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:

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.