The AAUP, the PSA and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni

Continuously and effectively, I criticize the institutional inheritance of university and college employer-enrollers that’s monopolized the facilitation of higher education for nearly a millennium now. I have more recently directed my criticism at the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which claims to be a champion of all things related to this inherited higher education institutional (HEI) model. I have been working on this social good reform or revolution project for over thirty years, ever since I invented the Professional Society of Academics (PSA) model as replacement or complement for the HEI model.

There are only two ways to stop me from criticizing the ignorant, irresponsible assumption of universities and colleges: Someone or some group that has more reach and authority than myself takes up the PSA project or someone refers me to material that successfully argues a professional model for higher education service and stewardship is not viable or desirable. In the meantime, my immediate strategy is to make the AAUP the focus of PSA criticism. To that end, here is the first in a series of posts that criticizes the policies, practices and actions of this organization over its 110 years of ignorant, irresponsible and unnecessary stewardship. I will be forwarding these posts to critics of the AAUP, of which there are a growing number, particularly during this period of social, political and fiscal unrest that is but one more instance in a long history of HEI model unrest.

The first organization to be explored that criticizes the AAUP is the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). Here is how the ACTA describes itself:

Launched in 1995, we are the only organization that works with alumni, donors, trustees, and education leaders across the United States to support liberal arts education, uphold high academic standards, safeguard the free exchange of ideas on campus, and ensure that the next generation receives an intellectually rich, high-quality college education at an affordable price.

Notice that this wonderful vision refers to higher education – teaching, researching community servicing – as "college education," as though university and college employer-enrollers are identical to the social good, rather than being but one means of its facilitation. This is because, like everyone at the AAUP, these self-proclaimed guardians of the social good assume the HEI model lock, stock and barrel, even if the barrel is pointed at the people that the AAUP and ACTA claim to serve and steward.

In 2014, the ACTA published a report, "Governance for a New Era: A Blueprint for Higher Education Trustees," which identifies problems such as:

• High Costs and Low Value: A majority of Americans believe they are not getting good value for their investment in higher education. Tuition has risen far above inflation, and student debt has topped one trillion dollars.
• Declining Quality and Preparedness: Many graduates are leaving college ill-equipped for careers, lacking fundamental skills and knowledge of their own history and heritage.
• Erosion of Academic Freedom: The authors express concern that political correctness is undermining the free exchange of ideas and that professional organizations are de-emphasizing faculty accountability. 
• Ineffective Governance: "Lay governance," once a strength, is now a liability. Many trustees have seen their role as passive "boosters, cheerleaders, and donors" rather than active fiduciaries. They often lack access to independent, objective data on crucial issues like student learning and academic quality.

The report provides a blueprint for what it considers effective governance, urging trustees to take a more active and authoritative role. Trustees are described as the ultimate guardians of the institution's mission, financial health, and core values. They are urged to:

• Have the "Last Word": While faculty should have the "first word" on curriculum, trustees must be the "last and determining voice" on academic value and strategy. They must be prepared to intervene, even against faculty wishes, when urgently needed reforms are necessary.
• Define the Mission: A primary responsibility is to articulate a clear, unambiguous institutional mission to combat "mission creep," which drives up costs and stretches resources thin.
• Protect Academic Freedom and Institutional Neutrality: The report states trustees have the final authority and responsibility to protect academic freedom for both faculty and students. They should also ensure the institution remains neutral on political and social issues, citing the University of Chicago's Kalven Report as a model.
• Oversee Academic Quality and Integrity: Trustees must ensure the curriculum is coherent and rigorous, prevent the proliferation of "exotic and narrowly focused" general education courses, and demand objective, data-driven evidence of student learning through nationally-normed assessments.

A central theme of the ACTA report is the need for boards to make decisions based on objective, data-driven metrics rather than relying solely on information provided and filtered by the administration. The report calls for:

• Key Performance Dashboards: Trustees should insist on a dashboard of key measures, including graduation rates, administrative vs. instructional spending, building utilization, and grading trends to monitor for grade inflation.
• Improved Presidential Selection: Boards should take full charge of the presidential selection process, warning that executive search firms are often conflicted and drive up salaries.
• Trustee Education and Selection: The report calls for governors and legislatures to appoint more qualified trustees and for boards to require ongoing professional development for their members to ensure they are well-informed.

Ultimately, the report is a call for boards of trustees to assert their fiduciary authority more forcefully, acting as a "mediating agent between the interests of the institution and the needs of the surrounding society" to restore public trust and ensure the long-term health and academic integrity of American higher education.

The ACTA report provides a stark and largely accurate diagnosis of the crisis facing American higher education, correctly identifying high costs, declining quality, and a profound failure of governance as critical sources of the problem. However, the proposed remedy—a more muscular and authoritative board of trustees—represents a doubling down on the flawed institutional logic that created and perpetuates the reoccurrence of such crises. From a Professional Society of Academics (PSA) perspective, ACTA's blueprint is an attempt to perfect a broken tool, whereas a truly new era requires a different model altogether.

On the Role and Authority of Trustees: A Misplaced Locus of Power

The ACTA report argues that lay boards of trustees must be the ultimate guardians of higher education, empowered with the "last and determining voice regarding academic value, academic quality, and academic strategy". They must be prepared to "intervene when internal constituencies are unable or unwilling to institute urgently needed reforms”, even when their decisions "depart from faculty wishes". This vision of empowered "lay governance" is presented as the solution to the failures of "shared governance," which the report dismisses as a potential "excuse for board inaction".

From a PSA perspective, this is a fundamental misplacement of authority. The core PSA principle of inherent academic authority posits that the ultimate stewardship of academic standards, curriculum, and quality must reside with the academic professionals themselves—the experts who perform the essential work of higher education. ACTA’s proposal to give the "final authority" to a board of non-expert fiduciaries undermines this principle.

The report correctly identifies that shared governance within the HEI model is often a dysfunctional, adversarial process. However, its solution is simply to ensure one side of that adversarial relationship—the employer (represented by the board)—wins. PSA proposes a more fundamental solution: eliminate the adversarial employer-employee structure entirely. Instead of "lay governance," PSA is built on professional self-governance. In this model, the academic profession itself, through a democratically constituted and legislatively sanctioned Professional Society, holds the public trust. Authority over academic matters is not "shared" with or subordinate to an employer; it is wielded by the profession directly, in a direct social contract with the public.

 

On Transparency and Accountability: Top-Down Metrics vs. Ground-Up Mechanisms

The report's call for data-driven decision-making, transparency, and objective evidence of student learning is laudable. ACTA's demand that trustees receive assessments of student learning via "nationally-normed instruments" and monitor a "dashboard of key, carefully defined measures" reflects a genuine need for accountability.

However, the mechanism it proposes is a top-down, managerial one, where an external board reviews institutional data to police the performance of its employees. PSA achieves a more radical and effective form of transparency and accountability through mechanisms embedded directly into the professional practice.

• Objective Crowd-Sourced Evaluation and Assessment (OCSEA): Instead of trustees demanding periodic, high-level reports on student learning, PSA's OCSEA model provides for the continuous, objective, and peer-based evaluation of student work at the course level. This generates granular, real-time evidence of learning that is far more direct and meaningful than any "dashboard" reviewed by a board.
• Public Performance Records (PPRs): Rather than trustees reviewing "final grade trends" to spot grade inflation, PSA proposes PPRs for every licensed practitioner. This would make data on student outcomes, pass/fail rates, and peer evaluation of course materials transparent to students, colleagues, and the public. Accountability becomes direct and continuous, driven by professional reputation and student choice, not by intermittent board oversight.

In conclusion, ACTA's "new era" is still fundamentally the old era of the HEI model. Its blueprint seeks to empower trustees as more effective institutional managers. The PSA model proposes a truly new era by replacing the logic of lay institutional governance with that of professional self-governance. In this model, the authority, transparency, and accountability that ACTA rightly calls for are not imposed from the top down by a board of fiduciaries; they are inherent in the structure of a profession of autonomous practitioners who are directly responsible for the social good they are licensed to provide.

This does not mean that the ACTA suggestion for a lay board has no place in the PSA higher education model. As a professional model of service and stewardship, academics are licensed, supported and disciplined by a legislated professional body, as one finds in the legal and medical professions. Only with the sort of transparency that PSA offers the public, such a board mechanism can be more effectively and appropriately used as oversight for higher education professional practitioners, not higher education institutional employer-enrollers. This gives the public a more direct and impactful role on the frontline of the social good, without the need for quasi-experts on the board of an institutional intermediary. This is because the Society of the PSA model does not hire and fire, it does not determine curriculum direction for some HEI, nor does it hire and fire a college or university president.

I extend to the ACTA the same in invitation to investigate the PSA model that I have in the past, and as I have to the AAUP. The faculty union has not only ignored me, it has blocked me on X and from commenting on their Academe Blog. I can only hope that the ACTA is more sincere in their self-description than is the AAUP.