An Academe of Ignorant Hypocrites

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has blocked me from following them on X. Over a decade ago, Dr Sara Goldrick-Rabb, formerly of Temple University, did the same on Twitter when I challenged her plan for two years of free college during the Obama administration. She blocked me, but not before making derogatory comments from her publicly paid faculty position.

To my knowledge, the AAUP hasn’t roasted me, though, like Sara, people there certainly have the right to, notwithstanding explicit or implicit professional codes of conduct and ethics that require restraint. For the record, this is some of what I think about some of the work done and not done by the AAUP in the name of higher education – not the institutions of higher education but the social good we depend upon for earning and learning.

The AAUP champions freedom of speech and so-called academic freedom, with its recipe for protecting and promoting individual and institutional (higher education) rights and freedoms in iterations of greater complexity that these days includes, the freedom and neutrality of institutions, shared governance, tenure, disclosure, divestment, and can include whatever else might come under the  assumption of earning and learning exclusively in institutions of higher education.

PSA offers different recipes with familiar ingredients for some new flavours. These recipes do not use idealized AAUP ingredients like academic freedom, shared governance, and tenure, though the professional model is a complete recipe for higher education service and stewardship.

Looking past the inherited institutional employment and enrollment apparatus assumed by the AAUP and arising from original PSA recipes, these are some of the questions I have posed to the organization (and the wider academe) on X and the Academe Blog:

1) Are universities and colleges the only or best means of facilitating the work of academics (i.e., teaching, researching and community servicing)?

2) Could all or part of the work of academics be facilitated using independent, solo professional (higher education) practices, as one finds in the practice of law or medicine?

3) If higher education were provided and protected in such professional (higher education) practices, would that result in greater or lesser (academic) freedom in the academe?

4) What is the basis for the inconsistency in this intersection: a licensed attorney who earns in their solo practice of law but is also an academic who earns in the institutional practice of higher education as an employee?

5) Are tenure, shared governance and academic freedom necessary if university or college employers and enrollers are not used to provide and protect higher education?

6) If someone has never worked for a university or college, can they be an academic?

7) What might happen to higher education if the Humanities and Social Sciences were provided and protected in a professional model, not an institutional one?

8) What is too much education, too much qualification, too much debt, too much funding, and too much oversight?

This selection of queries provides enough momentum to carry you deeper and wider into the possibility, plausibility and preferability of PSA, if you care to.

I don’t think the AAUP cares to. I have not received an answer to any of the many questions I have tabled and implied in response to their steady supply of public commentary, policy statements, censures, testimonies, histories, philosophies, studies, reports,… It might be that these people never shut up long enough to inform their public indifference to and then attack on my efforts to repair the social pillar I believe they damage.

After commenting on X and other posts from the AAUP, the only reply I received from the organization was to tell me to make direct contact by email if I want to communicate with the AAUP regarding PSA. So, of course, I did that, and like my questions, the email did not receive a reply, though it contained material on the design and value of PSA. With some more time spent commenting on the AAUP X account and the accounts of its labour union chapters that bargain for higher education, I was told a second time to contact the AAUP by email for communication regarding PSA. I replied on X with a recount of their earlier failure to respond though I followed their stipulated communication method, a failure for which they are solely responsible. But I suppose none of this matters to the AAUP, because their final solution was to block my participation in their public discourse that includes all people and organizations following their public voice.

I was not surprised by AAUP hypocrisy and ignorance (in every sense of the term), but I was disappointed, as I was a few months earlier when the Association of McGill Professors of Law blocked me on X. This association of academics are public faculty employees of McGill University in Canada. It's a law school, no less! 

These employees spent lots of zeros and ones on bashing institution personnel (not positions), the government for its alleged lack of support, and maybe me for what are in fact self-inflicted problems for which academics (including faculty employees) are ultimately responsible. In public they offer fighting, bad mouthing, striking, and other industrial acting better suit to autoworkers than academics, while I was trying to get these academic-attorney hybrids to recognize a professional mode for higher education that better meets their social obligations while offering them a way out of their all-too-common struggle with an institutional employer.

Now, one might argue that I should abide by the communication conventions of the academe (as the AAUP sees them (on its public platforms)) and that to enter the discourse unconventionally (especially as an unknown) reduces my chances of successful communication with the likes of an AAUP or a faculty union. This how communication went with my old mandatory faculty union representation at Saint Mary’s University, where I studied and was later a faculty employee in my hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia. The response from SMU was at least initially better than the AAUP, but in the end the SMU Faculty Association is just as irresponsible and destructive in meeting their social contract obligations as is the AAUP.

In the end, I’ll communicate, strategize, use social media, howl at the moon, as I choose, until – and this is super important – until I am being paid through social contract with the public for service and steward to higher education, not to some fucking monopolistic institutional facilitation of academic work, but the social pillar. So, as a critic, you can step off that rationalization trainwreck right now. From the AAUP to Professor Whorelie Kairz, the obligation is on those who draw from the public trough, not me.

So, while I might consider my efforts pathetic, my strategies lame and my communications muddled, I’m not getting paid to steward higher education. The faculty employees who populate the AAUP are. The public does not pay me to be less pathetic, more effective, more creative, more anything regarding the social good, while the AAUP, McGill, SMUFA and the rest are employed by the institutions that society assumes as the sole means to facilitate higher education. So, save the advice or criticism on how I communicate and start doing your fucking job.

To help you do your fucking job, here’s a stop that might coax you off this critical line of thought. When AAUP blocked me, do you think they looked at the entire record of my communications with them, across all their public portals, across all the time I have been reaching out to them?

For over a decade now, I have been presenting PSA and posing questions inspired by PSA to the AAUP. As I said, the organization has not responded except to silence me after following their stipulated communication instructions to no avail. Over the years, I tried to communicate to the AAUP (and others) by posting comments on various sites from the Chronicle of Higher Education to the AAUP website, sent emails to the organization and individuals within it, written comments and made posts on social media and its Academe Blog, to name a few of the attempts to connect. The earliest direct communication with the AAUP regarding PSA dates back to 2012 in comment form across the pages of its website, with the most recent being here in the comment section of Academe Blog, with these two portals now also under threat of silencing me as well. This failure to meet their academic obligations is not minor and blocking me for their failures is astonishing to me.

But you’d think by now I’d get the hint. The problem is there has never been anything more than a hint. Certainly, there has not been a single reply that directs me to literature I have not read or don’t understand that can help explain why something like PSA cannot or should be used for higher education. If the public faculty employees of universities and colleges give me more than a hint in the form of a cold a shoulder or slammed door as to why PSA is absurd or unnecessary or dangerous or impractical or…then I’ll express gratitude and continue to think on PSA and how to solve the problems of higher education. “That’s how it’s done, right?” asks the high-rise window cleaner, academic and philosopher, who is sometimes a faculty employee.

As reputed experts on the service and stewardship of higher education, how hard would it be to meet their public obligation and avoid the hypocrisy of denying my (academic) freedom of speech and expression? Is it too much to expect this sort of reply from the AAUP: “Thank you for the suggestion, Shawn. Here is an article that might speak to the possibility and desirability of PSA and a book that examines the private tutoring system of the German higher education system.” I suspect it would be too much to expect that this second sentence in the reply: “Forgive us if you have already examined these sources over the thirty years that you been developing and promoting PSA as a response to the myriad problems that have afflicted the social pillar over its centuries of labour under the monopolistic yoke of institutional earning and learning.”

Trust me, I have no persecution, martyr, savior, or bucket list motive behind my decades-long interest in PSA. Over the years I have concentrated on this community service as I do now with a spiked intensity that has waned at other times during the course of life. I have communicated with people from within and without the institutions in western and eastern higher education systems, using various styles, genres, tones, attitudes, diagrams, videos, arguments, metaphors, and so on. In the face of this reality, it is revealing how the AAUP stipulates the terms of communication with them (and then ignores your communication with them), but they don’t bother to look at me, at PSA and the way I stipulate communication. They don’t bother to ask questions, offer concrete research suggestions, introduce a center or faculty employee at some institution who might be interested, consider the idea a good topic for a symposium or a graduate thesis. Instead, the AAUP just clicks an icon and blocks me, blocks my service, blocks my freedom.

The other day someone at Hunter College, National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, was telling me on X and then in email that I was ignorant and needed to do some research before posting as I did. There's never a shortage of people to tell me how to use my social media account. This attorney, who is an academic, sent me a Michael Sandel keynote, thanks says the philosopher. My reply included a PSA analysis of Sandel's view on higher education, labour, access, success, the dignity of work and so on. The whole exchange went right over his head. 

To be clear, the AAUP, Hunter College, CUNY, SMU, SMUFA and the rest are the ones that need to be doing the research, learning about the social media presence of PSA, looking at their own communications records with me, and the likes, because it is their obligation to do so, since they are the ones who pocket the public money and then block or shame public communication.

When I worked for these ubiquitous, assumed institutions, I did not communicate with the public in the way many in the academe have with me, often on behalf of organizations that formally represent many thousands of academics. I certainly can’t imagine communicating or not as these public servants do if after a moment’s investigation I learn that the public contacting me is an academic who has many years of experience in higher education and claims to have an alternative model that improves the social pillar being destroyed on an adjunct majority watch.

Fiddle DeeDee, Whatever Did I Do

I've been arguing that AAUP (et. al.) is obliged by social contract to be available and inquisitive, but that the organization has failed to meet many of its social obligations, going so far as to deny the public they serve (me) the exercise of freedom of expression, while loudly presenting itself as a champion of the same. So, what grounds might the AAUP have for this (prima facie) irresponsible, hypocritical violation of their explicit and implicit social contract obligations and freedom brand?

Was I verbally abusive? Nope.

Was I commenting off topic? Nope.

Was I repeating a (prima facie) absurdity? Nope.

Was I self-promoting for personal (financial) gain? Nope.

Was I offensive, unnerving or bewildering to some? Maybe, but that’s academic work.

This list is enough momentum to carry you to an obvious conclusion regarding AAUP denial of the exercise of my freedom of speech (on a social media platforms) but also consider that they deny it of a nobody. I have a PhD from an institution that had to change its name to cover up its corruption of higher education. I have no publications that are spoken of (in circles like the AAUP). I don’t attend conferences on higher education reform or revolution. I have an X account with around 150 followers, after more than a decade of being on the platform. In exactly what way am I anything but a mild amusement or curiosity to the AAUP, an irritant maybe, but not a threat that warrants a reaction like that of which they routinely condemn as censorship, cancellation, and corruption in others?

Evidence suggests the AAUP is not worthy of my respect or trust. The organization cannot guide us through and beyond the inheritance, because this organization of academics can’t think through and beyond its assumptions. I have argued this at length on this blog, of which the AAUP is apparently ignorant, an ignorance which apparently does not deter them from silencing me in their world. All this, I claim, is from an organization that is not required or recommended for stewardship of the social good, much like the university and college employers that its members ignorantly assume in violation of their social contract obligations.

You might rally behind the storied and belabored AAUP to offer defense, “Shawn, you admit to not being on the academe radar and not using the expected, traditional modes of communicating an idea in the academe, but the thing is, the AAUP is busy, with insufficient staff struggling to contend with the latest crisis in higher education, so how can they be expected to jump on your PSA bandwagon?” 

I have been on this bandwagon for three decades, so fuck the AAUP workload with its army of academics and staff, and its multi-million dollar budget, with compensation the AAUP became a labour union to protect and improve, while I have never been paid a dime to carry the workload of PSA, up the AAUP hill, in buckets it stipulates. I will not stop until I am convinced that a professional model cannot or should not be researched and implemented. If the AAUP (et. al.) wish to thwart my efforts (such as they are) through indifference or interference and failure to meet even the most basic of reasoning, servicing and stewarding requirements, then I am sometimes disappointed, bewildered, angered, and exhausted, but I am not deterred.

@ProSocAcademics is a personal account, but it also isn’t. A few minutes on the profile page and you’ll notice it only contains posts and replies related to PSA. You will not find me offering a movie review, hotdog stand, or book club. There are a handful of reposts but mostly of my own posts. You will not find likes beyond perhaps a dozen in over a decade. And again, while I’m told this is a piss poor social media strategy, thanks for the advice but, fuck that, do your job, and stop blaming me for your failures. Besides, you couldn’t possibly be better than me at blaming me when it comes to PSA.

This is not all that can be said against the AAUP’s hypocritical treatment of freedom and more generally against its history of ignorant assumption and unnecessary, destructive stewardship. But this should be enough momentum, and as, Rachel Ida Buff, of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, constructively added to the discourse on PSA, "its no wonder nobody reads your blog, it's post are too long for the format." Get off the side walk and do your job, Rachel. To put it in terms she and others might better understand, "a right delayed is a right denied."

Would you like to join me in protecting our rights and higher education with PSA or explain to me why I should be deterred? The communication channels are always open, on my end.