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 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.