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.

Rachel and the Revolution

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) publishes just about anything from Guest Bloggers these days. As an example, Rachel Ida Buff, is quite certain that the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Popular University for Palestine Coalition (UWMPUPC) “encampments represent the true and best hope for the university.” 

Who knows, maybe this blip on the radar of the higher education institution (HEI) model of university and college higher education (HE) service providers will finally manage to bring real, lasting change to… Ha! Ha! Ya, right!! Ever hear of Berkeley? And though Rachel concludes with a reference to 1968 Paris, why not Kent, as it predates and took place in the USA? No catchy phrases? Just more dead people at the doorstep of HE.

Rachel’s post is foreshadowed by one on this blog from over ten years ago, updated in 2022. It describes a day in the life of someone who works in the Professional Society of Academics (PSA) model for HE that I have created. She’s a mom raising two kids on her own, and during an eventful day she reflects on the great faculty-student uprising, on the “education encampments” that overthrew the old (dare I say it?) colonial institutional model of HE, making possible her independent professional life as an academic and mother.

But, sure, let’s go ahead and rock that real true best hope, of saving institutions, with something thrown in about proper HE and individual flourishment.

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.