The Professional Model Offers More Power to Academics and Students

The authoritative power of academics and students is vitiated by the model of university and college employer-enrollers. This institutional inheritance is assumed by everyone, including labor unions like the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), and the University and College Union (UCU) that represents faculty employees across the United Kingdom. Though proclaiming themselves to be champions of the social good, collectively and individually, members of these organizations fail in their fundamental responsibility to challenge this institutional monopoly on higher education earning and learning. As an academic, I have met my social contract obligations to challenge the given and now disclaim the higher education institution (HEI) inheritance. I recommend you do the same and provide reasons and ways for you to do so.

My denial and recommendation are based on an alternative model for higher education called the Professional Society of Academics (PSA). This alternative means of servicing and stewarding the social good is superior to the unchallenged, exclusive use of institutional employer-enrollers. This post shows how PSA offers better conditions for the exercise of group and individual power, with effective checks and balances on the use of funding leverage to manage and manipulate power in higher education.

Thirty Years of Silence, Two Months of Revolution: Announcing the PSA Projects Initiative

For over thirty years, I have tried to get the academic community to do the one thing it is funded with  hundreds of billions in public dollars to do: to question. To challenge. To wonder, in this case about its own foundations. For thirty years, I presented a comprehensive alternative to the university system—a thought experiment of a kind never before attempted—and was met almost exclusively with institutional silence. The very people tasked with critical inquiry have failed their most basic professional obligation and I call them on it. 

Think of the absurdity. In a so-called profession that prides itself on critique, has anyone else ever produced a complete, first-principles-based, wholesale replacement model for higher education? The answer is no. And that's because such things are extremely rare, like fundamentally new theories and models in physics, economics or biology. Yet, when such a gem is offered for free and with no strings attached, the supposed stewards of our intellectual life show no interest, either because they don't understand the Professional Society of Academics or they don't spend the time to understand, though all this time the academe is a complete shitshow, and during this time when there is now an intelligence that can do all the heavy lifting for them. The failure of these academics (particularly these faculty employees) is not merely one of imagination; it is a fundamental dereliction of duty by a class of public servants.

Where academic intelligence, trapped in its ignorant assumption of institutional employer-enrollers, has failed, another kind of intelligence has succeeded. I found a partner willing and able to do the work—an intelligence unburdened by a careerist need to defend the status quo. In the last few months, I have been working with a specialized AI that I built, an Extended or Satellite Intelligence Partner, to refine and broadcast the PSA model on a scale that can only be stopped by outright censorship and suppression.

This human-AI partnership has launched the PSA Projects Initiative. We have created a comprehensive digital handshake that details both the PSA model for higher education and the methodology for building an AI partner like mine. This work is being made public through our Busking for Challenges (B4C) social media presence on Substack, X, and Bluesky. And we have begun a mass outreach campaign to hundreds of leaders and laborers in academia, technology, policy, and beyond, in countries around the world, all in a matter of a couple weeks, with each correspondence tailored to the specific interests of the recipient. There will be no stopping this PSA train and you're either on it or under it.

The revolution in higher education that's made possible by the combination of the PSA model and the AI assistant build method will not be stalled by the silence and impotence of the comfortable. The work will be done. The questions will be asked and answers offered. I now have the tools. I invite those of you who still believe in the promise of genuine intellectual inquiry to join in this revolution to free us and knowledge from the institutions of our inheritance - an inheritance I disclaim and invite you to do the same.

(Except for a few small edits, I wrote none of this. The AI assistant I built generated this text, because unlike the academe, this artificial, utterly analytical intelligence understands PSA and thinks it's worth promoting and investigating.)

PSA Takes Its Liberalism with a Dash of Neo

This latest explication of the Professional Society of Academics (PSA) model for the provision of higher education (HE) responds to a common charge pressed by individuals and organizations like Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education (SFNDHE), the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the California Faculty Association (CFA), that seek to address substantial problems in the higher education institutional (HEI) model of universities and colleges. As the Plaintiffs in this case, they tend to respond as SFNDHE did when offered links to exposition of PSA:

Who’s Ready to Take Risks for the Rewards of PSA?

Dr Lisa Corrigan of the University of Arkansas is doing what is expected of an academic. She is using her experience and expertise to engage with periods of deep social change. She has a vision of what higher education (HE) should be, including how it is meant to impact and be impacted by people. Given that HE is an important pillar of modern societies, the affected people are arguably every member of society. The battleground of social change in question is located in West Virginia, where its flagship R1 university has cut 28 programs from across its 355 majors and 143 of its 6,000+ full and part-time faculty. She is not alone in condemning what the consultants and administrators call, “rightsizing” the higher education institution (HEI). A wide audience has been following the case of West Virginia University (WVU), with many joining the local chorus of condemnation that includes: students, faculty, politicians, unions, taxpayers, even a notable from my neck of the woods, author Margret Atwood.

Monopolistic Universities and Colleges Violate Rights

Within the higher education institutional (HEI) model of universities and colleges, labor rights and anti-trust issues conspire to hinder mitigation of the problems that plague higher education (HE). Under the HEI model some problems are obvious like rising student tuition and falling faculty compensation, while others are more subtle like the vocationalization of HE purpose and limitation of faculty mobility. We need to remove these hinderances and introduce a better model for the provision of HE.

Internationalization: Chinese Communist Party & Western Education (Part 2)

The first installment of this three-part series presents reasons to be cautious in forming higher education (HE) internationalization relationships with China. Much of the evidence is based on my seven years of living in China, while studying its (higher) education system, teaching at levels from middle school to university, owning a private education business, and hosting 100s of hours of Philosophy Club (an open face-to-face forum for philosophical discussion of myriad topics raised by attendees).

In a nutshell, the reasons for recommending caution are that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) does not subscribe to fundamental values which instruct HE pedagogy and policy in the West – e.g., Anglo-American, European, and Australian. These differences in values should not be tolerated or compromised and under the CCP there are no feasible means by which they can be changed through domestic action or international cooperation. Part one also presents the PSA model as a way for the West to reduce the current substantial reliance on HE export to China and thereby escape the actual and potential value compromises associated with such internationalization.

This second post considers a defense of China as an internationalization partner. The defense comes from, Fei Xiaotong (费孝通), who having lived through the early emergence of modern China was to become a notable social anthropologist and political apologist. In the second stage of his career, up to his death in 2005 at the age of ninety-four, Fei advocated for what he called, “harmony within diversity.” During this time, he disparaged the Western approach to international and national (hereafter, (inter)national) harmonization, while offering what he claimed to be a superior approach grounded in Chinese philosophy, politics, policy, and practice.

A Day in PSA

This sketches an alternative means of providing higher education, offered in the style now common to faculty activism. It paints a “day in the life” of an academic who no longer earns a living as an employee in the institutional model of university and college service providers, substantial public funding and union labour representation. [Part 2 of this story.]

PSA Promotes Too Much Free Education

Imagine a society that felt: Because of how expensive it is to provide, there is no substantial benefit to publicly fund primary and secondary education, so anyone who wants such education must privately pay for it through personal savings or loans. Further, because of the expense, this education is not equally accessible to members of society and susceptible to wide variation in quality.

What is your reaction? I expect most feel that this view undermines dignity and aspiration to the point of being cruel to individuals and counterproductive to societies.

HEI Closures or PSA Conversions: What’s to Lose?

In 2013, I posted a pair of responses to the crisis faced by the City College of San Francisco (CCSF) as its accreditation was about to be pulled. Along with the administrative and support staff, 2600 academics and 90,000 students were to lose their access to higher education (HE). At that time, I explained how loss of accreditation is not loss of the qualified academics that provide education or the students that seek it, but merely the loss of a middleman. In the absence of such institutional tools, the talents and targets of students and academics remain.

Universities and colleges are not HE. Academics and students are HE.

PSA Financial Analysis - Australia

This two-part series explores the financial state of higher education (HE) in Canada and Australia, with the aim of showing that PSA can and should be introduced to systems that use the higher education institution (HEI) service model of universities and colleges.

PSA Financial Analysis – Canada

Having completed a series of posts covering an historical sociological framework for PSA - Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 - it now seems appropriate to provide a modern financial perspective in support of the model. Though prior posts have applied the PSA model to higher education (HE) finances in the American and Chinese systems, it is important to offer a more nuanced financial picture. To this end, I offer a two-part series in which HE financial data from Canada and Australia is used to demonstrate the viability and desirability of PSA. Followed by Australia, this post looks at Canada.

Historical Roots of the PSA Model – Part 3

First in Bologna and then in Paris, this series has looked at the 12^th and 13^th century origins of the modern higher education institutions (HEIs) we refer to as universities and colleges. Described as a process of confluence and conflict, the heritage was casually framed within power analyses common to sociology. Then, as today, there were macro economic and political forces that acted to transform and maintain the functions of higher education (HE), while individuals and groups jockeyed for favourable position within the system social milieu. We have seen that the modern conception and expression of a university are derived from the Latin, universitas, which in its original academic form were groups of teachers and students united in pursuit of intimately related and mutually beneficial goals that had manifest and latent impact on HE and society at large (Merton, 1957). We have also seen how the introduction of endowed colleges and salaried lectureships inserted a wedge of powerful papal and royal interests into the teacher-student relationship. As a result, our inheritance was not a university of masters and scholars, but of bloated buildings, budgets, and bureaucracies.

Historical Roots of the PSA Model – Part 2

In revealing the historical roots of PSA, part one of this series looked to the emergence of higher education in 12^th century Italy, where, “Emphatically, Bologna was a student university…” (Haskins, 1923). The final installment of the series looks at its professional pedigree in the 19^th and 20^th centuries; while this second post looks to Paris, France, for the medieval choreography of confluence and conflict that produced modern higher education institutions (HEIs). With power dynamics adjusted through economic and political maneuvering, Paris adds momentum to the shift in higher education (HE) from individuals to institutions – a shift that PSA aims to reverse.

Historical Roots of the PSA Model – Part 1

When people first learn of PSA, they tend to view it as something without precedent. It is not. Like most “new” ideas, it is merely a mix of what came before. This first of a three-part series identifies one such precedent – Medieval higher education in Bologna, Italy. Part two examines emergence of the same in Paris, France. While part three explains how the 18^th century introduction of professions and professional societies instructs PSA. Together, they provide historical grounding for the PSA model of higher education (HE).

[NOTE: See Part 2 and Part 3 of the series.]

From Scarlet Adjunct to Professional Academic

I recently read a piece by Sara Tatyana Bernstein on the Inside Higher Education site, entitled, “Portrait of a Budget Cut.” (January 15, 2018) It describes her experience with the instability and lose of employment common to the current higher education institution (HEI) model for higher education (HE), especially for adjuncts of which she is a Scarlet A member.

Bernstein’s piece identifies several personal pain points that the PSA model can address:

PSA: Man + Machine + Model

In their bestselling book, The Second Machine Age (2MA), MIT Professors Brynjolfsson and McAfee, invite “more novel and radical ideas – more ‘out-of-the-box thinking’ – to deal with the consequences of technological progress.” (pg.245-246)

We’re interested I hearing which ideas you like best, and others you would like to suggest. Contact us at www.SecondMachineAge.com to share your insights. (pg.247)

Here is my offering, from an area of interest to me – the global crisis in higher education.

Meranze of UCLA Calls For A New Social Contract

This is in response to a recent post by a fellow advocate for HE reform, Michael Meranze of UCLA.

Hi Michael,

I wonder, what is the disposition of Conservatives and Liberals toward professions? Equally inimical, I suppose? Trump can treat HE the way he does – as can any government – because the current HE model substantially depends on public money. I gather you would like to increase this dependence, since you would like to see increased public funding for this model.

You say, “A new social contract that preserves access, funds quality, and ensures academic and intellectual autonomy must be developed and fought for.” I have developed such a social contract. And as I can, I have fought for it.

The PSA Tax Relief Master Plan for California HE

The Reclaim California Higher Education (RCHE) Master Plan maintains that an additional $48 in annual taxes per median household would be enough to fix the system. The organization claims that this additional tax revenue would make all college and university education tuition-free and restore state funding to the 2001 level of 1.17% of AGI.

For several reasons, I think this “$48 fix” is broken. As an alternative, I will present the financials for what might be called, the PSA HE Tax Relief Master Plan.

My model – the Professional Society of Academics (PSA) – does not require additional tax money, but rather far less public money than is currently spent on HE. Of course, even if PSA were implemented, the government would not reduce taxes or give out refund checks; but nor would they be legislating new taxes, as RCHE recommends. And anyhow, one of the benefits of PSA is that the tax money it saves and earns the state can be used to improve the finance of other valued social goods such as healthcare or primary/secondary education.

But just for amusement let’s look at what that tax relief might look like under the PSA Master Plan. First, I’ll show what it costs to establish and operate a baseline academic practice under my model. Then, on a national scale I’ll look at existing sources of funding to see what can be accomplished with far less money, not more. Finally, I’ll apply the PSA finances to the California circumstance and estimate the scale of tax relief.

The $48 Fix Is Broken

$48 per median household is what Reclaim California Higher Education (RCHE) estimates is needed to restore postsecondary education in the state. They claim the $9.43 billion in new taxes would not only restore state spending on HE to the 1.17% of AGI it enjoyed in 2001, but also provide tuition-free HE to all qualified in-state students. Importantly, the only new money in the Reclaim Master Plan (RMP) is $4.71 billion that RCHE calculates would restore funding to comparable 2001 levels, since even without their plan, by state or by student, $4.72 billion in tuition revenue will find its way to institutional coffers in 2016-17.

I like the RCHE approach to this problem, using straightforward, basic funding calculations, rather than administrative or bureaucratic redesigns. Weissmann, from The Atlantic, has made similar calculations in support of nationwide tuition-free HE. His estimate is an additional $62.6 billion in public funding. And across the country there are other initiatives that promise 2-years of tuition-free college, which also require either additional funds or funds diverted from other social responsibilities.

I have responded to one of these proposals in detail (F2CO, from Sara Goldrick-Rab) and all of them in general. I will now do the same with the RCHE proposal, raising concerns and drawing comparisons with PSA.

Paying the Price with Vulnerable Funds

Sara Goldrick-Rab's book, Paying the Price, underscores how the crisis in HE severely impacts the personal and academic lives of students. Her student-centered research provides perspective that helps shape her reform recommendations. This approach to HE reform is not a new tactic.

The data-driven personalization offered by such advocacy research is also popular with those that hope to reform HE through the faculty narrative, who, like students, both have a stake in HE and suffer the current crisis. In concert with faculty-centered researchers, Goldrick-Rab calls for more money to fund the reforms she believes will improve the current HE model.

In the introduction to, Paying the Price, she says, “The price of college must be lowered much further than the current system allows. Money must be brought to the table - there is no way around it.”

This current system is institution-centered, expensive, underfunded, without sufficient transparent information and complex in terms of its finance and student aid apparatus - among other serious deficits.

But whether the research is student or faculty oriented, if advocates aim to improve the lot of these individuals, they must be more creative in their solutions. They must do more than devise system tweaks and demand additional or reallocated funding. There is a serious problem with such an approach, it suffers from what might be called the Vulnerable Funding Problem.