Institutions Are Essential, But Not for Higher Education (Part 2)

In the first post of this two-parter the Professional Society of Academics (PSA) apparatus for gatekeeping and oversight was compared to that found in the institutions of our inheritance. The tradition of institutional employment and enrollment is not required or recommended in the facilitation of academic service and stewardship to higher education. At the same time, universities and colleges are positioned as the sole legal means by which individuals can earn and learn in higher education.

How’s that for open pursuit and propagation of knowledge? How’s that for the right to earn a living or the right to free higher education? How’s that for academic stewardship of a social pillar? How’s that for freedom of speech and expression in the academe?

No one knows.

Universities and colleges are part of the problem and solutions meant to improve them are footnotes to facilitation failure, mends for mangled mechanics, band-aids like tenure, shared governance and academic freedom. Oxford, Stanford, Rutherford, and other ‘fords of the academe are examples of an institutional inheritance that I disclaim, and offer in its stead, a model that boasts better elegance, economics, and emancipation than does a heritage of monopolistic employers and enrollers that organizations like the American Association of University Professors struggle generation after generation to tape up and put back on the field.

Ours Is Not to Question Why, Ours Is but to Comply

The State Bar of California (SBC), Board of Examiners does not disclaim the inheritance. As the legislated body for gatekeeping and oversight with respect to the work of attorneys and academics, the SBC assumes the institutional model. Everyone does.

Last year, the Board of Examiners was obliged by the laws, rules, and guidelines of the inheritance to force closure of the People’s College of Law (PCL), because the institution (and its people?) were noncompliant with the assumption of universities and colleges. The SBC is vested with the power and responsibility to issue, suspend or deny the accreditation and degree-granting statuses of institutions of higher education, as it is vested with the power to license, support, and discipline attorneys who earn as independent solo or partnered practitioners, as employees of law firms, or as employees of corporations, governments, and others. As the American Bar Association Journal put it, “The Peoples College of Law, a Los Angeles-based, unaccredited law school founded in 1974 focused on serving underrepresented students interested in public-interest law, has been on probation since December 2022... Since then, the school has not demonstrated compliance with the state bar’s standards...”.

Even at this fringe institution with volunteer faculty who are licensed, practicing attorneys, the professional model does not trigger curiosity or creativity, even though PSA has potent responses to the six categories of institutional noncompliance identified by the SBC as grounds for the closure of PCL and the denial of our right to earn and learn in higher education.

The Board of Examiners states:

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.

The SBC notion of compliance is fundamentally determined by the states and actions of institutions. In PSA, compliance is fundamentally determined by the states and actions of individuals. And this distinction does not commit the composition or division fallacies.  

This noncompliance issue indirectly refers to individuals, but because our notion of compliance applies to inherited institutions, the individuals being referred to are not contributing to the social good as independent solo practitioners, but in teams, and more importantly, in teams of employees or volunteers at institutions that exclusively determine higher education earning and learning for individuals. As the SBC puts it in their General Rules Regarding Accreditation,

Section 3.03…Accreditation is granted to a law school as an institution, and a law school that conducts classes at multiple locations must be in compliance with the Standards at each location.

PSA does not accredit institutions, it licenses individuals, with profound implications for the social good. For instance, the tuition at PCL was $5000 when it closed. Suppose that the volunteer faculty were instead paid by students a tuition of $1000 per full (academic) year course developed and delivered at PCL, then the institution might well attract more academic-attorney talent like, Dan Kapelovitz, who ran for Attorney General of California in 2024.

I’m sure Dan provided satisfactory, even excellent academic service and stewardship, perhaps in fulfilment of his social contract obligations as a member in good standing among his peers at the California Bar. But with PSA, he would earn as an academic, rather than volunteer as one to check a professional box, pad a political portfolio, or answer a personal calling. In PSA, this professional could decide how much to earn, with whom, where, how and plenty more besides. Surely this change in circumstances would make it easier to attract suitable, sustainable academics and support staff to the service and stewardship of higher education, if not higher education institutions.

What counts as compliance in an institution that arranges finance and service in this manner remains novel and untested (in modern times). What if PCL was an institution owned and operated cooperatively by academics and support staff? What if Dan could administer his own academic practice, undertaking support staff tasks as a solo practitioner? What if Dan and some likeminded academics decided to use the support staff of PCL on a per use basis or use other comparable vendors or partners in academic practice throughout the community? What is the difference between traditional institution compliance and compliance in a model with varied profession-based facilitation, service and stewardship?

No one knows.

At this juncture in the series, it is crucial to reemphasize that in a professional model, institutions like PCL, UC Davis, or Oxford, are not degree-granting. PCL in PSA is an incorporated entity that provides higher education service and stewardship – e.g., administration, registration, teaching, researching and community servicing – but the college does not have the authority to grant degrees. In turn, academic practitioners and support staff are professionally qualified and licensed to (inter alia) offer courses that count as credit toward recognized degrees, but, like PCL, practitioners do not have the authority to grant degrees.

Degrees are conferred by PSA, not some college, school, university, or other body outside the professional model for higher education. The SBC licenses individual practitioners of law, like PSA licenses practitioners of higher education. In PSA, the license to practice higher education is issued to individuals, not to institutions (in the form of accreditation from third-party agencies comprised of academics (who are or were faculty employees) approved by government). The SBC does not confer degrees in law, unlike PSA which is the sole (professional) source of legally recognized degrees in higher education (across all areas and levels of post-secondary education).

In this battle of universitates, four points speak in favour of the professional alternative over universities and colleges. The Professional Society of Academics is:

1) consistent with the authority of the SBC to accredit and issue degree-granting status (to institutions),

2) consistent with the authority of the SBC to license for the practice of law (by individuals),

3) leaner, with elimination or subordination of institutional middleman (to independent solo practice), and

4) freer, with institutional earning and learning made discretionary (not compulsory).

Sometimes the Questions Are Complicated, and the Answer Is Simplification

Everyone gets their degree from PSA, wherein a familiar phrase like, “I got my degree from Harvard,” progressively morphs to, “I got my Evidence and Procedures course from Prof-Pro Dan Kapelovitz.” This shift in emphasis can help to amplify value signals in the inheritance that recognize “from whom” over “from where” in the pursuit and record of employment and education. Like all ideas, PSA borrows and bends.

Everyone gets their degree from PSA, but PSA admits no students, while it admits all academics to, if not some (ig)noble bar or board, then a cheeky tower: the State Tower of California. This shift does not describe the compliance of institutions, but of individuals, with weighty implications for society.

Under PSA, a law school does not assemble a team, as SBC institutional compliance requires. Academics assemble themselves, or not, with the law school serving as a vendor for independent academic practice, or not. In PSA, academics employ university and college services, but not the other way around. Dan might like the reputation, location, fixed facilities and registrar services that PCL offers, but PSA gives him the (legal and operational) liberty to select other familiar vendor options or those that might emerge in a professional model for higher education.

[A video that describes how PSA offers community integration that universities and colleges cannot.]

The SBC requirement for fixed facilities can be met anywhere in Los Angeles or beyond. In a wholesale model like PSA, functions (services) like enrolment and registration become regional, state or national concerns overseen by professional bodies comparable to the American Bar Association or the SBC, what I have called, the State Tower of California (STC), but conducted on the frontline in academic practice. I repeat, this is feasible because the functions of a university or college that support the teaching, researching and community servicing of academics are not unique or exclusive to these institutional vendors. Throughout our communities, service and facilitation for higher education exists or might emerge in a professional model. To get a sense of what service and facilitation is currently available to licensed professional academics in independent practice, just have a look at the downtime for facilitates at both secondary and post-secondary institutions, but also have a look at the back log of maintenance and repair on campuses across the US, Canada, UK, Australia…

Lingering here on functions (services), we can explore an implication connected to the sixth item of institutional noncompliance from the SBC:

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.

Enrollment, registration, recording-keeping, degree requirements, qualifications for licensure, and more can be assumed by the STC of PSA higher education. The inheritance and the profession share this (and other) important higher education functions that are partially vested in institutions and partially vested in individuals across varied distribution and weight.

So, which of these arrangements – the institutional or the professional – is the better safeguard for records of higher education earning and learning? What are the chances that ABA- or SBC-style recordkeeping would be compliant with or relevant to STC laws, rules, and guidelines for recordkeeping in professional higher education practice? How could these macro-functions be realized in STC? How could the STC be used to better ensure micro-functions like timely grade submission?

No one knows.

Another of the institutional compliance issues identified by the Board of Examiners was the late submission of student grades – in an underfunded, volunteer institution, no less. Would grades be routinely late if gainful academic work depended upon the satisfaction of students who pay practitioners directly for services (and stewardship) using open-access data bases and analytics that provide information on the teaching, researching and community servicing of academics, including data on average marks, course completion rates, failure to meet submission deadlines, complaints, their STC disciplinary record, student evaluations, community service record, and whatever else might be found useful in a professional model? When faculty employees of the inheritance submit grades late, what happens to them and how is this behaviour managed? Does the university or college maintain a public record of late grade submission across their faculty employees? Would the students in PSA higher education be more or less likely to come rapping at an adjunct employee's shared-office door demanding grades or the office door of an independent solo professional academic practice?

No one knows.

Late grade submission can be an issue, it has been with me. But it is not a problem, and the social pillar has many serious problems that something like the SBC, Board of Examiners does not or cannot address. We can use the remaining institutional noncompliance findings to explore how PSA offers better quality, integrity, and liberty in higher education micro-, meso-, and meta-functions.

Where quality is concerned, the Board found,

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.

What is the curriculum at PCL? Is it like that found a few blocks away at Berendo Middle School? Or more like that at LAUSD Division of Adult and Career Education near the Harbor Freeway? Is it like that of Cambridge, Cornell, or Coahoma? Is the curriculum unique on the legal landscape or just boutique? What is a sound legal education? Does PCL determine that? Does Dan determine that? How about the SBC, ABA or something like the STC?

We gettin’ warmer nah bruh…

PSA responds to these and other key questions by leaning on the inheritance, adopting and adapting what the institutions have been doing for centuries, turning things inside out or upside down, but certainly not working within an inherited geometry because universities and colleges are part of the problem. Meta-functions, like curriculum development, degree requirements, admissions standards, codes of conduct, evaluation standards, and the like are addressed above and elsewhere, certainly enough to start the willing down the road. Here the question is about soundness across micro, meso and macro aspects of higher education.

PSA responds with a notion like the STC, which is analogous to the SBC and its Board of Examiners. The STC has Examiners, or it can in some versions of the professional model. The sort of Examiner envisioned thirty years ago when PSA was created is a position, a role, a function, perhaps a career, likely an expectation, but maybe even a requirement of licensed academic practice in good standing with the Professional Society of Academics.

As a fee service, a career in academic practice, or an (un)compensated condition of professional licensure, STC Examiners – what the PSA model originally called Evaluators – might function both as assessors of course materials, evaluation methods, degree requirements, program curricula, etc., and evaluators of student, lecturer, support staff and government performances. With this sort of depth, breadth, transparency, democracy, accountability, mutuality, and autonomy, the notion of diversity being parried these days with institutional footnotes for realization is better formulated and accommodated in a professional model of service and stewardship. But here the focus is on what the SBC calls sound (legal) education, as it relates to (legal) curricula.

In PSA, there are no top-ranked to bottom-ranked law schools as we understand them in the inheritance. In this series, the People’s College of Law (PCL) is presented as either a service vendor or a limited liability partnership among professionally licensed academics (and support staff), who hang a shingle that reads: “Active Legal Education: Where Academics and Attorneys Meet, LLP.”

PSA has no need for the universitas of a university or college, though there might still be uses for them. PSA is a professional model with an STC that oversees and supports Examiners who, over time, error, race, sex, culture, gender, geography, economy, and other relevant input, help to secure for higher education better soundness, integrity, liberty, diversity, and other ‘itys.

In PSA, there are top- and bottom-ranked curricula, courses, practitioners, textbooks, lecture notes, academic partnerships, or whatever serves the purposes, services, and stewardships of profession-based higher education. PSA invites courses, programs of study, credentials, and so on in everything from the eccentric to the vanilla because it uses Examiners to render community-wide, peer-based, professional academic opinion on the soundness of this education or that curriculum, this degree or that exam, this course or that program, this academic or that partnership, this student essay or that group presentation, and so much more, all with centuries of time on the (chess) timer to nurture soundness, inclusiveness, inventiveness, and other ‘nesses.

The inheritance has a comparable peer-review practice, though it is not commonly made public, and, at best, it is only used (contentiously) in some institutions some of the time on some of the input to (higher) education. PSA puts this inherited practice on steroids, describing a framework for assessment and evaluation of academic work produced by professional academics and their students that does not restrict much, including curriculum, to the expectations, capacities and requirements of universities and governments. PSA is a body of professional academics that ranks, classifies, categorizes or otherwise measures the service of peers (and development of students) using Examiners who are licensed, supported, disciplined and measured under the STC and who are among the practitioners that support their families on income from students who directly pay for higher education using their tax dollars, effectively cutting out middlemen gatekeepers and overseers like institutional employers and enrollers.

This take on the SBC’s Board of Examiners is part of a PSA strategy for quality insurance and assurance that does not require the closure, nor existence, of People’s or Harvard’s law schools. What PSA does require is that academics like the American Association of University Professors, faculty employees of higher education institutions and the labour unions that represent employee interests get their heads out of their collective assumptions and meet their social contract obligations, starting with researching the plausibility or desirability of a professional model, so that one day we might earn and learn as free academics, not forced employees.

Here is one way Examiners might function in support of sound academic service: Under STC legislation, Dan can or is required to submit his course syllabus, teaching and evaluating materials, samples of student work that contribute to final grades, and whatever else might aid in an anonymous, crowd-sourced, peer-assessment of his Criminal Evidence and Procedures course (say, during 2020-21) by fellow licentiates of the academic profession, which is then made available to the public (along with analytics). Over time, this data base can yield reliable insight into the quality of services offered by every single practicing frontline professional academic, whether in solo or partnered practice, enabling students, employers and society to get a finer-grained sense of education and credential soundness throughout the good we seek in higher education earning and learning.

The thing is, if we have in place this sort of professional gatekeeping and oversight for higher education (soundness), then what need is there of accreditation and how do the two models compare? Do we need accreditation because we need collegiality in higher education and universities and colleges are the (best) way to encourage, facilitate, and develop it? Do we need accreditation for frosh week, the play-offs, and swag? How about for studying Plato or Plank (with me or some other academic)? Is accreditation needed to satisfy desire for power and control (by me or some other academic)?

I bet you know.

But don’t get too hung up on this version of PSA-style soundness, or gatekeeping and oversight. The universities and colleges have operated for centuries with quality insurance and assurance mechanism that are far less objective, informative, robust, or effective. I marked and submitted final grades (often late) for the thousands of students I serviced on precarious contract with institutional enrollers that sell their brand to students I find scheduled in my courses on Mondays and Wednesdays – and without the aid of a marker, though I always asked for one to help feed students. But even if this centuries-old assessment and evaluation apparatus for the inherited brand of soundness found in institutions were to remain in PSA, the professional model promises so much more by way of improvement over the inheritance that the favorite to win remains PSA.

Meanwhile, AAUP and the gang offer stewardship band-aids to manage, or is it navigate, it’s certainly negotiate with unnecessary employers and unreliable funders, while they block me on their social media. Universities and colleges, accreditation agencies, and government bureaucracies form an umbrella of gatekeeping and oversight in which the SBC Board of Examiners find:

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.

 and

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.

Since institutions like PCL are either a vendor, a partnership, or non-existent in a model that borrows from the familiar, tested joint (professional) apparatus for attorney oversight in law and institution (academic) oversight in higher education, it should not be too difficult to draft further PSA interpretations of SBC Guidelines, Rules, Laws, Reports, Hearings, and the rest of its functions. But to help flesh out some more of the soundness in education, gatekeeping and oversight that PSA offers, consider the nuts and bolts of STC functions where technology is concerned.

Years ago, I wrote about the relationship that is possible between technology and (the work of) academics, if PSA is in place. There is no doubt that the centralized administrative and managerial functions of STC can be facilitated by technology that is already in use by universities and colleges, government departments, banks, libraries, and other relevant institutions, covering everything from escrow to scholarship, from grant application to insurance plan, from concept to classroom. Think of the existing federal loan and national application systems in your country, or the communication and recordkeeping systems for learning management, grade submission, feedback, or the plethora of tech that enables open, on-demand access to higher education.

Technology is here and coming. PSA squarely places the power and responsibility to shape its use and value in the hands of the academics who provide teaching, researching and community servicing in a model that subordinates institutional employer-enrollers and dampens the negative personal and public effects of precarious funding, working and learning in higher education.

Of course, even with the slimming effects of technology on personnel, the heritage of institutional higher education is one of (occupational) status and hierarchy with a steady stream of owners and overseers, administrators and managers, boards and investors, who individually and as a class, have sought (with success) to consolidate their individual and collective power, as shaped by the inheritance they assume.

But if the American Bar Association and the State Bar of California are any indication, then the threat of a bloated, powerful, tyrannical administrative or managerial class in higher education is less likely to emerge or be orchestrated in a professional model. As basis for this hypothesis that is made possible by PSA, consider some numbers from California.

Supposing you were one of the 1,565,065 full-time equivalent students who managed to land a spot in a Golden institution during 2023, your learning was backed by almost $30 billion in state and local tax appropriations used by institutions to employ 77,000 full time equivalent faculty in conditions ranging from precarious adjunct to tenured professor, supported with a staff of roughly the same number (and precarity). Not including the billion-plus taxpayer dollars spent on government bureaucracy for appropriations, accreditation, student loans, and other oversight apparatus and using only the general operating appropriations, that comes to public expenditure of $13,323 per FTE student.

By comparison, with budgeted expenses of $286.5 million, an 8-person executive, and a 13-person board, the State Bar of California provides oversight and support for some 190,000 active status attorneys who earn in conditions ranging from solo and partnered practice to practice as an employee or as a volunteer in service and stewardship to the over 6 million Californians who sought legal services in 2023.

Among other things, this suggests that it might be possible to double the number of academics in circulation for less than it costs now to employ half that number of faculty in universities and colleges, with stewardship that costs the public a fraction of the inherited apparatus that is being held together with band-aids like tenure, shared governance and academic freedom in a parade of assumption, if ever there was one.

How much of the $30 billion is spent covering comparable functions to those the SBC is legislated to perform? How much of that $30 billion is spent on administration and management of the inheritance? How much on the service and stewardship of faculty across the system? How much would service and stewardship cost taxpayers if technology is introduced by frontline professional gatekeeping and oversight? How much of the $13,323 per FTE student would I need to gainfully (and legally) provide higher education service and stewardship in philosophy, with technology collectively and individually employed by professional peers?

Someone knows and no one knows.

There is not much to say against a profession that shapes gatekeeping and oversight in higher education employing technology it deems useful and appropriate to frontline practice, especially when history tells us technology in the hands of employers is a risky proposition for employees and higher education employers are no exception. Just ask the unions trying to protect against redundancy in the UK or the venture capitalists that drool over AI in (higher) education. Just ask the people who lost access to higher education when the People’s College of Law was closed or when the executive gutted West Virginia University, along with all the other loss due to institutional closures, redundancies, underfunding, (geo)politics, (geo)economics and the rest, across a globe that knows nothing but the institutional inheritance.

This is so though I have offered PSA to attorneys, legal organizations, law schools, legal centers, and graduate programs in law. I have offered it to colleges that are closing, programs that are shutting down, and institutions that find themselves under the tyranny of some president or board of governors. I have given it to labour unions and student unions. I have given it to the Presidents, Prime Ministers, and Gang Leaders of countries.

I’m reminded of a YouTube Short where a random old guy shuffles by some influencer in a public square, “If God exists, why is there so much evil in the world?” It was an intellectual hit and run in response to which the influencer declares for the audience, “See, that’s the problem. A lack of intellectual honesty.”

The Problem of Evil is wonderful to explore, notably because honesty is a prerequisite, not a perquisite, for intelligent exploration of the subject. Maybe the senior citizen was late for a blind date with a Witness from Utah, but the influencer is not wrong. The disposition, ability and time to be critical of one’s beliefs, convictions, expectations, values, and the rest, not to mention the mass of assumptions we rely on with ignorance, this sort of philosophical reasoning is rare, especially on matters with deep cultural and conceptual roots that have taken hold over long histories like those enjoyed by universities, colleges, and houses of worship. In this context, SBC found that PCL did not meet the compliance standard for institutional honesty,

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.

Inherited integrity is shady business, especially when the trait is applied to a long record of institutional integrity and that of those individuals who people and peddle the universities and colleges. Of all the problems in higher education that are based in the inheritance that PSA aims to mitigate or correct, failure of integrity is probably the most impactful. It’s also quite a crease in law and medicine, suggesting these established professions serve as questionable references for a model of professional (higher education) service and stewardship. But if the sins of the fathers are to be tallied in judgement of a (theoretical) PSA, then the bar is not set very high given the (actual) heritage of university and college integrity.

It might be said that my shot hits the wrong target, the wrong category of being. Institutions like universities and colleges are not to be blamed for lapses of integrity in higher education. It’s the actions of individuals, employees like Francesca Gino and Claudine Gay, who challenge the integrity of higher education and the higher education institutions that select them through employment.

Yeah, yeah, maybe. I can lay out a few reasons to think this qualification is support for PSA, rather than criticism, but I’m tired. I’ll turn out the light with this. To throw a Gino, Gay, or some more sinister challenge to Wissenschaftsfreiheit on a pyre to protect the virtue, honor and integrity of universities and colleges is weak stewardship for higher education. It places the burden of stewardship for honesty, in the wrong institution, at the wrong level, with the wrong weight on the wrong people, at the wrong price, paid by the wrong people to the wrong institution.

It's hard to know what to make of an academe that reasons it’s better to remain employees in some monopolistic, manipulative, mangling employment arrangement in fulfillment of one’s social contract obligations, than to supplement or replace this inheritance with the improvements in education, economics and emancipation that PSA promises. I have run it around in my head for years. If you have some idea, please let me know. I’m always open to discourse and comment.