The Professional Society of Academics New Tender Book

After thirty years of developing an alternative to the higher education institution model of our inheritance, I am pleased to share the comprehensive manuscript of A New Tender for the Higher Education Social Contract. You can read and download the complete text here:

A New Tender

For centuries, dialogue and debate surrounding higher education has been trapped inside the container of the corporate campus, treating university and college employer-enrollers as the only viable and desirable portrait of higher education. The New Tender dissolves that Byzantine goldleaf. It demonstrates that the runaway costs, adjunct precarity, student debt, and institutional censorship plaguing the sector are not failures of higher education itself, but structural pathologies of the legacy institutions--universities and colleges (Universitas). Higher education is an activity of scholars, apprentices, and citizens; it has never required the institutional middleman to exist, let alone thrive.

Rather than offering another toothless plea to reform the company town, this book delivers the complete architectural, financial, and ethical blueprint for its replacement: the Professional Society of Academics. Moving from first principles to granular balance sheets, the book details how higher education can be reconstituted as an autonomous, self-governing statutory public corporation (Societas). It models the full micro-financial reality of independent practice—guaranteeing $120,000 net professional compensation for licensed scholars, a mandatory $38,400 living-wage floor for graduate teaching assistants, leased civic seminar spaces, and double-blind peer quality assurance, all while slashing the public cost of social good by over 60%. 

I offer this work free of copyright, with no strings attached, as an exploration of genuine possibility for researchers, graduate workers, and anyone searching for a way out of the current collapse of institutional higher education.  

As always, I welcome your critique, engagement, and collaboration.