Institutions Are Essential, But Not for Higher Education

Just about a year ago, the People’s College of Law closed. Just over twelve years ago, I came across this unique institution and used it to argue that PSA belongs in the social economy. Just over fifty years ago, this Los Angeles-based, fix-facility, degree-granting, unaccredited, nonprofit institution offered its first law courses, using faculty, a dean and an administrator-registrar, all of whom worked as volunteers until a few years ago when the two staff positions became full-time salaried employment. The school offered a JD degree backed by the authority of State Bar of California (SBC) accreditation and degree-granting status and American Bar Association (ABA) curriculum, with a concentration in activist law that prepared students to write the bar, practice law, go into politics, business, or, dare I say it, use the education qualification and professional licensure to earn from a joint academic-attorney practice made possible by a service and stewardship model like PSA.

[https://www.calbar.ca.gov/About-Us/News/News-Releases/committee-of-bar-examiners-withdraws-registration-of-peoples-college-of-law-due-to-noncompliance]

Using my old contract law instructor as an example, I recently posted about the personal intersection of academic and attorney, faculty employee and independent practitioner, the member of a union and the member of a profession. In this post, the People’s College of Law (PCL) is used to explore intersections at the institutional level, and how with a professional service and stewardship model like PSA, the law school could be thriving, not archiving, gainful, not charitable, boutique, not unique.

As PCL graduate, Senator Maria Elena Durazo, put it, "There was nothing else like it. I don’t think there’s anything like it even today." According to faculty volunteer, Dan Kapelovitz, who in 2024 ran for Attorney General of California, "It’s just crazy. All the complaints [against PCL] have nothing to do with the quality of education. They're just weird technicalities. Not enough books at the library. No one looks at books anymore anyway. They're just going after the school. I don’t know why."

The State Bar of California, Committee of Bar Examiners disagrees, citing numerous noncompliance issues over 15 years that span the following categories:

1. The law school has been unable to assemble a team of volunteers and paid staff with the experience and capacity to establish and sustain compliance: Noncompliance with Guideline 3.1 was observed in 2020 and again at the October 2023 inspection. The October 2023 Inspection Report also identifies noncompliance with Guideline 4.2.

2. PCL lacks appropriate administrative oversight to ensure a quality legal education for its students: Noncompliance with Guidelines 5.17, 5.18, and 5.25 was observed in 2020 and again in 2023.

3. The school lacks honest communication with its students and prospective students: Noncompliance with Guidelines 2.2(B), 2.3, and 9.1 was observed in 2020 and again in October 2023. New compliance issues related to Rule 4.241 were documented in the recent inspection report.

4. PCL lacks sound faculty oversight: Noncompliance with Guidelines 4.8 and 4.9 was observed in 2020 and 2023. New issues related to Guideline 2.9(E) were documented in the October 2023 Inspection Report.

5. PCL’s curriculum does not provide a sound legal education. In 2020 and 2023, noncompliance with Guidelines 2.3, 2.9(C), 3.1, 5.3(A), 5.8, 5.9, and 5.25 was observed. Noncompliance with Guidelines 5.1 and 5.2 was documented in the October 2023 Inspection Report.

6. The school’s record-keeping process is inadequate: Noncompliance with Guidelines 2.11, 5.8, and 9.1 was observed at both the 2020 and 2023 inspections. New compliance issues related to Guideline 2.2(C) were documented in October 2023.

Every higher education institution has been “noncompliant” in these and other regards at one time or another, to one degree or another, reaching back through the centuries of these institutional employers-enrollers. My PhD parchment has an issuance date of 2010, when it was issued to me in 2008. It seems the institution ran into some trouble with its computerized recordkeeping that screwed up the official record of the time and money I invested in self and society, and so the degree had to be reissued to me in 2010. This is from the oldest higher education institution in Wales, which had to change its name in 2012 because it was caught pimping higher education on the international market. Or consider the troubles faced by City College of San Francisco, not the current troubles, but these same troubles faced by the institution twelve years ago when I tried to help by offering PSA.

This is baseline for the institutional inheritance that I disclaim and suggest be replaced or augmented with the PSA model.

Rather than deep dive into the minutiae of State Board of California law school guideline violations, this post gropes around at the macro level using concepts and phrases from the Committee of Examiners six-point summary to explore intersection between the institutions of the inheritance and those of PSA. That said, I recommend the deep dive using the PSA analysis of (institutional) noncompliance that follows, as Part 2 of this series does (forthcoming).

 

Compliance With the Unnecessary

PSA might have saved PCL by offering a shift in payment arrangements, accreditation and degree-granting status that removes middlemen institutions, closing the gap in function and jurisdiction between the State Bar of California and the People’s College of Law.

In the social economy post from twelve years ago, I noted how PCL and another social enterprise, Mondragon University, in the Basque Region of Spain, might affiliate using the glue of PSA to form an international body that challenges the institutional monopoly on earning and learning. Unfortunately, even in this tightly packed example of the interface between contribution to society as institutional faculty employee and as individual professional practitioner, even speaking to people who earn and learn in this unique post-secondary arrangement with one foot in employment and the other in self-employment, the possibility was lost to assumption of institutional compliance.

Beginning with the shift in financial arrangements and then moving to the shift in accreditation and degree-granting status, here is how compliance might look if these community-minded, academic-attorney champions of the underdog were to acknowledge their assumptions and explore the possibility of a professional service and stewardship model for higher education.

The tuition for PCL was $5,000 per year, making it one of the cheapest law schools in the United States. Suppose that full-time study at the school amounts to five full (academic) year courses at $1,000 per course. With such financing, how many students might Dan Kapelovitz need to enroll in his Criminal Evidence and Procedures course to earn a respectable living as an academic, or as an academic who is also an attorney?

With PSA, professional and personal choices regarding work conditions and compensation are in the control of the worker, the expert frontline academic service provider and steward. In the institutional model such work control is either non-existent or negotiated with an institutional employer (perhaps using a union intermediary to represent collective labour interests). At the same time, PSA is not a zero-sum game. Comparable to attorneys who practice law as employees of corporations, governments, firms, and so on, or who earn as self-employed owners of solo and partnered practices, PSA provides academics with a contribution and earning option that enables the exercise of liberties not properly provided for on the boards and campuses of the inheritance. Traditional higher education institutions can remain, only thanks to PSA, universities and colleges would face comparison and competition not experienced in centuries of their monopoly on higher education facilitation.

Suppose Dan enrolled 40 students in his Criminal Evidence and Procedures course for an academic-attorney practice revenue of $40,000 gross. Have you had a class of forty students? How much did students pay for that course? How much were you paid to develop and deliver the course? Maybe your professional and personal expectations are different from Dan, with 100 course enrollees and a part-time practice in labour law.

With liberty to earn from an investment in self and society, exercising professional prerogative, the particulars of work conditions and compensation are predominantly determined by the independent academic on the frontline of service and stewardship, not some institutional employer and a government overseer that tag team wrestle faculty employees and student enrollees over everything from redundancy terminations to residency fees. This PSA earning liberty is combined with a learning liberty wherein control over the spending of higher education tax dollars is in the hands of citizens who pay professional academics directly for services, like courses in Criminal Evidence and Procedures, Contracts Law, or Philosophy of Law.

These combined professional and personal liberties mean that the strings attached to institutional employment and government funding can no longer be used to play the same old tunes we’ve danced to for centuries. The PSA tune does not need the employment string and needs a smaller gauge funding string. I wonder what higher education would sound like with this arrangement. Only research and trial can tell.

Recognizing that academic labour is voluntary in PCL, if students pay the $1,000 in tuition directly to Dan for the courses he develops and delivers, then what revenue/funding/income is left for the institution to operate? Take a moment to recognize that this question is not common, and not sensible to many.

PCL relied on a dean and an administrator-registrar during its fifty years of operation. Suppose we keep this staff, each with a full-time annual salary of $100,000. Suppose that as a licensed practicing member of PSA, Dan remits 10% of tuition-derived revenue from his academic practice to PCL for its operations. How many PSA academics would be needed to cover the $200,000 annual expense of administrative staff?

Because of the earning and learning liberties entailed by independent licensed professional practice, the answer varies. If a PSA academic like Dan enrolled 100 students in his course(s) over the (academic) year, then he would remit $10,000 to PCL for institutional expenses like the salaries of a dean and administrator-registrar. Twenty PSA academics working as Dan does can cover this institutional staffing expense, or forty Dans each enrolling 100 students paying tuition of $500 would cover it, or tuition that’s capped at $800 per full (academic) year course, and so on.

From the perspective of the inheritance, such exercise of individual professional prerogative might be seen to invite uncertainty in higher education institution operating revenue and so instability in the higher education earning and learning these institutions facilitate. But in PSA, with institutional middlemen eliminated or subordinated, stability across many higher education metrics is improved. For instance, there would be many more academics in service and stewardship to the social good than can be accommodated by the bottleneck funding and facilitation of exclusive university and college employers. These institutional higher education employers might suffer from the shifts introduced by PSA, but the people who depend upon higher education will benefit. Let’s further explore this charge of financial instability that might be partly characterized as a problem of predictability, when compared to a higher education institution like PCL.

Though as a nonprofit PCL is required to make its finances public, as of publication, I could not find its annual reports. So, let’s imagine that the fixed facilities are leased. In that neighbourhood, commercial rent for a 6000 square foot facility is around $150,000 to $220,000 per year, with a Los Angeles average of $50 a square foot a month. Two full time staff are $200,000 and other annual expenses like insurance, maintenance, utilities, equipment, furnishings, and so on, can be estimated at $100,000.

So, for between $450,000 and $520,000 a year, PCL can effectively operate as an institution of higher education, without the expense of faculty, the only essential labour in higher education. If the $5000 in tuition was paid directly to the professional frontline academics of PSA, then how many instructors and how many enrollees would be needed to finance the operations of PCL? Again, this is an odd and open question that depends on professional and personal prerogative exercised by academic-attorneys that earn independently and remit for PCL services. But this open-endedness is what prompts the concern over funding predictability and so stability in the sector, in a comparison that was not possible before the introduction of an alternative model like PSA.

It might seem immaterial to shift the direct payee from institution to individual, from faceless institutions and insulated faculty employees/volunteers to professionally licensed and supported individuals in higher education practice for themselves, as one finds with the practice of law or medicine, but I believe the shift to be beneficial on measures from the material to the moral. When the (frontline) service provider is expected to cover overhead for their solo or partnered practice in higher education, then there is new, complex, structural incentive to provide economical, effective service and stewardship to citizens who spend their tax dollars purchasing directly from an academic-attorney his course in contract law that counts as credit toward the pre-law aspirations of a twentysomething undergraduate.

This describes an arrangement among adults, not school children. All over the world, a sixteen- or eighteen-year-old person can seek and receive the services of an attorney or physician without parental consent and using public or private funds. Surely, adults can do the same when seeking higher education services, and without the assumed need of facilitation from institutions that patronize with rhetoric about how these employers and enrollers are our own, my college, my universitas. The manipulative marketing is all too familiar, a cousin of that used to excuse the labour exploitation of teachers, priest, and nurses by calling the vocations a calling. “I’m not in it for the money,” trill the tenured and temporary who flutter around the faculty employee flame.

This description of PSA higher education likely raises neoliberal hackles. But if there is a neoliberal element to PSA, it has yet to be determined in design or execution. The neoliberal footprint of PSA is determined by final design details, but as a profession-based model, the presence of a neoliberal ethos is principally measured by individuals who gainfully contribute to social goods without the need for employment by others, like a firm, hospital, or university. In this framework, a neoliberal charge against PSA is kneejerk, and needs to be backed by argument and research, while I have responded to the neoliberal charge here.

If you’re still reading, then systemic ripples from this sort of shift in payment must be apparent. So far, we can see a professional finance model leaves in its wake a shift in power, in material compensation, in the public expense of the social good, and in the neoliberalism of university and college employers and employees, including their role in creating the neoliberal ethos of the higher education sector. Here are a few more ripples that PSA makes possible.

The conflicted heritage of shared governance would be adjusted in favour of academics on the frontline, not employers on the sideline or governments on the spectator line. This shift in control is concomitant with a material change in earning for academics, as suggested by these PSA financial analyses for the United States, Canada, and Australia. For students and society, the financial flexibility of PSA makes feasible universal, sustainable tuition-free higher education – something that was apparent back in the 1990s, in Nova Scotia, when PSA was created and average tuition at universities across the province was $4100 (or $7144 CND in current purchasing power).

If an academic-attorney like Dan can earn $80,000 teaching 100 students at PCL, expensing $8000 a year for the registration and administration services used by his academic-attorney practice, then maybe there would be more Dans, then maybe there would be more who could afford to study law with Dan, or philosophy of law with me. And it does no good to say, “A university couldn’t operate on that sort of service revenue from professional academics,” because, as will soon be made clear, in PSA there are no higher education institutions as we traditionally know them.

If another fifty or sixty likeminded professionals saw value in this professional opportunity to gainfully contribute to higher education, then there would be enough to cover the cost of dean, administrator and registrar services under PCL. Of course, that’s only one possibility. Another is that PCL is run as a partnership among the academics and these (academic-administrative) support staff. Whatever the professional arrangement, it must be acknowledged that before PSA, PCL had a volunteer faculty and remained insolvent and noncompliant as an institution of higher education.

In tandem with this shift in financial arrangements is a shift in legitimacy, authority, credibility. Aside from the dean and admin-registrar services that PCL provides academic practices for a negotiated or state-fixed fee, there is the (market) value of the institution’s accreditation and degree-granting status. Only a fool or a saint would try to gainfully or charitably offer higher education – teaching, researching, and community servicing – without the ability to legally issue these credence goods. I consider PCL a saint and look where that got it.

This leaves in place the institution-oriented legitimacy of our inheritance, with PSA piggybacking on the value this credibility imparts to independent, professionally licensed academic services on the frontline. Though this probably sounds familiar, it is different enough to be an improvement over the incestuous and contentious financing and budgeting that plagues the inheritance and causes our loss of the higher education that PCL facilitated.

Personally, I aim for something with more elegance and emancipation. Shift degree-granting status and accreditation over to the body in PSA that licenses, disciplines and develops the academic profession. Let’s call it the, State Tower of California, for continuity with the legal profession of which attorney Dan is a licensed practitioner under the legislated authority of the State Bar of California (SBC). All legally recognized degrees come from the STC of PSA as do all licenses to legally practice higher education as an academic (in the state of California). The familiar legitimacy provided by institutional accreditation and degree-granting status is shifted to and shaped in a single legislated body of the PSA model, the State Tower of California (STC).

Legislation vests in the State Bar of California the authority to license practitioners of law, accredit law schools, and issue degree-granting status to law schools. Except for Dan, everything here is a legal invention enforced by penalty of law. In the state of California, it is illegal to practice law without a license and it is illegal to peddle law degrees without degree-granting status. Just ask President Trump, who learned that in the state of New York, it is illegal to call your private, namesake higher education institution a university without the authority to do so from the University of the State of New York.

In PSA, institutions like PCL, UCLA, or Trump University might retain the familiar veneer we like to call our own, but these universities and colleges are neutered, being repositioned as vendors for STC licensed practitioners in solo or partnered practice. This would produce an interesting dynamic in the sector, with vendor institutions vying for the business of professional academics, just to stay relevant and solvent. Again, I suppose, there is similarity to the inheritance, at least with respect to the top-ranked academics in any field.

Though this is one possibility, I think greater elegance and emancipation comes from shifting degree-granting status to something like the STC, eliminating the need for costly, cumbersome and corruptible accreditation of institutions (that peddle their degree-granting status to the independent academic practices of PSA). The State Bar of California does not need to be accredited to grant, withhold or rescind institution or program accreditation and degree-granting status. It needs a different legislated authority and legitimacy to perform these acts of oversight. Where institutional accreditation is transposed into professional licensure of individual practitioners under the STC and degree-granting status is centralized under the STC, unnecessary middlemen employers are eliminated or subordinated, so academics and students are freed to engage in earning and learning where we are not forced into universities or colleges in pursuit of our personal higher education heritage.

With this shift, People’s College of Law and the rest have nothing to offer an independent professional academic practice, beyond administrative, clerical and facilities services, all of which an academic practice can secure in many locations from many providers in many communities. In PSA, the STC keeps all the records, issues all the transcripts and confers all the degrees. The functions of a dean and other hybrid administrator-academic positions of the institutions are shifted to the STC and are of just the sort that can help develop, maintain and oversee a dynamic, diverse degree system, and evaluation scheme designed specifically for the professional model, that combined make for a stronger legitimacy foundation less bound by inherited institutions and more bound by current individuals. In PSA, the STC licenses, disciplines and supports these individuals to practice higher education as academic experts see fit, without the needless constraint of institutional employment and enrolment.

 

Conclusion

There is nothing new here, with a shift in the players and practices, not the principles, and as this PSA picture sharpens, it becomes clear that institutional noncompliance is merely a reflex of assumption. The assumption being the exclusive university and college employment model for academic service and stewardship in higher education. Part two of this series (forthcoming) systematically examines the six categories of institutional noncompliance from the SBC, how they are a consequence of this widespread assumption, and how this negatively impacts access to earning and learning in higher education, like the forced closure of PCL and the attendant lose of service to society and income to individuals.

As always, the door is open. You are welcome and nothing here is proprietary. Use and abuse as you like.