The AAUP, University Employer-Enrollers, and AI are Not Compatible

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) might have become something it should have. Instead, the organization opted for shoring up institutional employer shortcomings, first as a professional association and later as a faculty employee union. While the AAUP has made itself an authoritative functionary of the inherited institutional model, 110 years ago when the organization was founded, 55 years ago when it morphed into a labor union, or at any time along the way, why did its members not wonder if there is a different way to serve and steward the social good of higher education?

In the history of the AAUP you will find no ad hoc committees or research reports of any kind that pose this question. Like the rest, exclusive institutional employment and enrollment remains the unexamined assumption of its members. As such, all AAUP action amounts to a (defensive) reaction to the dynamics of this unchallenged, inherited, monopolistic mode of higher education earning and learning. This makes everything the AAUP says on the question of AI in the academe both irresponsible and predictable, as evidenced in its July 2025 report, "Artificial Intelligence and Academic Professions."

Though the title indicates that the AAUP has in mind a narrow band of dues-defined concerns for its report, the PSA response to AI has in mind a more inclusive, direct, explicit concern for the entire social good and all those who depend upon it. In comparing the ad hoc committee and PSA responses, I find myself increasingly concerned about the future of higher education and so this post addresses each of the report's findings and recommendations on AI in the academe.

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.

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.

CFA Is No Match for PSA: Professional Society vs Union Representation

Faculty of the California State University (CSU) system are once again fighting for a new employment contract. Not surprisingly, negotiations have not gone as hoped and so they are now moving to third-party mediation. Their union representative California Faculty Association (CFA) seeks a 12% general salary increase, better defined workloads, improved paid leave, and improved campus safety. From the point of view of faculty within the higher education institutional (HEI) model of university and college employment, the CFA has been doing much to improve compensation and working conditions.

This post goes through a 3-minute promotional video capturing and commenting on the various claims in support of CFA efforts, while providing links to PSA blog posts that elaborate the commentary. The principal source of testimonials is CSU employees classified as lecturers, who earn an income of between $62,016 and $83,352 on 12-month contracts and constitute at least 45% of the faculty staff, though they have very little say in the shared governance of the CSU system, which has no where near the number of faculty necessary to meet the general demand for HE.

PSA Takes Common Strategies to Logical Conclusions

Eleven years ago, I wrote this open letter to American academics offering the Professional Society of Academics (PSA) model for higher education (HE) (2012). Ten years ago, I wrote this to help the City College of San Francisco when its accreditation was to be pulled because its finances were tanking (2013). Nine years ago, I wrote this to help the City of Detroit during its urban collapse due to the 2008 economic recession (2014). Last year, I wrote this to help all troubled universities and colleges, using the Illinois examples of two now closed institutions, Lincoln College and Lincoln Christian University (2022). In between I have explained that according to the PSA model:

New World Order: A Socialist Higher Education System

 

The forecast for humans is severe, with contraction or collapse expected in: demographics; trade; food; employment; ecosystems; economies; education; energy; technology; diversity; democracy; diplomacy; comradeship; freedom; tolerance; and peace. Bound by ever-increasing social and natural antagonism, it seems more of us will be doing with less in a “new world order.”

Unionization is Inadequate Social Unity for Higher Education

In concert with mounting worker action across many industries, unionization in higher education (HE) is intensifying. Recently, some 48,000 academic workers of the University of California (UC) system endured forty days of the largest labor strike in the history of HE – to date. From UCLA to UPS, as communities struggle to find footing in these uncertain times, acts of collective protection are expected to increase in frequency and gravity.

But unionization is not the best protection for the HE community and stresses the deep deficiencies of the current higher education institution (HEI) model of universities and colleges. This post describes two socialist alternatives for providing HE that better protect not only the interests of academic labor but all stakeholders.

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 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.

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:

A Post-ac, Para-ac and Alt-ac walk into an Alt-mod…

With social media craze and higher education crisis as parents, the hashtags #alt-ac, #post-ac, and #para-ac refer to people classified by their work, education, and attitude toward the academy, who opt or aim for careers across the public and private, employee and entrepreneur work spaces within and without higher education, and who by some lights are laying foundation for a new academy.

Until recently I was unaware that I might be classified as an “acer” – as in “hacker.” Like many others I do not fit nicely under any one of the three hashtags, though best fit is a reluctant post-ac. For a decade I worked as an adjunct until five years ago when romantic and labour market forces left me without even this tenuous access to faculty work.

From Motor City to Mind City: Combining Union, Professional and Co-operative Association in Michigan Higher Education

Nation of Change published a piece this month by Matt Stannard, entitled, “Organized Labor, Public Banks and Grassroots: Keys to A Worker-Owned Economy,” that includes several observations I consider consistent with the aims of my alternative higher education model (a.k.a. PSA): a paradigm shift away from the current employer/employee capitalist labour arrangement in favour of labour arrangements more common to entrepreneurialism and the social economy.

First, from my perspective on higher education reform Stannard’s piece offers a constructive rather than complicit role for unions.  Second, his piece mitres nicely with one of the strategies I have been developing to put the PSA model into action.