The AAUP, the ACTA, and the PSA

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 institution (HEI) model. I have been working on this social good reform or revolution project for over thirty years, ever since I co-invented and developed 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.

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.)

61 Questions For A Professional Academe With No Accreditation

A skulk of attorneys is drinking late into the night when one announces, “We should open a practice to teach law. The law schools are shit.”

“Says you. I went to Harvard.”

“And yet we work at the same firm, drink the same liquor and kiss the same ass. We both know some of my professors were at least as good as some of yours, with an equal share of faculty shitheads. Anyway, we all know you were a pretty lousy student.”

 ...

If in the morning this band of drinking buddies still want to teach law as it should be taught, then there are only two versions of the one way to gainfully and legally do so: 1) Get jobs at the same school and negotiate with the institutional employer’s board, administration, faculty, student body and the rest to effect change in curriculum, standards, pedagogy, materials, and the rest; or 2) Open their own law school and dictate their distilled vision for legal education.

Institutional employment is the only way for licensed, experienced, civic-minded attorneys to contribute as academics to recognized higher education credentials in the study of law. Not only does the inheritance direct the study of law for credit into the confines of employers and enrollers like a law school, but the study, the learning, the education must comply with laws, rules, standards and guidelines that are enforceable by legal and other penalties set against (visionary) noncompliance. As an example of this control, the State Bar of California is legislatively empowered to create and enforce laws, rules, standards and guidelines for not only the practice of law but also the practice of (legal) higher education by qualified individuals (employed by institutions).

What could go wrong, with this oversight that every higher education system needs? Unfortunately, we’ve lived the answer to that question for centuries now, in the grace and grip of higher education institutions. Only we don't know but should know what could go wrong in PSA where attorneys open their own solo or partnership academic practices offering education in law that helps qualify students for graduation with a JD or LLB from the Professional Society of Academics.

PSA is a universitas, but not a university, college or school of the inheritance.

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.

Institutions Are Essential, But Not for Higher Education (Part 1)

Just about a year ago, the People’s College of Law closed. Just over twelve years ago, I came across this unique institution and used it to argue that Professional Society of Academics (PSA) belongs in the social economy. Just over fifty years ago, this Los Angeles-based, fixed-facility, degree-granting, unaccredited, nonprofit institution offered its first law courses, using faculty, a dean and an administrator-registrar, all of whom worked as volunteers until a few years ago when the two staff positions became full-time salaried employment. The school offered a JD degree backed by the authority of State Bar of California (SBC) accreditation and degree-granting status and American Bar Association (ABA) curriculum, with a concentration in activist law that prepared students to write the bar, practice law, go into politics, business, or, dare I say it, use the education qualification and professional licensure to earn from a joint academic-attorney practice made possible by a service and stewardship model like PSA.

[https://www.calbar.ca.gov/About-Us/News/News-Releases/committee-of-bar-examiners-withdraws-registration-of-peoples-college-of-law-due-to-noncompliance]

Using my old contract law instructor as an example, I recently posted about the personal intersection of academic and attorney, faculty employee and independent practitioner, the member of a union and the member of a profession. In this post, the People’s College of Law (PCL) is used to explore intersections at the institutional level, and how with a professional service and stewardship model like PSA, the law school could be thriving, not archiving, gainful, not charitable, boutique, not unique.

Professionals for Hire, But Not for Higher Education

Once I thought I had the fortitude to study and practice law, so I enrolled in a contracts course. The course was fine but I don’t have what it takes to be an attorney. I know this because I was married to one. We were together when she applied to law school, was called to the bar, and then practiced as an associate for a law firm. Where earning a living is concerned, I know the practice of law and the practice of higher education.

The course instructor was an attorney with a solo practice of mixed civil law. Such professor-professional hybrids exist in other fields of post-secondary education such as medicine, accounting, and business. This is an intersection of institutional faculty employee and independent professional practitioner, in one life, in one person, but two models. The clarity this juxtaposition offers is useful in addressing the challenges, crises and absurdities of the higher education institution model that we have inherited.

Presidents Are Essential, But Not to Higher Education

Thirteen years ago, I argued it is a red herring to spend resources and rancor on criticizing the compensation of presidents, deans, chancellors, and other offices of the institutions. The stink of bloated administration and compensation distracts from the scent of serious structural problems in the university and college model for higher education. A model we have inherited without challenge or alternative, in which these positions and people form clauses and parties to a social contract for the social good. In many minds, it would be hard to separate higher education from higher education institutions, though one is a means and the other an end.

Consequently, the scope of discussion on presidential compensation is not fundamental. In present circumstances the cost of the position is considered by some to be unacceptably high. This does not challenge the existence of the position, but assumes it and offers internal assessment of value, with claims of relative systemic inequity.

But ask yourself, can one of these institutions operate without a president, or its deans and other officers? Universities and colleges often operate poorly thanks to the people in these positions, but what is the provider without the position? And what relevance does this have to higher education and the people who depend upon it to earn and learn?

These questions are fundamental to higher education. Union bosses bitching about that compensation for that person as that president of that institution is fundamental only to universities and colleges and the academics who happen to be employed by them. Social goods and personal welfare are fundamental, tools for their provision and protection are not.

Mixing Collars, PSA Makes Light Blue Higher Education

This post explores earning as an academic and as a blue-collar worker, both of which I have done for extended periods of time and often with overlap. I make the case that the vocationalization of higher education – the notion that the pillar’s principal personal and public value is to help land a job that satisfies a return on investment – is forced on us by the institutional model that we have inherited without necessity or challenge. I disclaim our inheritance of university and college employers, and offer an alternative in the professional service and stewardship model for higher education.

Starting my second year of faculty employment with Saint Mary’s University, I received mail at my home from SMU informing me that I was placed on probation and no longer permitted to enter campus or use university facilities. The first claim was true, but in Canada campuses and facilities such as university libraries are open to the public and the institutional employer-enroller cannot deny me access merely because I managed to fail all courses in my first year of an undergraduate anthropology degree.

25 Years Ago In the Academe: Same Shit Different Day

It’s worth reaching back to the start of this century, to an exchange between two academics in Canada, to see how meaningful improvement is not coming to higher education so long as the university and college model remains unchallenged. I do not mean challenge to some peculiarity of its players, positions, policies, procedures, processes, or practices, but a winner-takes-all contest. At any rate, improvement is not coming from academics who fail to see beyond the campuses they cling to for validation and vacation, memory and mortgage; beyond the peaks and valleys of unionists, trustees, capitalists, and politicians that interfere with proper stewardship of higher education.

To see how the Professional Society of Academics (PSA) offers better, the model is inserted as a third party to this cookie-cutter academic exchange between two academics. Exposition is provided by exposing the fundamental irrelevance and practical impotence of such exchanges to the well-being of higher education, and how such dialogue is happening still, a quarter century later in a similarly charged academe, and still at the expense of the social pillar.

This must stop. Not by getting your version of your institution in a secure enough position to act as some paradigm for generations to come. It’s by doing exactly the opposite. It’s by recognizing that Oxford, Stanford, Melbourne, McGill, Peking and the rest are the price of an inheritance. They are instruments in a service and stewardship model. They are not higher education. They are not the only means of providing the teaching, researching and community servicing of higher education. They are not many things that they need to be in fulfillment of their social contract, but principally, they are not required.

Dear Donald, Wanna Re-Open Trump University for the Greater Good?

Dear Donald Trump,

You opened a university and closed it with a court settlement. Without caring about fault, how'd you like to right that wrong and contribute much more to higher education besides?

Included in the case was a penalty of up to $1 million for operating an unlicensed university in the state of New York. I care about this misdemeanor offence which government assesses in its control of higher education. I think this crime should concern everyone. I think it directly concerns you, Donald.

When you were opening Trump University I was working as an adjunct at two universities in my hometown and completing a PhD on the Hard Problem of consciousness. Years before, in the early 90s, I was co-creating and promoting an alternative model for the service and stewardship of higher education. Along with Dr Peter March and Dr Robert Ansel, this profession-based model is our response to the obvious truth that everyone's higher education inheritance is fucked, like some twisted conditions in a crackpot last will from a prickly distant relative, we inherited universities and colleges.

I offer wholesale change, in a new social contact, in the now.

Dear Donald, Wanna Open Trump University Again?

Dear Donald Trump,

Straight to the point, you look to adjustment higher education. I look to turn it inside out so there is no increased demand for public funding, no more exploitation and digitization of academics, nor leaning on labour unions, alumni donors, venture capitalists, accreditation boards, and departments of (higher) education. I offer a shift in paradigm from our inheritance.

Academic Freedom On A Model Diet - Parts 2-5

This is the second post of a series that uses interview responses from an expert on the academy to show how academics are failing us even in the most basic of functions. Hank Reichman is the academic I choose for demonstration purposes and he is interviewed by James Vernon.

This failure of academics is not easily detected. It is hidden in language and life that has evolved over centuries of reference to the inherited model of university and college service and stewardship for higher education. This institutional model is an only child of a dysfunctional heritage so deeply rooted in our concepts and cultures that the institutions have become synonymous with the education, research, and community service of higher education. The brand has become the product, like Kleenex or Tampons.

[NOTE: The plan was to write a five-part series, fading out on the fifth interview response because the job had been done (probably to the point of ad nauseum) or I couldn't bare the task any longer (again, from nausea). Instead, I dumped the lot here. So, there are four posts presented here as they were meant for separate publication, starting with this post two. Post one is found here.]

I aim to expose this mental magic for what it is: unnecessary and destructive. Though there are many unnecessary sources of destruction in universities and colleges, academic freedom is the focus of this series, because it is the focus of the interview. Hank has written books on the subject. I don’t have the resources or resolve to do for those texts what I do in this series for the text of this interview, but I'd bet on the results being the same: While they grow up to pick up a ball that has been rolling for centuries in a game whose rules they did not design and do not doubt, Hank and the Hornets assume the inheritance. This is a serious omission for academics. It is a breach of social contract.

I teach critical thinking. One of the toughest areas of thinking to instruct is the assumption. Inference is a tricky bugger too, acting like a ghostly glue between premise and conclusion. But the assumption is a hidden gem in reasoning, because finding them makes or breaks your position. Let’s continue to mine for gems and better positions.

What Can PSA Do That AAUP on FIRE Can't?

These days of raging FIRE are too poetic not to use in aid of their own ends to defend and sustain the free speech and thought of all Americans. From 1999 to 2022, the organization did this sort of thing for a very small subset of Americans in very specific, temporary, unbalanced, ROI relationships at very specific, temporary, unbalanced, locations. They did this sort of thing for those Americas who try to earn and learn in higher education. Let's hear about it from an overseas ally, Academics for Academic Freedom (AFAF),

Founded in 1999, [Foundation for Individual Rights in Education] FIRE’s mission was to defend and sustain the individual rights of all students and faculty members at America’s colleges and universities. These rights included freedom of speech, freedom of association, due process, legal equality, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience—the essential qualities of liberty. FIRE continues to educate students, faculty, alumni, trustees, and the public about the threats to these rights on our campuses and provides the means to preserve them.

Academic Freedom On A Model Diet - Part 1

Hank Reichman is a prominent figure among university professors, though perhaps not among academics. At least that’s what the title of his organization suggests, the American Association of University Professors. These people are, steadfast. That’s the term to use.

Hank is on the right and his interviewer is James Vernon.

This series of posts speaks with contempt because I have tried to get this champion of academic freedom, wrapped in a AAUP cloak, to fulfill academic duties for some time now. In fact, for over thirty years I have asked all academics to execute just one basic necessary function of the job: stop assuming.

Hank has remained steadfast in his silence and probable ignorance. But he has no power over me. Does he have power over you? Do his AAUP union masters have power over you? Or is it just your institutional employer and the bargaining unit is a liberator?

If the latter, then read on and I’ll again try to rob you of that fatal fantasy by critiquing a recent interview Hank gives on academic freedom. Using a common formula on the PSA blog, there is direct quote from the interview followed by analysis, evaluation and prescription. Another related example can be found here where I treat a promotion video from the California Faculty Association.

So, let’s dance to the disaster de jour in higher education: academic freedom.

But before the music begins, I feel an oft-repeated bridge coming on: The ills of higher education are not to be fixed by upmarket band-aids like academic freedom, shared governance, and tenure that are applied to an inheritance of university and college professors, or more precisely, them and their institutional employers that together form an unchallenged heritage of universitas. The Professional Society of Academics (PSA) adopts and adapts a recognized alternative universitas in the professions and applies it to higher education as a formal, viable, desirable challenge to the continued assumption of our inheritance.

Cue music to an old familiar faculty chorus…

Another Day in PSA

The alarm rings. Two tiny humans hoover cereal, as she enters the kitchen.

“Mom, it’s funny.”

“Yes, but don’t stare. He’s sensitive.”

“What? No. Your holidays are the same as ours.”

“Sort of. Today’s not a holiday, Sweetie. It’s a PD day. Your teachers still have to go to school.”

“But we don’t, right!?”

“Correct! Today we go to the zoo!” Collecting her coffee, she pecks each crown. “When you’re done, dishes in the sink, and suit up for safari!”

“For some fairies?”

“Yes, we’re having lunch with three,” she chuckles from down the hall, slipping into the office for some practice maintenance.

But once seated, it’s no use. She cannot concentrate on work, when work is in jeopardy. When everything is in jeopardy. Fresh pajamaed coffee, the clink of spoon and bowl, morning teases in the air. As much as one can, she controls this life…for the two who scurry past to depajama. She thinks.

“Deny the inheritance,” slips out, standing with a defiance that refutes even professional routines. Inconsistency, fleets through her mind as she sends herself for depajamaing. [See Part 1 here.]

Academic Freedom Is Not the Freedom of Academics

This post responds to a recent post on the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) publication, Academe, penned by Ross Jackson of Wittenberg University. He makes a case for academic freedom. I make a case for freedom of academics.

Asked many times by me and yet to be answered by others: Would we be facing a crisis in academic freedom or facing crisis in the same way, if academics were not the employees of inherited institutional employers but were also or instead licensed members of a legislated profession that enables them to earn a living as attorneys or physicians are enabled?

From this perspective, I respond to Ross and the widely shared view that academic freedom is necessary. Nothing will be lost in comprehending this post by not reading the Ross piece, which presents a very familiar affirmative position on the question of necessity.

PSA Offers an Area of Research

Thirty years ago, Dr. Peter March, Dr. Robert Ansel and myself sketched in some detail the Professional Society of Academics (PSA) model and then tried to raise awareness for it. This is a model that does not rely on university and college employment for the public provision of academic services (i.e., teaching, researching and community servicing). There is no model like it, standing as the only comprehensive challenge to our inherited model of institutional employers and enrollers. Since that time, PSA has been further developed and disseminated. This PSA blog is a record of both.

As philosophers, we are not expert in fields that (ought to) contribute to the construction of an alternative model for the provision of higher education (HE). Suppose you are one such established or aspiring expert, looking for a fresh thesis topic, an unspoken hypothesis, then this post might be for you.

There is in this professional model the opportunity to explore a new area of research, call it: Alternative Higher Education Models (AHEM). I recognize that calling for alternative, change, reform, or revolution in the sector is obscenely common and deplorably misleading. None, I repeat, none of it references an alternative to the higher education institution (HEI) model. All light filters through this institutional lens, and what a kaleidoscope of calamity it presents. This must be acknowledged, if alternative, change, reform, or revolution is to gain footing. Anything less is relegated to a footnote of the HEI model.

This post is about something intellectual, something academic: possibility.

The US, UK, Canada, Australia...All Suffer the Same Institutional Model

How would you like to be on the Office for Students Register? I sure would! Here are some of the benefits that come with the registration, assessment, and investigation fees:

Bet I could get on teaching, researching and community servicing in England, if I register. Maybe print some business cards with these bullets, or hang a classy framed version on my wall, maybe a website that emphasizes the value this Register enables in my service to the public. Certainly, it’s excellent promotion for a tertiary/post-secondary/higher education (HE) practice. Nothing screams value in the HE sector like the phrase, power “to award its own degrees.”

SMU, FU, So I Can Do What I Do!

Saint Mary’s University (SMU), in Canada, is one of my previous employers. The institution is presently having budgetary problems that impact employment and so the higher education it is meant to facilitate. What a surprise. Here’s another, the response from the faculty employee labor union: Solidarity, redeemable at any Tim’s or Sobey’s and telling the President to fuck off.

It doesn’t dawn on the parties that these two acts – one of solidarity, the other of schism – embody the fracture of higher education, or that reoccurring episodes of such schizophrenia might be an indicator of deeper problems with the higher education institutional model of universities and colleges.

This all might be amusing, except they deserve it and so many others do not.

Irony and Absurdity in the AAUP – Part 2

In Part 1 of this two-part series bitter irony was the focus, along with a scolding for the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and its growing team of union and activist affiliates, including the likes of the America Federation of Teachers (AFT), the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA), and Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education (SFNDHE). Their entrenched assumption of the higher education institution (HEI) model of university and college higher education (HE) provision is a principal cause of their failure to adequately address the many serious problems in HE. My alternative model called, the Professional Society of Academics (PSA), makes their failure all the more personally embarrassing, but publicly fixable.

Part 2 provides further reason to criticize the AAUP team for the irony and absurdity of its response to what ails HE. The aim is to open the eyes of the AAUP team to their folly and force proper consideration of the PSA model. It is recommended that Part 1 be read before continuing, but the following content can be managed without it.