PSA Financial Analysis – Republic of Ecuador

Following the analytical models developed for the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, it is time to turn our focus south to Latin America.

Among developing and middle-income nations, the Republic of Ecuador presents what is arguably the most mathematically clean and conceptually profound case study for the Professional Society of Academics (PSA) framework.

Ecuador occupies a unique structural position in global higher education:

1. Full Dollarization: Since abandoning the sucre in 2000, Ecuador has operated entirely with the United States Dollar (USD) as its legal tender. This eliminates the currency-conversion distortions, chronic foreign-exchange devaluations, and hyperinflationary accounting adjustments that typically complicate Latin American financial modeling.
2. Constitutional "Gratuidad": Under Article 356 of Ecuador’s 2008 Montecristi Constitution, undergraduate education in public higher education institutions is guaranteed to be tuition-free (la gratuidad de la educación superior pública hasta el tercer nivel). This is consistent with Article 13 of the United Nation's International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
3. A State-Centralized Regulatory Triad: Higher education is governed by the Ley Orgánica de Educación Superior (LOES) and overseen by a formidable administrative bureaucracy: the SENESCYT (Secretaría de Educación Superior, Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación), the CES (Consejo de Educación Superior), and the CACES (Consejo de Aseguramiento de la Calidad de la Educación Superior).

On paper, Ecuador appears to have constructed the progressive ideal: free, state-funded higher education for the public, backed by constitutional mandate and regulated by technocratic oversight bodies.

Financial Liberation of Higher Education: An Academic Denominator Analysis of the United States Public System (2026 Edition)

Following the initial empirical model of the United States public system in 2021, and subsequent comparative analyses of the Canadian (2022) and Australian (2022) higher education sectors, it is time to return to the US system with an updated, post-pandemic data profile for PSA finance.

Higher education in the United States is routinely described by administrators, policymakers, and corporate pundits as an enterprise trapped in permanent fiscal crisis. Over the past five years, the public has been told that campuses must absorb continuous rounds of austerity: departments dissolved, tenured lines frozen, tuition incrementally hiked, doctoral admissions throttled, and two-thirds of the instructional workforce forced into contingent, per-course wage labor. At the same time, institutional balance sheets have never been larger, gross revenues across public flagships have crossed historic highs, and state tax appropriations have rebounded significantly from their post-Great Recession troughs.

How can a sector take in more revenue than at any point in human history, yet operate under a perpetual "cuts culture" that starves the classroom and reduces scholars to academic food-pantry recipients?

The answer lies in the fundamental design flaw of the monopolistic employer-enroller institution (Universitas). The legacy university is an extractive, debt-leveraged corporation that operates as an unnecessary, cost-intensive middleman between the only two essential participants in higher education: the academic and the student.

A PSA Response to the AAUP’s 2025–26 Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession

The June 2026 release of the American Association of University Professors’ Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession (ARES 2025–26) reads like an actuarial inventory of a dying industry. Authored by Glenn T. Colby and issued under the auspices of the Committee on the Economic Status of the Profession, the document methodically catalogs the ongoing degradation of academic labor in the United States: real wages trailing inflation, continuing faculty losing purchasing power relative to historical benchmarks, executive compensation soaring into the millions, and a casualized instructional majority trapped in sub-poverty piecework.

The diagnostic work performed by the AAUP is empirically rigorous, but its political and structural diagnosis remains hopelessly obsolete. The report treats the immiseration of the professoriate as if it were a temporary aggregate demand problem, an administrative ethics lapse, or a series of unfortunate external shocks—the lingering wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2008 subprime crisis, executive orders targeting diversity programs, and congressional threats to indirect-cost recovery. Its concluding policy recommendations read like an exercise in nostalgia: invoking the non-binding 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, pleading for "budgetary transparency" under the 1972 statement on The Role of the Faculty in Budgetary and Salary Matters, and urging faculty to form advisory committees to help deans make "open and clearly understood" compensation decisions.

The fundamental error running through all thirty-two pages of the report is the unexamined assumption that higher education is identical to the corporate institution that currently encloses it. The AAUP assumes that intellectual production must occur within the legal machinery of an employer-enroller corporation (Universitas), where scholars sell their labor as subordinate employees (locatio operarum) to an entity that owns the physical plant, holds the state-granted credential monopoly, and commands the payroll.

Beyond the AAUP's "One Faculty" Triage: Why Academic Freedom and Workplace Equity Require the Professional Society of Academics

For more than a century, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has stood as an intellectual and organizational conscience of American higher education. In its founding 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure, the Association articulated an idealistic vision of the university as an "inviolable refuge" from the tyranny of public opinion, commercial passions, and government overreach. It insisted that the search for truth requires an extraordinary degree of independence, secured through continuous tenure and meaningful shared governance.

Yet, over the last four decades, that refuge has been systematically dismantled from within. The contemporary corporate university (Universitas) has steadily replaced its permanent scholarly core with an army of insecure, low-wage instructional laborers. To confront this slow-motion collapse, the AAUP launched its signature labor initiative: the One Faculty Campaign. Faced with an academic workforce that has been fragmented into hostile caste divisions, the campaign calls for cross-rank solidarity. It urges tenure-line scholars, non-tenure-track instructors, academic librarians, postdocs, and graduate employees to unite under a single standard of professional dignity, fair compensation, and shared governance.

The empirical justification for the AAUP’s alarm is beyond dispute and common to most higher education systems around the world. In the US, the data snapshots compiled by the AAUP’s Department of Research and Public Policy lay bare an institutional system that has commodified instruction and codified inequality. But while the AAUP’s diagnostic work is sound, its strategic remedy—the "One Faculty" campaign—suffers from an insurmountable theoretical and structural flaw: it attempts to resolve a structural crisis of corporate ownership through the mechanisms of employee trade-union triage.

Why the AAUP’s “Extorted Compliance” Report Demands the PSA

The American Association of University Professor’s July 2026 Special Report, "Extorted Compliance: A Threat to Institutional Autonomy, Academic Freedom, and Shared Governance," provides an unsparing empirical record of the moral and structural collapse of corporate higher education. The joint subcommittee—chaired by Rana M. Jaleel and co-authored by distinguished scholars including Henry Reichman, Joan Wallach Scott, and Risa L. Lieberwitz—has assembled an undeniable indictment of how federal power has weaponized research overhead, Title VI/IX compliance, and ad hoc regulatory extortion to bring America’s universities to heel.

Meeting Academic Duty Until I Die

I have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). This is an uncurable, terminal illness 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.

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.

An Academe of Ignorant Hypocrites

The American Association of University Professors (@AAUP) has blocked me from communicating with them on X. Over a decade ago, Dr Sara Goldrick-Rabb, formerly of Temple University, did the same on Twitter when I challenged her plan for two years of free college during the Obama administration. She blocked me, but not before making derogatory comments from her publicly paid faculty position.

To my knowledge, the AAUP hasn’t roasted me, though, like Sara, people there certainly have the right to, notwithstanding explicit or implicit professional codes of conduct and ethics that require restraint. For the record, this is some of what I think about some of the work done and not done by the AAUP in the name of higher education – not the institutions of higher education but the social good we depend upon for earning and learning.

The AAUP champions freedom of speech and so-called academic freedom, with its recipe for protecting and promoting individual and institutional (higher education) rights and freedoms in iterations of increasing complexity that these days include, the freedom and neutrality of institutions, shared governance, tenure, disclosure, divestment; and can include whatever else might come under the  assumption of earning and learning exclusively in institutions of higher education--universities and colleges.

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.

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.

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 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.

The Inheritance, The Assumption

On and off, for over thirty years, I’ve tried to raise awareness of assumptions surrounding the service and stewardship of higher education. For instance, if I ask, where is higher education, what’s your immediate thought? Or if I ask who provides it, what’s your response? Or to whom are you applying for it? To whom are you paying for it?

Mass diagnosis of the assumptions of others is perilous, so wish me luck.

The hypothesis is that the failure of others to entertain PSA is in part the result of unexamined assumption. Assumption being the work-yard of philosophers, I hazard a guess that, for most people, a principal response triggered by such questions includes the institutions of our inheritance. Universities and colleges are what comes to mind whenever we reflect, discuss, dream, organize, bargain, teach, graduate, discover, publish, pixelate, politicize, ……or try to improve our social pillar. Higher education action and thought is scribed, even sculpted, by these institutions and the ethos they embody, covering everything from student meals and academic research to government fund-trolling and global economies.

I do not assume this institutional inheritance. I recommend you do the same.

A German Physicist, Canadian Philosopher, and Model Walk into a Wall

Sometimes in a desperate effort to garner support, I send personal correspondence to people or organizations that might benefit from the Professional Society of Academics (PSA) model for the provision of higher education (HE). This is not the higher education institutional (HEI) model of universities and colleges. PSA might be described as the HEI model turned inside out, with institutional employers recast as vendors now employed according to the prerogative of professional academics who practice HE in solo or partnered HE practices in a new HE system sanctioned by state legislation – as has been comparably done for the social goods of law and medicine.

We do not need universities and colleges, and I mean come on, look at them...

Watch them…

[Faculty and students being good little Fascists. From: https://perspectives.ushmm.org/collection/higher-education-in-nazi-germany]

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.

Irony and Absurdity in the AAUP – Part 1

The former editor of Academe and current member of Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, Ellen Schrecker, claims, “the AAUP is not to blame for [the] deplorable situation” in higher education. She is mistaken. Like other supposed champions of the academy, the AAUP has failed the individuals that depend upon higher education (HE).

In her Academe piece, Political Repression and the AAUP from 1915 to Present, Schrecker notes in passing that:

Unlike their equally well-educated peers in law and medicine who had the power to delineate the parameters of their professions, the distinguished academics who established the AAUP did not have complete control over their work lives. They [faculty] were salaried workers, subject to the authority of boards of trustees, whose members included some of the most powerful industrialists in the United States.