Meeting Academic Duty Until I Die

I have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). This is an uncurable, terminal condition better known by the name, Lou Gehrig’s Disease, after the early twentieth century baseball player and which in more recent times was made familiar to us in the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking.

In a bit of Morrisette irony, my immediately previous post here on the Professional Society of Academic (PSA) blog opened with this shot across the bow of organizations like the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA):

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.

Because it is present from the moment of conception, we don’t think to factor in death as an end to our aims and efforts. We don’t phrase things this way: I want to be a teacher, if I grow up. I certainly didn’t factor in death when at 56 I retired, discovered for myself new technology called a Constitutional AI, and switched into high gear a PSA initiative meant to raise awareness for a professional alternative to the monopoly of inherited university and college employer-enrollers that everyone assumes without question. Being otherwise in very good health, I assumed at least another twenty years of effort aimed at improving the sorry state of higher education. I now expect to be dead within a year.

Prior to the triggering of this built-in silencer, the AAUP tried to silence my efforts by blocking me on social media (X or Twitter) and by changing the Comment Policy on their Academe Blog website to bar me from posting comments or articles. In this light, I suppose my death will provide them with some relief because, though no one thinks of themselves as the bad guy, these self-appointed champions for freedom of speech and expression must recognize their silencing of me is inconsistent and improper, especially since their censorial actions seem grounded in ignorance of the higher education that PSA offers individuals and society. If only, like life, ignorance had an inevitable built-in off switch.

Fighting What Can’t Be Beaten

Entropy is the first law of nature so there is no point in trying to deny death. But when it comes to social institutions, we ought to make effort to push back against the decay of disorder for each new generation that is born into institutions which they rely upon to shape lives and communities. Directly and indirectly, all members of society have roles to play in institutions, but here I speak of the academic and the social good of higher education, which is not the same as speaking of the higher education institutions (HEIs) we know of as universities and colleges. These HEIs are mere tools, mere means of facilitation, not to be identified with the institution of higher education or the individuals who serve this social good.

Academics must question, doubt, challenge. This is their foundational function. But to effectively perform this social service they must also understand. Understanding and questioning are partners in an intellectual dance that academics are expected to perform with excellence. In search of a dance partner, I have directly contacted more than a thousand public-sector academics across the world, as my social media engagement has indirectly reached thousands more. None but a number that I can count on one hand has met their obligation to question the higher education model they assume or to understand the unique alternative found in PSA. Has any academic who earns a living in these HEIs ever asked of their employer or their personal role in serving the social good questions like these sixty-one that I pose, including:

To my knowledge, academics have not questioned their assumption of university and college employer-enrollers as the sole means of providing and protecting higher education. Instead, well-educated and social-minded stewards such as the AAUP have introduced coping policies like tenure and shared governance, and principles like academic freedom and due process, all of which are defined entirely by the finance and employment arrangements found in the inherited HEI model monopoly.

The AAUP essentially conceded mission failure in the late 1970s when what was originally a professional association aiming to cooperate with institutional employers in the service and stewardship of the social good found that executing their policies and principles required labor unions that stand on sidewalks waving signs with slurs for their institutional co-workers. Made in the ignorant assumption of an inheritance, this Starbucks stewardship has only moved academics and higher education further down the road of an adversarial us-versus-them mentality and perverse notion of worker solidarity. While the AAUP has only managed to further ensure the employification of academic labor, right in front of them, from the very inception of the organization, was another possibility like the one created in PSA, where academics are independent professional practitioners like those we find in law and medicine.

How might a model of professionally licensed and supported higher education practice for academics address some of the socio-political problems that routinely undermine higher education? If there is no institutional employer to threaten one’s livelihood, then isn’t one much freer to live by their personal and professional political, ethical or religious convictions? How might the professional practice of higher education outside the HEI employers reduce the cost of providing and protecting the social good? How might the notions of diversity, equity and inclusion be defined, delivered and defended outside the exclusivity of HEI employment and enrollment? 

Academics don’t have the answers to such questions, because they have failed to preform their fundamental social function: to ask the question.

For asking such questions with PSA answers in hand and for imploring publicly paid academics to do the same, organizations like the Association of McGill Professors of Law (or Association McGillienne des Professeur.e.s de Droit) also blocked me on X (Twitter) during their most recent sidewalk slandering. This is the labor union that represents faculty employees of the McGill University Faculty of Law, many of whom are licensed, practicing attorneys. If I can’t get through to these hybrid attorney-academic types who have the contrast of the HEI employee-enrollee and independent professional PSA models staring them in the face, then what academics can be awakened to their social contract obligation to question the institutional inheritance under which we all labor!?

To faculty employees and student enrollees, I have offered PSA as a purely intellectual tool. Being an original, fully developed, alternative model to the only one that has existed for centuries, PSA offers a class or thesis on higher education, political rights and freedoms, philosophy of education, education law, organizational psychology, sociology, history, and so on a comparative with which to test field assumptions and generate insights. Whether or not PSA is ever implemented, its existence enables explorations not possible in academic work that operates under the myopathy of our inheritance.

For instance, I was sitting with some professors having lunch the other day when one said, “Higher education is simply not for everyone.” I pointed out that setting aside the fact that liberal arts and trades college institutions both contain poor students who should not be enrolled, the phrase, “not for everyone,” is tacitly and fundamentally defined by the singular HEI model of our inheritance. Many societies set a high school diploma as a minimum general education for its citizens, with post-secondary education of all types taking on a more vocational orientation. I noted, however, that in no small part this is so because the cost of mass higher education under the HEI model is extremely high for individuals and society but that if the cost of providing education beyond secondary was cut in half or even to a third of the HEI model finances, then societies might raise the minimum education bar for citizens who are expected to live longer with each generation. (Financial Analyses of PSA: Canada, Australia, United States.) In such a PSA world, perhaps higher education does become for everyone, or at least for a hell of a lot more of everyone, with the minimum education bar for citizens is raised to an undergraduate degree and higher education becoming something people pursue throughout their adult lives.

Over the centuries, the university and college employer-enroller monopoly has shaped every principle, policy, practice, and possibility in higher education. Talk of reform or revolution is only talk of change within the boundaries of this assumed, unchallenged institutional model. Take the example of digital technology. Much of it is introduced in response to the rising public cost and private debt associated with university and college facilitation of higher education.

The best education I received, and I believe anyone can receive, is in small face-to-face group interactions among students and educators. But that sort of coverage in mass higher education is not feasible given the exorbitant expense of our inheritance; and even if the HEI model was provided with all the public and private money needed to accomplish such educational coverage, the increase in cost of such service and stewardship would only make the social good more vulnerable to political and market controls.

Technology like massive open online courses and classroom clickers are neither necessary nor recommended. PSA enables academics on the frontline of higher education to collectively and individually decide for themselves what technology is necessary and recommended, in contrast to the current policy and practice of leaving such decisions to institutional employer-enrollers that are influenced by capitalists, politicians, and disingenuous, dysfunctional (labor) organization like the American Association of University Professors.

Change the model, change everything. 

Death And Duty

As Stephen Hawking demonstrated, ALS leaves the mind intact while it disintegrates the muscles of the body from toe to tongue. I now have distorted and labored speech, so the professor professes far less. My right arm and hand have lost much of their strength, so the writer writes far less. But already on this blog, I have communicated all that needs to be if someone is looking for another way to provide and protect the social good of higher education. I have shown how and why PSA is viable and desirable, covering important topics like operations, finance, quality and freedom.

I cannot seem to successfully invite academics to this intellectual dance and certainly I can’t if they bar me from the floor, as the AAUP and others like the McGill Law School faculty employees have done. But that does not absolve these academics of their duty, their obligation to consider alternatives, to expose and challenge their assumptions. For me, only death can release me from that duty. As always, I invite your participation in the PSA project, with or without me.