Mixing Collars, PSA Makes Light Blue Higher Education

This post explores earning as an academic and as a blue-collar worker, both of which I have done for extended periods of time and often with overlap. I make the case that the vocationalization of higher education – the notion that the pillar’s principal personal and public value is to help land a job that satisfies a return on investment – is forced upon by the institutional model that we have inherited without necessity or challenge. I disclaim our inheritance of university and college employers, and offer an alternative in the professional service and stewardship model for higher education.

Starting my second year of faculty employment with Saint Mary’s University, I received mail at my home from SMU informing me that I was placed on probation and no longer permitted to enter campus or use university facilities. The first claim was true, but in Canada campuses and facilities such as university libraries are open to the public and the institutional employer-enroller cannot deny me access merely because I managed to fail all courses in my first year of an undergraduate anthropology degree.

As the fall semester began, I parked my car on campus and dropped my gear in the office of a mentor, friend and colleague, Professor Peter March, who generously shared his space to spare me the perversions of a communal adjunct office. I headed to my first class and announced that institution authorities might arrive to escort me off campus, but that our Plan B is to reconvene in the pub on the neighbouring Dalhousie University campus, where I also was an academic employee but not on academic probation.

Students were baffled and amused as I read aloud the letter. I explained that I had started the degree, went to the classes and read the materials, but I did none of the work necessary for grades, or rather, I took one exam in medical anthropology. Later that semester, as the professor and I were entering the faculty lounge, I learned that it was the first time she’d given a perfect mark to a student.

Save the few with whom I studied the year before, my courses enrolled thirty, forty, fifty people I didn’t know from Adam and who didn’t know me from Eve. By the end of these initial classes, we knew each other better, as they came to see absurdity in their university and possibility in my PSA. This use of class time was in line with my capacity as a person-citizen-academic, if not as a person-citizen-employee.

It was the late 1990s and with a master’s degree in hand, I earned around $10,000 to $12,000 that year working for SMU as a part-time faculty employee, who was expelled as a part-time student enrollee. In current purchasing power, that’s an annual gross of $20,000 and would mark a good year for me earning in the white-collar inheritance.

Meanwhile my buddies in the blue-collar trades earn four, five, even ten times that, as they tease me about sitting on a park bench thinking, working, with Dire Straits playing in the background but no money for nothing or chicks for free. “That looks like hard work, Shawn,” they chuckle after a long week of constructing a high-rise or hanging off the side of one cleaning its windows. “Or hardly working! Careful you don’t get a splinter in your ass!”

When my buddies look closer at my week, they see nine hours in the classroom, three for office hours and eighteen spent on course and class prep, with another ten added to cover marking averaged across a semester - assuming no use of teaching assistants. During the academic year, that’s a 40-hour week in an office chair, or a 25-hour week over the calendar year, with no holidays and my Dire Straits work included.

After a decade of such adjunct employment proving to be incompatible with life, facing a serious fear of heights, in my forties, I began full-time work as a high-rise window cleaner. I spent about seven years in the bosun chair, doing philosophy in the clouds with my buddies, contributing in some small way to the higher education of society. Fifty-hour weeks are the norm in this industry, as are weeks at a time without a day off during peak season. Most trades work these hours on behalf of their employer or on behalf of themselves in side-jobs.

What PSA does is make the bosun or office chairs elective, rather than a systemic false dilemma or a necessity of survival. I suppose the boys would be happy to have me tie-off and drop with them on Mondays and Fridays, while the rest of the week my butt enjoys a soft office chair in a warm, dry classroom. As further evidence of unsustainable earning in the inheritance, I delivered newspapers at four in the morning while employed by the University of Waterloo to develop and deliver courses like Philosophy of Mind and Professional Ethics for Engineers. I owned and operated a cleaning company while working at Saint Mary’s and Dalhousie universities, with a business pager on my hip developing and delivering courses ranging from the Rational of Scientific Reasoning to Introduction to Philosophy. I owned and operated an education company while employed to develop and deliver courses such as Critical Thinking and the Aristotelian Conception of Nature for Beijing Normal University and Hong Kong Baptist University. I was conditioned for this light blue mix, having worked full-time during my undergraduate studies to pay for my education.

This earning potpourri is a common reality for academics employed (or students enrolled) by the institutions of higher education, which is the only means by which academics can earn from contribution to higher education, as distinct from contribution to institutional employers-slash-facilitators, because universities and colleges are not higher education - a fact often forgotten by those who work to improve the social pillar.

We know how things are in the institutional employer model. We have lived the inheritance, consumed it in movies and novels, woven it into the fabric of global culture and cultivated goals. But how might things look if PSA was an option? I have lived a 25-hour office chair week and a 50-hour bosun chair week. How might work be lived by me if I could earn in the office chair what I earn in the bosun?

But before we explore these questions, we must pause for a moment to recognize that without something like PSA, these questions cannot be answered and without subbing PSA, these questions can only be answered in the hypothetical. Both observations should concern anyone who claims to care about those who depend upon higher education for earning and learning.

The Collar of Work in Light Blue

We can ignore the hours in a week that I commit to building a business or an alternative model for higher education. We are looking at the development and delivery of three full-credit courses over the span of one calendar year. The high-rise work is over the same fifty-two weeks. My high-rise rate was $20/hour, and with a 50-hour week, I earned around $52,000 annual gross. That’s $26,000 in the academe, where I would need to earn double the blue-collar rate to sit comfortably in my office chair twenty-five hours per week and earn like I was in my bosun chair.

Would you pay $40 an hour to study with me? Would you pay $40 an hour for an electrician or a pipefitter or a high-rise window cleaner? When you pay for a faculty employee to teach you philosophy or physics, do you know this person and how much it costs (you) to study with them? Do students pay faculty employees for their services or do they pay faculty employers, and might this distinction make a difference to higher education and the people who depend upon it? Do such questions even enter your mind? Students are often taken aback when I correctly point out that fundamentally, I am their employee, which stands as further evidence that the inheritance offers (at best) a misleading picture of the relation between these employers and the social good, between academics and the people they service.

Students in my private education business pay much higher rates to study with me, but for now, let’s suppose all that is available to me under PSA is the 25-hour work week at $40/hour. Could you live on $52,000 per year (or supplement your principal income with it)? I now live in Ecuador, where this is a damn good income, and where a 40-hour work week over the academic year leaves plenty of time to explore the country and continent.

If independent, professionally licensed academics earned at this sort of hourly rate, then their service (and stewardship) would fall within the mean income for most trades. But maybe the more familiar and opaque notion of tuition and fees is preferred, with professional academics earning based on enrollees who elect to pay for their services using higher education tax dollars that are theirs to spend as they see fit (not as politicians and governments see fit). If I could enroll 10 students in each of my three courses and charge $1,733 in tuition, then again, office chair earning matches the bosun chair. If I doubled the enrolment to 20 students and cut the tuition to $866, with 60 students in three courses, working 25 hours per week, for 52 weeks, I could earn as the average window cleaner does in the mid-50s range.

The funding flexibility offered by PSA is theoretically apparent and stands in stark contrast to the actually rigid, insufficient and vulnerable funding of the institutional inheritance that I disclaim. I do not need or want or recommend faculty employment, but the unchallenged monopoly imposed by the collective assumption of universities and colleges forces us, without necessity or comparison or justification, to be employed or enrolled by one of these institutions if we want to earn and learn in higher education. And that’s bullshit.

PSA is a basis for comparison, something the unchallenged university (not universitas) has managed to avoid through its monopolistic heritage. With an alternative model, we can ask which of these two means of providing higher education service and stewardship is better: the institutional employer or the professional licensor.

In answering, this post looks at earning benefits for academics in professionally licensed independent practice. I have explained the benefits of PSA many times in many ways on many fronts including liberty, variety, quality, accessibility, and affordability. Those who engage with the baked-in problems of the inherited institutional model are obliged to make such comparisons, especially when they are parties to the social contract for higher education. This obligation is most pronounced in academics who earn from the public as faculty employees. 

Being a sometimes formal, sometimes informal party to the inherited social contract for higher education service and stewardship, I claim...

If my professionally licensed and supported solo academic practice provides service to 120 enrollees a year, each paying $866 in tuition for credit toward a degree, that’s $103,920 in income, for a 40-hour work week over the academic year. In that reality, my trades buddies are not laughing so hard, freezing their asses off on the north side of the building during the winter semester in Canada, while students and academics laugh all the way to the bank with earnings and savings that accompany many other benefits to boot.

If you are a champion of academics, students and higher education, you cannot ignore this alternative. You cannot automatically dismiss the white and blue collar comparison. You cannot dismiss this light-blue collared academe of independent professional practitioners, perhaps working alongside the inheritance of institutional faculty employment. You cannot ignore assumption of the inheritance. You have an obligation under social contract to question it all. So, please join me in exploration of a PSA alternative to university and college employment.