61 Questions For A Professional Academe With No Accreditation

A skulk of attorneys is drinking late into the night when one announces, “We should open a practice to teach law. The law schools are shit.”

“Says you. I went to Harvard.”

“And yet we work at the same firm, drink the same liquor and kiss the same ass. We both know some of my professors were at least as good as some of yours, with an equal share of faculty shitheads. Anyway, we all know you were a pretty lousy student.”

 ...

If in the morning this band of drinking buddies still want to teach law as it should be taught, then there are only two versions of the one way to gainfully and legally doing so: 1) Get jobs at the same school and negotiate with the institutional employer’s board, administration, faculty, student body and the rest to effect change in curriculum, standards, pedagogy, materials, and the rest; or 2) Open their own law school and dictate their distilled vision for legal education.

Institutional employment is the only way for licensed, experienced, civic-minded attorneys to contribute as academics to recognized higher education credentials in the study of law. Not only does the inheritance direct the study of law for credit into the confines of employers and enrollers like a law school, but the study, the learning, the education must comply with laws, rules, standards and guidelines that are enforceable by legal and other penalties set against (visionary) noncompliance. As an example of this control, the State Bar of California is legislatively empowered to create and enforce laws, rules, standards and guidelines for not only the practice of law but also the practice of (legal) higher education by qualified individuals (employed by institutions).

What could go wrong, with this oversight that every higher education system needs? Unfortunately, we’ve lived the answer to that question for centuries now, in the grace and grip of higher education institutions. Only we don't know but should know what could go wrong in PSA where attorneys open their own solo or partnership academic practices offering education in law that helps qualify students for graduation with a JD or LLB from the Professional Society of Academics.

PSA is a universitas, but not a university, college or school of the inheritance.

What follows are the state of California, State Bar of California (SBC) standards for law school accreditation. These SBC standards help to create value in the credence good of post-secondary credentials so that academic work in higher education might be gainful, rather than an act of charity, like the People’s College of Law in Los Angeles, where the service and stewardship of its volunteer faculty was lost to society when the school was closed for noncompliance in 2023. After presenting the SBC standards in red, a PSA interpretation is offered in black, in a context where assumption has forced institution-oriented laws, rules, standards, and guidelines on all individuals who want to earn and learn in higher education.

RULE TWO: STANDARDS FOR ACCREDITATION OF LAW SCHOOLS

Section 2.01 Preamble. To become accredited, a law school must establish that its paramount objective is to provide a sound legal education. Financial considerations shall not dictate nor adversely affect the educational program. The school shall not retain any student who is obviously unqualified or who does not appear to have a reasonable prospect of completing the program and acquiring the educational qualifications necessary for admission to practice law in California.

Nuance and assumption are evident from the start, in a preamble that reads like an operational ideal based on an educational ideal, related to purpose, access, and quality ideals that are applied to a social good in which one is not only expected to be educated in law but educated for the purpose of earning a living in the practice of law upon graduation. Sure, you say, its a bar and a bar document that covers law schools, what'd you expect? Not what I got and more than I got.

The SBC says, “Financial considerations shall not dictate nor adversely affect the educational program.” Of course, the reality is that higher education is deeply and negatively affected by its long history of insufficient, erratic, and vulnerable public and private finance. To wave around ideals that demand for their realization ever more public and private money is an inexcusable failure of imagination and social obligation on the part of academics who are paid as faculty employees to provide the opposite under legislated social contract with society.

But maybe SBC Guidelines on accreditation offer a less idealized interpretation of institutional financial requirements and impact,

      Decisions that may adversely affect a law school’s educational program, admission or academic decisions, or academic or scholastic standards, including its ability to staff and operate each approved campus adequately, must not be based solely on financial considerations.

One is left wondering if the legal requirement is “shall not” or “shall not solely.” But hey, who’s splitting quantification hairs? Documents like this are only used to determine (citizen) access to an institutional monopoly on earning and learning in higher education. What could go wrong?

PSA also scribes an ideal relation between education and its facilitation, including the financial element, only it manages to do so requiring far less public and private money – at least a fifty percent reduction in the current total expense of the institutional inheritance (e.g., United States, Canada, and Australia). 

(Q01) But suppose the promised reduction was only a third, would that confirm we don't need to explore, develop, research or trial PSA finance? 

(Q02) Would a twenty or ten percent reduction in tuition not raise any heads from their desks? 

(Q03) In an inheritance where student debt has steadily risen in chorus with the constant cry for more public funding, shouldn't even the whiff of reduction give reason to pause grazing?

At the tail of this preamble, the SBC also speaks of purposes for the formal study of law that leads to a legally recognized credential like a degree. Consider two statements of purpose and the question: could assumption have a hand in shaping this (alien) asymmetry? 

(i) In the case of the legal profession, the purpose of earning an education and degree from an SBC-accredited institution is to qualify for independent (self-employed) earning in social contract service and stewardship to law as a licensed professional. 

(ii) In the case of the academic profession, the purpose of earning an education and degree in a field of study is to qualify for independent (self-employed) earning in social contract service and stewardship to higher education as a licensed professional.

Purposes are public, personal, and plentiful. The preamble requires that those who do not show "reasonable prospect of completing the program and acquiring the educational qualifications necessary for admission to practice law in California" must be denied the formal study of law for credential by accredited public or private institutions, or face institutional noncompliance with the SBC. Fair enough, but what counts as "completing a program" is being shaped by a purpose for pursuing a law degree that is made explicit in the second half of the conjunction.

(Q04) Does this mean that finishing the program of study to obtain the parchment, not to practice law, but to practice darts, is not a legitimate, recognized, acceptable purpose for pursuing a law degree?

(Q05) Because the majority of people who attend law school intend to sit the bar and practice law, does that mean this one purpose must be explicitly and exclusively referenced in SBC accreditation material that essentially issues to institutions the only legal, gainful license to practice higher education in the field of law?

(Q06) Does this not confuse individual purpose with institutional function, tethering telos to tool?

(Q07) Is the sole educational purpose of law schools to produce licensed, practicing attorneys?

If there were no law schools then there would be no purpose for law schools, there would just be degrees in law, some of which are used by some people to sit the bar or practice law. This might seem pedantic, but it's not. PSA might seem a pale unasked version of a higher education institution, but it's not. One can get a law degree that meets requirements to write the bar and practice law, but then not.

(Q08) So why is the practice of law explicitly mentioned in a document that circumscribes the exercise of personal prerogatives related to higher education (in law), setting (inter alia) standards for what counts as the study of law for a degree in law (from a school of law (for the practice of law))?

The SBC legislation addresses law schools, using a design meant to ensure that only in institutional spaces of employment and enrollment will there to be (legal, gainful) service and stewardship for credentialed higher education (in law that leads to the licensed practice of law). According to the inheritance, that should be the end of it. Job done. 

(Q09) So, why the hell am I blathering on about an alternative to law schools, colleges, universities and the rest of the inherited institutional field army?

Because while there's nothing wrong with the SBC accrediting law schools - affecting everything (in this area of higher education) from curriculum and content to contracts and commodes - there is something wrong with this being the only (legal) road to a law degree (of this sort, from this sort of place, with this sort of people, teaching and learning this sort of content, stamped with approval by this sort of legislated body...so you can qualify for the bar and practice).

From state legislation to institution policies and practices, this inherited apparatus molds and massages the social good in ways that the PSA alternative does not and can not. In PSA, the second half of this conjunction is unnecessary when setting standards for the study of credentialed higher education (in law). But as part of the inheritance, there it is shaping higher education in a document that frames the only doorway to a (legal) law degree (sought for sport, sustenance, spite, or surprise). In PSA, if the preamble sentence ended at, "reasonable prospect of completing the program," no meaning is lost, no standard is lost, no purpose is lost, and importantly, none is made explicit at the absence of all others.

Thank you, state and strangers, for including an unnecessary assumption in documents that circumscribe my purposes in spending my time and my (tax) money studying law. I feel patronized, not protected. This is not a good start to legislation-backed rules, standards, and guidelines, with things made worse still by the fact that one doesn't even have to graduate with a degree from law school to sit the bar exam and be licensed to practice law in California, or in Washington, Vermont, and Virginia, though this is not so in New York, Maine and West Virginia, where a law school degree is required. With all this variety, all these options, all this built-in access to higher education (in law), maybe there isn't a need for more of the same, more a good thing made better by PSA.

(A) Lawful Operation. The law school shall be a residence law school operated in compliance with all applicable federal, state and local laws, and regulations. The law school shall be qualified as a degree granting institution under the laws of California, if located in California, or of the state in which it is located.

Education is a state domain in America, a provincial responsibility in Canada, a concern for the Department of Education in England, and so on. In the institutional higher education system of California, studying law for the purposes of attaining a credential that qualifies one for a license to legally (and gainfully) practice law, requires academics and students to win admission to (and graduate from) a law school with SBC-backed legal authority to grant degrees in law. When both parties -  the master and scholar of law - are employed or enrolled by such an institution, then it is possible to pursue a degree in law. This is the same for a degree in philosophy, physics or phrenology under the institutions of the inheritance.

PSA suggests replacing “admission to a law school” with “admission to a profession” that services and stewards higher education through professionally licensed academic practices that admit students into courses (not institutions) that contribute to legally recognized PSA-backed law (and other) degrees.

(Q10) What would it take to make something like PSA lawfully operational in the state of California? 

(Q11) What would it take to implement something like PSA in the federal domain of post-secondary education? 

(Q12) What does "residency" mean in a higher education model that has no need for inherited universities, colleges, or schools, but is still conducted face-to-face in physical spaces? 

(Q13) What do "degree-granting institution" and "degree-granting status" mean in a profession of academics who do not earn a living as a faculty employee of some school, college, or university? 

(Q14) What higher education system has no universities but is a universitas that grants degrees?

(B) Integrity. The law school shall demonstrate integrity in all of its programs, operations, and other affairs.

From Bologna to Beijing, good luck achieving this measure of compliance (in all the affairs of institutions). Under "Honesty and Integrity" in the SBC Guidelines, E(2), the force of institutional earning and learning is made clearer still: “A law school that is accredited or approved by another agency or is a member of an association may state that fact in any communication, but must indicate in connection with any such statement that its degree-granting authority in connection with its students qualifying to take the California Bar Examination and obtain admission to the practice of law in California is based on accreditation by the Committee of Bar Examiners of The State Bar of California.”[Italics added.]

According to this pissing contest, to study law for credit that qualifies you to write the bar and practice law, you must be admitted to and satisfactorily complete a program of legal study approved of by the SBC. This forces those who wish to earn and learn together into employment and enrolment together at the same universities, colleges and schools, with little to no room outside the institutions to facilitate the same. This clot in the flow of earning and learning is found across all fields of study that lead to legally recognized degrees and other credentials of higher education. Studying any subject for credit (and practice or further studies) requires graduation from an institution approved of by some accreditation agency that is approved of by some government bureaucracy.

This is the inheritance that I disclaim and recommend you do the same.

This institutional path is forced on us. It is patronizing and controlling. It restricts fundamental freedoms. It undermines academic authority. It elevates administrative authority. It damages in subtle and substantial ways the people who depend upon higher education. It's a path that warps and wounds the social pillar.

Maybe a case can be made for the institutional inheritance where students are the focus, if the people in question are young, new adults who lack experience. But this doesn't sit well with me, and anyway, good luck making the case that this legally (and culturally) forced path for earning and learning should apply to academics, especially those who are or were once faculty employees, qualified, vetted, and experienced in the gold standard, or rather, the only standard for (legal, gainful) service and stewardship of credentialed higher education.

I don't need an institutional employer to facilitate my contribution to the higher education of society. But the inheritance, of which the SBC is a clause, forces me to comply with institutional employment if I want to earn a living from my contribution to the social good. Academics must settle for the freedom of sauced solicitors who are free to pursue employment at a university, college, or school, like everyone else who aspires to (legally and gainfully) study with others (for credit and cash).

And good luck making the case that on balance society benefits from this illiberal inheritance. If academics can’t get (back) on some institution payroll as (even precarious) faculty, then society loses these human resources, because the inheritance denies otherwise perfectly qualified academics access to the value created in credentials by the legislated functions of something like the State Bar of California, as demonstrated in the case of being admitted to a law degree, or being admitted to the bar exam, the bar, and ultimately the (gainful) licensed practice of law.

(Q15) Is it naïve to think the same could be done for any or most degrees and other credentials in higher education, and for any academic in institutional or professional self-employment who services and stewards higher education, and for any student who seeks higher education service and stewardship?

As was mentioned in the preamble, there is a road to the bar exam and legal, gainful contribution to law that does not require university or college credit. As you read of this SBC-approved alternative but "equivalent intellectual achievement" to law school or college, think of what PSA can do with this sort of (institutional) option across higher education (using independent, professionally licensed academic practices in philosophy, physics, phenology, forensics, and the rest).

Rule 4.26 Legal education

 

General applicants for the California Bar Examination must

(A) have received a juris doctor (J.D.) or bachelor of laws (LL.B) degree from a law school approved by the American Bar Association or accredited by the Committee; or 

(B) demonstrate that in accordance with these rules and the requirements of Business & Professions Code §6060(e)(2) they have 

(1) studied law diligently and in good faith for at least four years in a law school registered with the Committee; in a law office; in a judge’s chambers; or by some combination of these methods; or 

(2) met the requirements of these rules for legal education in a foreign state or country; and 

(C) have passed or established exemption from the First-Year Law Students' Examination.

Rule 4.29 Study in a law office or judge’s chambers

(A) A person who intends to comply with the legal education requirements of these rules by study in a law office or judge’s chambers must 

(1) submit the required form with the fee set forth in the Schedule of Charges and Deadlines within thirty days of beginning study; 

(2) submit semi-annual reports, as required by section (B)(5) below on the Committee’s form with the fee set forth in the Schedule of Charges and Deadlines within thirty days of completion of each six-month period; and 

(3) have studied law in a law office or judge’s chambers during regular business hours for at least eighteen hours each week for a minimum of forty-eight weeks to receive credit for one year of study or for at least eighteen hours a week for a minimum of twenty-four weeks to receive credit for one-half year of study. 

(B) The attorney or judge with whom the applicant is studying must 

(1) be admitted to the active practice of law in California and be in good standing for a minimum of five years; 

(2) provide the Committee within thirty days of the applicant’s beginning study an outline of a proposed course of instruction that he or she will personally supervise; 

(3) personally supervise the applicant at least five hours a week; 

(4) examine the applicant at least once a month on study completed the previous month; 

(5) report to the Committee every six months on the Committee’s form the number of hours the applicant studied each week during business hours in the law office or chambers; the number of hours devoted to supervision; specific information on the books and other materials studied, such as chapter names, page numbers, and the like the name of any other applicant supervised and any other information the Committee may require; and 

(6) not personally supervise more than two applicants simultaneously. 

[Bold indicates intersections where movement can be made from the SBC of legal practice to the to the PSA of higher education practice.]

(Q16) Do you think such restriction on a community of earning and learning is a conscious attempt at quality control or just a spontaneous implication of blind assumption?

(Q17) Could there be better ways of effecting higher education quality control that are not tied to institutional employment and enrollment? 

(Q18) Have there been others in the long history of the social good? 

(Q19) Does a forced path into institutional earning and learning invite integrity (or diversity, inclusiveness, innovation, flexibility, affordability, sustainability,…)? 

(Q20) Does PSA shape into a wholesale model for higher education the State Supreme Court, Judge's Chambers, and the Committee of Bar Examiners of the SBC inheritance, cutting out the middleman university or college employer-enroller? 

If the law allows an attorney in private legal practice to help someone (fully) meet education requirements to (successfully) write the bar exam, then surely the same should be true of academics who in a private higher education practice help qualify someone with a semester credit in philosophy of law (that counts toward a BA, PhD, LLB, JD, etc.). I was married to an attorney for a number of years, some of which were when she enter law school. The education, the preparation, the memorization, the will needed to pass a law bar exam (not to mention finish law school) is magnitudes more challenging than a course on applied professional ethics or the history of professional ethics or the sociology of professional ethics. At the same time, much of law school is about managing to pass required and elective courses that, in PSA, qualified academic can provide for credit toward a law or any other degree in higher education independently of institutional employment or enrolment.

I can hear from the dim-lit tables in the back: "But where's the law degree come from?!"

Sharing an equally checkered rap sheet to that of its known associates - the university and college - the professions are no stranger to income protectionism and other forms of self-interested behaviour that runs counter to the terms of social contracts. Also like the university and college, the legal profession has the nerve and need to speak in lofty tones about honesty and integrity in service and stewardship to a social good.

(Q21) But in the context being provided by PSA, in a professional model like that used for law or medicine, what is the SBC notion of institutional integrity and is it best for service and stewardship in higher education? 

(Q22) Is the integrity of institutions distinct from the integrity of (transient) faculty employees of institutions? 

(Q23) With whom should the greater burden for integrity be placed, institutions or individuals? 

(Q24) How many lapses (of what type and degree) in individual integrity are needed to bring institutional integrity into question, and vice versa? 

(Q25) If Gino and Gay are expelled does that repair the reputation of Harvard, or was it not affected in the first place by a tradition of institution-vetted employees in service and stewardship to higher education?

(Q26) How does all this drama being seated in institutions affect higher education, our view of the social good and the professionals who work (as employees of the institutions) to serve and steward it with integrity? 

(Q27) Does the transience of faculty employees negatively or positively affect integrity in higher education (in universities and colleges)? 

(Q28) Would removal of service and stewardship transience improve or harm integrity among the academics, students, and institutions of the academe? 

(Q29) Does the relative intransience of institutional employers adequately compensate for the loss of integrity (if any) in the relative transience of employees like faculty, teaching and researching assistants, presidents, and trustees? 

(Q30) Would more (public or private) money for higher education solve the transience (as we want and need)?

I wish we knew. Academic integrity could use a boost these days, one that doesn't come from a double shot of Starbucks stewardship.

(C) Governance. The law school shall be governed, organized, and administered so as to provide a sound educational program.

To provide a sound education program, the means of higher education in law shall be effectively and appropriately governed, organized, and administered by, I wanna say, PSA, but maybe you have something else in mind or maybe you only have in mind the inheritance, with its field army of universities, colleges, schools, centers, institutes, departments, programs, committees, teams, and so on that is assumed without challenge or alternative by those who sing in marches for integrity.

The PSA alternative sees things differently: Except by an accident of inheritance, the governance of universities and colleges is not the governance of higher education. Just as academic freedom is not the freedom of academics, and the integrity of academics is not the integrity of institutions.

This post sketches a notion and apparatus of governance in a professional model for higher education. I have kicked this can before, here, here, and here. The diagram below is a comparative sketch for PSA and the higher education institution model of the inheritance. This is not your mom and dad's college experience, nor your grandparents, great grandparents,...

(D) Educational Program. The law school shall maintain a sound educational program.

And what is that, exactly? I suppose we could start with the purpose of a legal education (program), including the for whom and for what, and then we could move on to the with whom and with what of it all. I don’t know what counts as a sound legal education program or much about how to maintain it, but the academic-attorneys who are on the frontline earning (or volunteering) as faculty employees know, so let’s license them under a profession and enable the practice of higher education as we enable the practice of law or medicine. Philosophers who practice higher education in California as faculty employees can be licensed to practice independently in a professional model that generates multiple modes of access and assessment for one another and each other’s courses, materials, programs, students, and whatever else might aid in maintaining sound legal education programs in the state of California, in a legislated academic profession like PSA, with no institution bottlenecks.

By subordinating accredited institutions to licensed individuals in peer and other support, in peer and other assessment and evaluation, in peer and other spaces of our choosing, in peer and other higher education relationships of our choosing, PSA is a professional model that offers greater soundness on all measures that matter to higher education, not its institutions.

The reputation and particulars regarding the educational program at Harvard or Harvard Law School are groomed with the charm and chafe of individuals in concert with organizations of such individuals over a long time operating within and without the academe. 

(Q31) If the crocked counselors open their law school tomorrow to get education right, how could its reputation for soundness be built or botched over (centuries of) time? 

(Q32) If these civic-minded professionals open separate PSA practices, maybe in different locations of the city, state, or nation, how might they co-ordinate their shared vision for sound legal education? 

(Q33) How could credential value (of various sorts) be created in PSA to give their vision the financial legs it needs to stand on its own and establish reputation? 

(Q34) Would this professional (reputation-building) model be less expensive to finance than the institutional model? 

(Q35) Of the institutional and the individual demonstrations, which provides a more useful, nuanced, immediate measure of (the reputation for) sound (legal) education and its maintenance across the system?

(E) Dean and Faculty. The law school shall have a competent dean or other administrative head and a competent faculty devoting adequate time to administration, instruction, and student counseling.

With humility and sincerity, I ask the state legislature, the SBC and the citizens of California: 

(Q36) What shall an independent solo or partnered academic practice have by way of administration? 

(Q37) How about the competency and number of academics, and their earnings in higher education? 

(Q38) Would someone in solo practice for themselves serve as a Dean for their higher education practice, or for their field of study, maybe for the profession as a whole, or even for each over time? 

(Q39) Of the administrating, instructing, researching, student counseling, community servicing, and so on that defines higher education (under assumption of the inheritance) which of these is jointly or severally the most demanding of PSA resources?

I wish I knew the answers and I wish you wish you knew the answers too.

Establishing, measuring and maintaining competency standards for service and stewardship is one way to distinguish professions from other work and work conditions (however cryptic and contentious this may be). But using only a light touch of commonsense, it would be irresponsible to allow just anyone to practice law or medicine, or design the new state bridge, or pilot your commercial flight home for Christmas. But then surely there is also a need for competency standards in the practice of higher education, where academics (employed as faculty in institutions like law schools) are integral to determining, demonstrating and disseminating for students the very standards that are needed to practice in good standing and with success in the professions. Just let that bitter irony sink in for a moment.

(Q40) The question that PSA presses is why use only the institutional employment means, with replication of administrative positions across every institution, when a professional model uses a fraction of the administration to provide better establishment, measurement, and maintenance of competency across the frontline of higher education?

(F) Library. The law school shall maintain an adequate library.

I think, Dan Kapelovitz, put it best in response to the closing of the People’s College of Law, where he was a volunteer faculty member, "It’s just crazy. All the complaints 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." 

(Q41) How many libraries with what sort of holdings open to the public on what sort of scale might be available if the cost to provide higher education was cut by thirty or fifty percent, if current public funding has its impact doubled thanks to system-wide cost reductions?

At the same time, it would be a mistake to think that the books, journals, microfiches, films, audios, and the rest of the holdings found in public (physical and virtual) libraries is the property of some university or college, some board of governors or trustees, some faculty or student union. As wonderfully civic as these assemblages might be, in the end, institutions, boards, and unions do not own public universities and colleges. But among the people who do own these conventions are the people who populate the libraries, in a tally that includes me doing independent research, my mother getting experience with an etymology dictionary, or my nephew on scholarship for a BA in Whatever-He-Likes and the library employee who shows him to a study room. 

And there is no retort in pointing to the high tuition that my nephew (and his family) pay for his use of these public assets as a student (and a citizen). That begs the question before us, of a model before us that provides tuition-free higher education using less than current levels of public funding, not to mention its reduction in private and bureaucratic costs associated with the inheritance.

This elemental reality of public ownership applies to the sports, laboratory, common, commercial, learning and other spaces of universities and colleges that are assets in common now burdened by system-wide maintenance and repair backlogs that boggle the mind and raise further doubts regarding the adequacy of these exclusive employer-enrollers, when even the roof that services and shelters sags to the point of breach. Instead, try this for a library with professional legs throughout the community,

[Higher education service and stewardship can be atomized throughout communities, unlike the inheritance.]

(G) Admissions. The law school shall maintain a sound admissions policy.

With PSA designs for soundness, competency and adequacy already on the table, admission is a multi-faceted feature of higher education. There is admission to the institution, admission to (under)graduate studies, to a school or center, to the course you want or need, taught by the faculty employee (professor) you hope for, admission to clubs and contests for CV lines, and admission to unions and professions for security on picket lines. The act of admission is not going anywhere. The question is what shape it takes, which is another way of asking about access to higher education, which is not the same as access to higher education institutions, but is the same as admission to the bar or the practice of law.

PSA shifts the emphasis in admission away from institutions to a model where students apply to and are admitted to an academic practice for a course in philosophy of law or evidence and procedures that meets PSA-established degree requirements for a JD, LLB, and the like. Again, this does not reinvent the wheel but borrows and bends until out pops a new universitas, a new institution, not a university or college of the inheritance.

In the inheritance, even though someone is fully admitted to an institution, enjoying (undergraduate-level) access to the campus library, sports, dining, classroom, laboratory, lavatory, and other facilities, that's not the end of admission. There are admission requirements for access to the education (and qualification) offered in courses with pre-requisites or those requiring signed permission from faculty employees to enroll or from dean employees to declare a major in a program of study in an institution each (comically) calls their own. This sort of micro-level admission requirement is applied to both the professor and the student in the case of Directed Reading or Study courses, where the employee and the enrollee must secure permission from the institution to study together, with each effectively being admitted for credit study under the institution’s (brand of) degree-granting status, and where if the institution denies, limits, or otherwise restricts access to this sort of education (and qualification), then the academic (who is an employee) and the student (who is an enrollee) must find a park bench during lunch to get half the job done.

It is in this frontline, micro, P2P, you-and-me relationship for service and stewardship that PSA principally shapes admissions in higher education, with no institutional gatekeepers required.

(Q42) What does “sound” mean with respect to admissions? 

(Q43) Does it require policymaking to include input like the competency level of faculty to effectively educate and the competency of students to effectively learn, in a model where high course failure and program withdrawal rates, or low rates of bar admission, graduate school admission or post-graduate employment, directly impact the quantity and quality of applications and so revenue for the institutional employer forming the admissions policy? 

(Q44) Is soundness in admissions a matter of ensuring that access to higher education is equitable (in the institution you call yours as a trustee, administrator, janitor, instructor, or student)? 

(Q45) Is it also a matter of ensuring that admission processes and practices are sound? 

(Q46) Does a sound admissions policy (aim to) ensure students are admitted to the right course with the right professors using the right materials with the right group of classmates on the right week night during the right semester in the right location for the right price paid by the right people with the right funds to the right providers in the right institution?

On this forced path, among the first fractures to appear in the social pillar is the familiar qualifying phrase - “subject to availability” - which means most courses that the university calendar advertises are not offered this semester or this year or in some cases the past five years and that unless a course meets minimum enrolment, even that education will be inaccessible to you, including in the form of a Directed Reading or Study course undertaken by two informed adults (because too much of the mutually constructed content is already found under another course listed in the calendar and offered by another professor in the department every other year on Mondays and Wednesdays at 8am, which is already two hours into the day job I need to work to pay for what education is available to me in the institutions of higher education).

Thankfully, my hometown is packed with these institutions, so sometimes I'd enroll in a course offered by the Dal philosophy department to make up for shortcomings in the Saint Mary’s calendar or offerings, and then transfer the credit to my SMU degree. This is not to suggest the Dalhousie and SMU philosophy departments co-ordinated offerings to plug higher education gaps across two institutions that are a 20-minute walk from one another and spread across much of the upscale south end of Halifax. Thankfully, my professors barked and bent the university into accepting for credit the Directed Reading courses we used as further fill for the many gaps in higher education institutions. Thankfully, my mentors were the type who take seriously their obligation to correct or mitigate this sort of nonsense and so without the facilitation or permission of the institutional employer-enroller, we met our obligations on the park benches of Halifax.

As indicated, PSA bends this inherited notion of inter-institution or transfer credit into a familiar two-tier structure, but one where admissions principally takes place at the micro-level in stand-alone courses or lines of study developed and delivered by professional academics, qualifying students to transfer credits toward recognized degrees administered at the meta-level with system-wide higher education record-keeping, adjudicating, formulating, monitoring and other administrating functions in attendance. This inversion of inherited admissions is explained in greater detail throughout this post, but also here and here.

Halifax Public Gardens

PSA designs for sounder admission to sounder competency in higher education service and stewardship. In PSA, admissions is a multi-facetted, mutually dependent affair conducted at the individual level between academic and student, not between the institution and academic or student. It is more like the admissions found in graduate studies than that of undergraduate programs where strangers get together in large groups to attempt sound higher education. Admissions in PSA is principally a matter of who wants to study what with whom, not who wants to study what’s available here (where the credentials are and I got admitted), with the where atomized across a profession of independent academic practices, some of which would be happy to take on the five or so students looking to enroll in a semester-long course covering the History of Anal Fixation that's listed in the local college calendar or a course of mutual academic-student design that's not listed in any college calendar, the both of which are for credit toward credentials cradled in a college of academics, called the Professional Society of Academics.

(Q47) Is this inversion of admissions more or less likely to corrupt soundness and its maintenance than is our inherited institutional version, with the survival of an individual academic practice on the line verses an institutional employer of hundreds or thousands on the line to closure? 

Moving toward an answer, think of the soundness, competency and adequacy (standards) used in international student admissions (and graduation) across an inheritance in which my PhD alma mater prostituted credence goods to remain solvent and as a faculty employee I was complicit in the corruption of higher education standards (as I see them) when working for a Chinese university that struck a joint-degree deal with good ol' Saint Mary’s University. 

(Q48) I wonder how admissions worked in the case of those hundreds or was it thousands of SMU degrees from the campus in Zhuhai (珠海), the very same degree I earned after admission to SMU in Halifax, the same degree I for years helped students attain on the campus in Halifax? 

(Q49) Were the education requirements and standards the same on both campuses? 

This one I can answer, since I was a faculty employee for both ends of this joint-degree program. But let's approach this subject from another direction.

Halifax, NS

(H) Scholastic Standards. The law school shall maintain sound scholastic standards and shall identify as soon as possible following admission and exclude those admitted students who have demonstrated they are not qualified to continue.

I don’t see things this way. Instead, sound scholastic standards for the study of law (that leads to legally recognized credentials) shall be made public and be in the form of a continuum or matrix for all things academic in higher education. To me, this seems as obvious as requiring rubrics for sound teaching. PSA does the obvious better by requiring a public record of performance for all licensed academics and their students across all rubrics from the individual course to the degree, but this is not the neoliberalism it might at first appear.

If you want to know (to set, explore, or test) the scholastic standards and if they are being met, then you must examine the school, the department, the course, the employee, the student. Does Harvard Law School have higher standards than Dalhousie Law School? I don’t know or care. But there is no denying the truth that the more data points the better when addressing any subject, any system, solving any problem, or modeling and maintaining anything as complex and vital as higher education. This sort of data collection happens throughout the inheritance, at various levels, used by various parties to monitor, maintain, and morph the institutions of higher education according to one or another ideal specification.

In PSA, academics no longer walk into lecture halls full of unknowns, who are assumed to have met the admission standards of an institution that employs them as faculty with fifty to seventy percent precarity and the apparent power to not only set their own scholastic standards but those of their institutional employer, the field of study and wider academe, across various aspects of higher education right down to the education of an individual student that has been admitted to your philosophy of education course (or the tutelage of a PSA-SBC licensed academic-attorney who is helping you to meet education requires for the bar and practice of law).

PSA liberates academics and students in several important ways. One is that scholastic standards are opened beyond the yawn of Yale or the reach of Rhodes. In PSA, standards of all kinds are not set by institutional employers (and their transient employees) vested with legislated authority over all things related to credentials. Instead, standards emanate from a legislated body of professionals that exercises authority over their own individual practice, but also over the mass of performance measured by the mass of academics (and students) over the mass of work product in higher education, for which there is data collection made fully available to the public for use with analytic tools that help determine if this education (program) is suitable, exceptional, affordable, etc. to this individual, organization or society.

Whatever standards might be set in comradeship or conflict by the SBC, some law school, or some law school faculty employee(s), the standards will always be a relatively fixed and narrow selection of the spectrum available in PSA. Seeds should be broadcasted, not forced into holes through institutional funnels.

If the institutions matter that much, then we're fucked if we get into the wrong one, surrounded by the wrong (employee and enrollee) peers, in the wrong part of the country, state, or town, in a second-choice program, and maybe career. We certainly hear that broadcast all the time about how vital it is to get into a good college, the right university. I worked in the private and public sectors of (higher) education in China for a bunch of years and let me tell ya, this is all parents think about with respect to their children, in a time when over forty percent don't land employment after their studies in higher education, and, who like most people around the planet, understand (higher) education through rankings, branding and anecdotal evidence. Maybe you'd get lucky and live in a college town like Halifax, in places where institutions tend to cluster like wildlife at the watering hole. Maybe one of those institutions will have programs, courses and faculty employees that can satisfy your higher education expectations, ones shaped by the holes and gaps of the inheritance.

(I) Physical Resources. The law school shall maintain physical resources adequate for its programs and operations.

I’ve touched on facilities in (F) above and in this post. Eschewing a square meter, utility bill, insurance and litigation approach to what counts as adequate physical resources, let’s tack with a little more atmosphere and some community architecture.

While I was completing a master’s degree in Halifax, at Saint Mary's, I penned some weekly columns for a local newspaper. They were part of a full spread called, The Professor’s Page. The columns covered philosophy in weekly television episodes of, Star Trek: The Next Generation, using the vernacular philosophy that the co-creator of PSA, Dr Peter March, helped to develop in me when I was invited to write for his Saturday morning page.

A newspaper that explores physics, mythology, philosophy, history, logic, chemistry, music, and more on a page with that handle can sell copy in a city that boasts seven degree-granting universities and three community colleges, with a network of main and satellite campuses in a city of around 234 sq/km (90 miles) and a population that grew just over 4% between 2022-23 to 492,199, and swells another 30,000+ when the fall semester begins. This higher education institutional ecosystem has root and fruit across my hometown, not to mention the province, nation and globe.

(Q50) If a college town like Halifax appeals to you as an academic, a student, a politician, homebuyer, mother or father, then more of this would be a good thing, right? 

(Q51) How about more of a good thing available to more people at less public expense and with less funding volatility? 

(Q52) What if higher education was atomized in such a way that it would be difficult to excise the PSA universitas from the community, would that be a better way to encourage more of a good thing? 

(Q53) What if communities were not created for university employer-enrollers like UCLA but a professional universitas was created for a community like yours?

(Q54) This is not to take a piss on the communities that institutions have built., but to ask if PSA might serve as another means of integrating, expanding, and liberating higher education, and if it is, then might it serve as a good compliment to or competitor for the institutions?

I live in Ecuador, in the Andean city of Cuenca, with an urban area of 71 square kilometers (27 miles) and a population of 360,000. It is a city of mom-and-pop services and products, with five universidades and several colegios. Every sector is peppered by houses with restaurants on the ground floor, or a stationary store, or a lawyer and an orthodontist, with a vet and a barber around the corner upon which you can find a convivence store or a hardware store, all with families living above. There’s a SuperMaxi, MegaMaxi, KywiMaxi, in malls with recognized retailers from across the board. But in Cuenca I can also get my shoes repaired or buy a new pair at a shop on the corner of Loja and Don Bosco, a fifteen-minute walk from my house and owned by the people who have lived up stairs for generations.

(Q55) What if this were possible for higher education, with a ground floor practice in history and archeology just around the corner from your house, which is two doors down from a practice in applied mathematics and cryptology? 

(Q56) What if your neighbour was an academic who not only lived on your street but worked there too, how might that change communities? 

(Q57) How would you feel if an attorney or GP opened an office in your neighborhood? 

(Q58) How might this affect barrios that are densely urban verses suburban spaces or rural sprawl? 

(Q59) Could an academic practice in philosophy sustain a family in a small Nova Scotia fishing village, off or online, or a handful of academics who partner to hold summer courses for credit in the fishing village, maybe to supplement their private sector work or retirement income?

(J) Financial Resources. The law school shall maintain adequate present and anticipated financial resources to support its programs and operations.

Because there are no free lunches, I have approached PSA finance from different directions, cutting the current public spending on higher education provision and protection by at least half. It cannot be disputed that lowering the cost, price, expense of any service increases access and gives those on both sides of the (service) relationship elbow room to maneuver with more options for better choices. By lowering the public financial burden of higher education, public funding for other more demanding social goods like medical care and research in university hospitals can be increased, while student debt forgiveness and tuition-free higher education are brought within reach.

Every person and organization of persons on the planet demands more public money for higher, tertiary, post-secondary education. This is a major mistake in stewardship that has and will continue to doom the social pillar, making it evermore vulnerable to marketizing, digitizing, politicizing, economizing, unionizing, institutionalizing, and compromising. This is the present and future expectation for institutional higher education finance, without competition from a viable model like PSA to expose and replace the funding realities of exclusive institutional employers and enrollers. The possibility of this system-wide reduction in costs is enough to rocket PSA past the inheritance, never mind the other numerous benefits that rank professional service and stewardship above universities and colleges.

Financial arguments for PSA can be found here, here, here, and here.

(K) Records and Reports. The law school shall maintain adequate records of its programs and operations, and shall make annual and other reports as the Committee determines to be necessary or proper to determine compliance with the Standards.

In PSA, reports, studies, investigations, and the rest regarding compliance with standards is not an occasional, under-the-gun affair as it is in universities and colleges where something like accreditation is typically reviewed every five years, sometimes longer. In PSA, compliance with standards is in continuous measurement, as the standards themselves are under continuous review and revision among the body of licensed academics in the Professional Society of Academics. Unlike the inheritance, the establishment and enforcement of standards is not formulated and carried out from the top down or from without the profession of academics. Standards and compliance are determined on the frontline of service by an army of professionally licensed practitioners of higher education, not on the sidelines by (institutional) employers or (government) financiers.

The recordkeeping and analysis of frontline data points on standards and compliance are maintained by the PSA model. This is accomplished in much the same way that the State Bar of California undertakes recordkeeping and analysis of data coming from attorneys it licenses to service and steward law. In PSA, the State Tower of California (if you will) is a repository for degree requirements, transcripts, parchments, programs, and other meta-level recordkeeping functions of higher education. I have discussed this design feature of PSA here, here and elsewhere.

It seems recordkeeping is important enough to shut down the People’s College of Law for noncompliance, and impose on another institution that is not shutting down (now or in the foreseeable future) to keep the records. In PSA, there is no worry that some university or college will close leaving records lost in the shuffle – as mine were when the University of Wales at Saint David Trinity (or whatever the fuck its new name is) changed its recordkeeping practices, causing the date on my PhD parchment to change from 2008 to 2010. In PSA, there is no need for institutional employers that separately maintain their records and do investigations into institutional compliance.

If recordkeeping and other meta-functions are as important as they seem, then there should be a system that takes better stewardship of such functions. It should not be entrusted to a limited number of institutions that might not be around in five or fifty year and that have incentive to game the system of standards and compliance in order to stay operational (if only as an important state employer). In PSA, gaming the system, cooking the books, semantic stunts, and the rest get a wet blanket because the data is continuously and independently generated, collected and secured for open analysis and access by the public. Compare this to the institutional accreditation that we have inherited and make your call on standards and meeting them in higher education.

(L) Equal Opportunity and Non-Discrimination. Consistent with sound educational policy, and the Standards, the law school shall demonstrate, or have carried out and maintained, by concrete action, a commitment to providing full opportunities for the study of law and entry into the profession by qualified members of groups (notably racial and ethnic minorities) that have been victims of discrimination in the past.

The law school shall maintain equality of opportunity in legal education in admission and retention of students and hiring, retention, and promotion of faculty without discrimination or segregation on the grounds of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, marital status, disability, or sexual orientation, except insofar as such action is protected by the Constitution of the state of California, provided that nothing in this Standard is intended to prohibit such admission, retention, hiring, and promotion policies maintained for the purpose of remedying present effects of past discrimination.

This rule-standard requires things like "providing full opportunities," maintaining "equal opportunity," and remedying "present effects of past discrimination." This subject is complicated and deserves a full treatment from the PSA model, and I am presently working on it.

In the meantime, here is one response from PSA regarding equal opportunity and discrimination in the academe. The inheritance dibbles individuals into institutional holes shaped by location, status, funding, access, purpose, and other strictures on service, stewardship and self-actualization in higher education. PSA broadcasts human resources and personal freedom across the fields of the academe with no need for the holes dung by universities and colleges.

(Q60) Now, which of these arrangements for earning and learning is more likely to accommodate equal opportunity that corrects or mitigates (past) discrimination?

The inheritance has institutional gatekeepers for employment and enrollment, for earning and learning, while PSA opens the practice of higher education to anyone qualified to provide the service and stewardship to whomever they find qualified as students. And don't bother with pointing to the discrimination and denied opportunities in the legal or medical professions. The heritage of universities and colleges is rife with centuries of actual and potential denied opportunities and open discrimination. The question you need to ask yourself is: 

(Q61) Is it easier to deny opportunities and to promote discrimination in a model with monopolistic earning and learning arrangements like the inherited institutional gatekeepers or is it easier in a profession of licensed academics who are free to work in one of the employment holes or plant their own independent practice in the academe field, growing a professionally licensed, supported and disciplined academic practice in higher education teaching, researching and community servicing?

This post is built around the legislated authority of the State Bar of California to show how this common apparatus for higher education service and stewardship (in law) already covers much of the ground to the Professional Society of Academic and its SBC analog, the State Tower of California. The SBC example demonstrates how PSA can be used for all of higher education, across all subjects, for all credentials, in all programs, not just law. This means PSA is a viable alternative to the inheritance. But I argue further that the professional model is superior to and so preferable to the monopolistic institutional model we assume without challenge. PSA is not merely a disguised type, form, or version of a university or college, though it is a universitas, as is the State Bar of California or the Medical Board or California. What many seem not to appreciate is that, like an attorney or physician, academics can (and should) practice their social good of higher education without the use or need of an institutional monopoly on earning and learning.

This seems obvious to me, but it might not to you, so the invitation to discuss or comment on PSA is always open.