conditions. But of course, Hank, neither am I. Do you see the difference between what you and the rest of the world assumes but I do not? Do you see the difference between a job and a profession, between a job and the sort of service and stewardship required for a social pillar? Do you see how higher education (including “what it means to be an educated person”) and its provision (and protection) do not only occur in the classroom but also in the coffee shop, but never in the sweat shop and not in a mom ‘n’ pop shop? Do you see that your assumed model is a hobbled design for expansion, service and stewardship of higher education when compared to a PSA universitas? Do you see that you can't see this until you see PSA?

Universities and colleges form bottlenecks to personal and public progress. PSA enables a much more inclusive and diverse higher education. Why should society settle for a handful of faculty employees when we can have that plus as many academics, in as many places and spaces, as demanded by taxpaying citizens, teaching subject matter that individuals demand, researching as much as one wants on topics one wants, and community serving in every mall that one can find. Think this, but for higher education,

See it as a marketing pitch. Cue music, voiceover and action: "Why pay expensive middleman fees for something you can get much more cheaply and personally with a professionally licensed academic, just down street at 523 Professionals Plaza, with the accountant, dentist, and law offices in your neighbourhood? Call, 1-800-STOP-ASSUMING, today!"

The best the inheritance can do is construct a campus over on that huge west end lot or open an office on the twelfth floor of the new building in the tech park where my academic practice is located, on the fifteenth floor, with a terrace. Ok, so it’s a shared terrace, but the company is engaging professionals and I’ve gotten some great student referrals from among their networks.

Part and parcel with your by-its-very-definition for a university and a distinction in freedom based on employment in a university - each a defining element of the universitas you embrace - is the need for an accommodating environment when on the job as a student or faculty in these institutions. You say, “…we also provide an environment in which young people in particular, but also ourselves, the faculty and staff, can exercise their rights…” 

I endorse such an environment, of course, but I must take the pronoun bait. When you say, “we,” you mean the inheritance, the institutions, your employers. And when you say, “environment,” you mean them again. I do not. But I have no choice. And neither do you. Because academics dum dee dum dee dum along right past the assumptions in their thinking. And that's my fucking point!

The institutions in fact have a third response to 1-800-STOP-ASSUMING. One they are now using. The latest herd migration for higher education heritage is from face-to-face in a place to avatars in space. I do not know what that means for the people that depend upon higher education, but I do know I don't want it exclusively in the hands of the employers and the faculty employees that suckle the teat.

You do not get to push the university into the street, Hank. These things have never fit there, or have not not for centuries at any rate. But you can push the universitas into the street, the academy in the community if it is professional in constitution and culture, designed to be everywhere for everyone. I am not talking about the so-called democratization of education through some institutional lifeline of zeros and ones, but face to face (with coffee and buns). So, if this really boils down to an environment conducive to rights realization, diversity and danger, then have I got a model for you, amigo.

Hank, what is the equivalent to academic freedom for attorneys or physicians? Is it called attorney freedom or physician liberty? Thirty years people. Try harder. Try different. Try this, for free. All ya got to do is say, hi.

POST FIVE STARTS HERE.........

Response Five from Hank

Hank: Yes, that’s true. That’s definitely true. And even, in fact, we think about academic freedom, which did not initially encompass this kind of broad sense of free speech for students, although I think the founders of the AAUP back in the early 20th century who first articulated most clearly the principles of American academic freedom.

I think they would have been sympathetic. And, indeed, they were themselves mainly political progressives. Nonetheless, I think the scope of what we have come to envision as appropriate for a contemporary university campus since the 1960s, arguably first emerges some places in the 1930s.

Me: The 1930s, when the AAUP still had its head up a collective assumption, but before it got shoved all the way in upon becoming a collective bargaining unit with an erudite, bitter, ironic backstory.(LINK) Tell me, Hank, was the full-on professionalization of the social pillars of law and medicine during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries progressive, if not a movement? Tell me, how did the missions and mechanics of the AAUP in the early 20^th century relate to those of the condensing medical and legal professions? Tell me also, how many (tenured) faculty –beneficiaries of AAUP progressives – how many of these employees have been leaders, active, or even just card-carrying members in some (union) labour movement to correct the shitshow they steward? Or rather, the shitshow in which stewardship is shared with their employer (et. al.)?

I speak of the exclusive employer that the AAUP proudly assumes, arms, and admonishes with a system-wide seven-year probation period for all types of (full time?) faculty employment. But surely this seems more like an authoritarian wet dream, in which the dinner bell rings for the tenure of faculty guests who are invited to this exclusive party, and who have been prepared for receipt their share of the full glorious necessity of academic freedom; because, with subtlety and absurdity, in reality, the faculty does not get to taste the academic freedom fondant of the AAUP recipe until the employee is handed the key of tenure to break the glass of probation - that is, assuming one is granted the key or even invited to the dinner party. Tell me, Hank, was it a lot of these dinner guests who stood up and risked for academic freedom? Was it enough? Was it necessary? Be careful in answering because PSA is on the table now.

You people need to try some research in fulfillment of your social contract obligations as academics, not faculty employees or union representatives or political activists. You need to get back to the basics in academics. Tell me, Hank, as an historian and expert on academic freedom, do you know if it is still permissible to earn an Oxford doctorate simply by submitting a passable thesis, written on your own not as an employee or enrollee of Oxford? Is this choice, option, alternative mentioned on the Oxford brochures, along with the pay this employer offers teaching and research assistants?

I must ask another embarrassing question of the AAUP: How many academics – tenured or not, employed by an institution or not, unionized or not – how many of these people share in the service and stewardship of higher education? This is an embarrassing question because the AAUP will not have that statistic in their union office database of service and stewardship to higher education, because it is an irrelevant category for the AAUP University of Who Give A Shit Chapter. 

Being a qualified academic is a necessary condition for providing service and stewardship and this is where PSA draws the liberty line in higher education. Unfortunately, thanks to the assumption of the inherited exclusive institutional employer model, being a faculty employee is also a necessary condition of service and stewardship to the social pillar. However, if the first condition is necessary and sufficient for earning, servicing and stewarding in the social pillars of law and medicine, then surely it is also a sufficient and necessary condition for earning and learning with real liberty for academics and students in higher education. And the onus is on the AAUP and its opening act, Hank and the Hornets, to prove otherwise in the face of PSA.

The reality is that the AAUP has always been a faculty lounge – whether campus-bound and unionized, or not – because it assumes the exclusive, restricted academic employment model of the inheritance and so it only (needs to, ought to?) track and treat a given set of signatories to an employment contract on this day, in this institution, in this time period, in this department (or, sorry, maybe not yet, though I don’t know if the trade union representation of academics in faculty employ has become this fine-grained yet, as one finds in as an auto factory).

The incomplete representation of academics by the AAUP is an consequence of ignorance that leaves unanswered assumption of the university and college employer and enroller model, perhaps even the identification of the model, the tool, the instrument with higher education itself. This has two implications that are problematic for the AAUP storyline and for the people who depend upon higher education.

First, when hired (or fired, sued, arrested, bullied, bribed,…) by one of these unionized institutional employers, the contract under which the academic labours is a bargain often not struck with this person’s awareness, participation, consent, signature, or vote. Like every academic who wants to be a faculty employee, we track the institution openings in the geographies and municipalities to which we can (and can only) apply for work and life in the service and stewardship of higher education, as employees in an inheritance that embodies centuries of preset proprietary working conditions.

Of course, this is so only should one freely choose to sell one’s hard-earned, expert, authoritative labour to the only employer who hires in higher education, a university or college, something which also entails freely choosing to accept the collective terms of employment bargained for by others. After all, no one would dream of denying us control over our labour, certainly not a bastion of liberty like a university or college, or a champion of solidarity like a labour union. In fact, I’m assured on the college website that, if we head on over to the faculty lounge, we can get a nice view of the new campus moto banner on our Richaz Phuck Admin Building. They say it’s a nice selfie spot, with the banner in the background reading: We embody the liberty of equal opportunity and a free labour market.(LINK – We ALL Suffer)

Second, what action does the AAUP take with respect to my (unpaid, unprotected) contributions to higher education, like the one I am making right now and have been making for thirty years? Over the past century, which of its principle, practice, procedure and process recommendations for the faculty employees in higher education have been ((un)wittingly) addressed to me, the independent academic who toils outside the model that this professional organization slash labour union assumes in dereliction of duty? What are you doing for me? What are you doing against me?

The AAUP does not represent academics. The AAUP represents employees. It has always only represented employees, whether acting as a professional organization or as a trade union. Only, because they fail in their obligations as academics and ignorantly assume this institutional employment heritage, they don’t even see it. They didn’t see it when the legal and medical professions were dotting i’s and crossing t’s at the turn of the 20^th century, nor in the wider labor turmoil of that period, as noted by the likes of AAUPhiles, Jennifer Ruth and Ellen Schrecker.

It’s hard to imagine a more coercive system and, unfortunately, I don’t have to. During my time as a faculty employee in Communist China, I found a large modern higher education system where (for instance) it is common to (sort of) hire six, eight, or ten candidates to compete in the department over three to six years for one position, in a last-employee-standing human resource tactic – and believe me, in Communist China, humans are resources. As contribution to institution-cum-state weeding of individuals, the high-minded, critical-minded, open-minded AAUP insistences on a seven year employment probation period for academics who have no (real) choice but to seek faculty employment, contributing to higher education in the only working conditions the assumption permits.

So, your precious, broadened sense of academic-student freedom (ASF) protects the academic when acting in the capacity of a faculty employee, providing the expert teaching, researching and community serving for which academics are hired, in fulfillment of intermittent employment contract obligations and those ongoing social contract obligations that being an academic entails. But this protects the academic and student from what or whom? And is the protection not needless, under PSA? Is the freedom in question not to be understood in a different way?

I Don't Need Your Sympathy

A sympathetic AAUP, eh? Wish it was possible to bend the ear of such an accommodating, academically anchored organization. Tell me, were these 1930s academics sympathetic because they understood and embraced the (social activist) pedagogy your interview identifies as definitive of an educated person, the sort of higher education you endorse in the 21^st century, the sort of institutional employer and employee you assume under union watch in the 21st century? Do you have to be progressive to endorse and protect naturally and constitutionally grounded freedoms and rights for people, be they academics,  students, baristas, or baristas who are also academics to make ends meet?

Fuck their sympathy. I don't need it. What I need and am owed by social contract from those academics who happen to work as faculty is for these employees do their fucking job and stop assuming.

First, not all HEI employers are public. The institutional heritage fully embraces private for and non-profit universities and colleges that employ academics as faculty, including private institutions that look like this. So, again, to emphasize the parochial nature of AAUP representation, its protections, recommendations, and other of its "tions" extend to those academics who manage to land faculty employment (however precarious) in a public institution. Or rather, this is where they are more likely to be received and acted upon, while the private higher education sector can comfortably say fuck you, your union, your probation, your academic freedom,...and in many cases with the state exercising plausible deniability or outright complicity, collusion, corruption...in their establishment and operations. Tell me though, do you think Harvard needs accreditation? Suppose tomorrow the new England Commission of Higher Education pulled it accreditation, what would happen to operations, to the higher education its faculty employees serve and steward?

But come on, dig deeper. The staff, the bureaucracy, the whole Yes, Minister of government, already has the right to speak out, to express as public employees of government that must abide by and uphold the Constitution, for instance. Is an HR employee, say some secretary in the department of finance (no matter what government party is in the house or on the hill) not free to express personal (political) views or to vote for the candidate of personal choice? I know they are not free to do so in Communist China, but how about America or Canada? And when this person is employed by a government department but also enrolled at the University of Piss Off, is there now a tension, a contradiction in freedoms and rights between secretary and student? What the fuck are you talking about!? Progressives, eh? 

At the time that the founding philosophers of the AAUP were kneading a place for faculty employees in the institutional recipe, there was underway a progressive labour transformation in two equally vital social goods, law and medicine. These workforces were securing for themselves the protection and direction of a professional model of service and stewardship (whatever its merits or demerits), while the progressive academics of the AAUP were sporting a bindle and singing hi-ho, hi-ho. What PSA notes for the AAUP is that this contemporary professional social contract is conveniently similar to but importantly unlike the one formed between institutions and society for higher education.

Look, Hank, suppose all faculty, from the temp to the tenured, is unionized under the AAUP umbrella and (knowledge) worker solidarity is achieved. All you achieve is a pale version of the service and stewardship in a professional model and unnecessary continuation of the unchallenged, exclusive, expensive, exploitive institutional employment of academics. Consider this incomplete list of important distinctions that help drain the colour out of your precious university:

AAUP Union University	Professional Society of Academics
A 1930s sympathetic institutional definition of being educated a la Hank and the Hornets in the 21st century.	The scores that describe being (formally) educated are complex, often composed in concert, but fundamentally performed solo or in duet and existed long before Bologna or Paris.
All faculty enjoy freedom sufficient in scope and security to provide service and stewardship earning a living in higher education as institutional employees.	All academics (faculty or not) enjoy freedom sufficient in scope and security to provide service and stewardship earning a living in higher education as independent, licensed professional academics.
To earn a living in higher education people must become faculty employees of universities and colleges.	To earn a living in higher education people are qualified and quartered to be independent professionals by choice, not faculty employees by necessity.
In determining key elements of faculty working conditions, collective preference, policy and practice is required (e.g., class schedules, compensation rates, maternity benefits, office space, etc.) and determined by (union) democratic practices, bargaining with the institutional employers, and efforts to lobby government.	In determining key elements of academic working conditions, collective preference, policy and practice is required (e.g., licensure requirements, tuition caps, disciplinary actions, degree requirements, etc.) and determined by democratic practices of the professional society and its efforts to lobby government.
The expression of faculty employee personal or professional opinions is monitored and managed by the institutional employer, union representative, faculty association and government overseer.	The personal and professional opinions of academics are not monitored and managed by PSA in this way because the professional society does not hire, fire or promote academics, nor does it have a brand to sell or bottom line to protect, though it must still contend with the (interference of) government (that has lost the convenience of higher education institutions used as leverage for administration, regulation, indoctrination, subjugation, murder,....).

In developing PSA with the ethea of socialism and liberalism, the economics and finances were a bonus: US, Canada, Australia. Intentionally or not, through much of the history of PSA, I have leaned heavily on economics and finances to pitch the model because for at least the past two generations, the the (global) academy is pregnant with pecuniary perturbation. In promoting one follows the pulse and these days the top trending discussion in higher education is politics, or specifically, ideology and freedom. So, PSA posts of late are aimed in this direction. But financial freedom from inherited, monopolistic university and college employment in higher education does buttress the freedom of person-citizen-academic-student, the freedom of Job and job. This is a fact as obvious as it is that incessant whining for more (public and private) money to securely and properly realize the AAUP dream academy is irresponsible, if only because it is absurd.

In contributing my service and stewardship to the social pillar, I do not need an institutional employer and I can contribute much more cheaply (diversely, equitably, personally,...) than a university or college contributes. What I need from the inheritance I have taken and discarded the rest to create PSA. What I need is a new social contract like the Professional Society of Academics. A model that financially and occupationally liberates service and stewardship by creating choice, option, alternative. PSA enables the exercise of the following freedom: electing to earn and learn in the university or the profession. As I have said numerous time, the AAUP offers what it assumes, what Hank and the Hornets assume and only this, with no choice, no option, no alternative, just a Starbucks academy.

Series conclusion

At the moment, I'm working on an exchange between two Canadian faculty employees who argue over the need for academic freedom. In a generation since its publication in the Politico, nothing has changed. Please, make the time to meet the duty to explore the only alternative model for higher education. I do not know that it will work, but I believe it will and the inheritance has not.