Institutions Are Essential, But Not for Higher Education (Part 1)

Just about a year ago, the People’s College of Law closed. Just over twelve years ago, I came across this unique institution and used it to argue that PSA belongs in the social economy. Just over fifty years ago, this Los Angeles-based, fix-facility, degree-granting, unaccredited, nonprofit institution offered its first law courses, using faculty, a dean and an administrator-registrar, all of whom worked as volunteers until a few years ago when the two staff positions became full-time salaried employment. The school offered a JD degree backed by the authority of State Bar of California (SBC) accreditation and degree-granting status and American Bar Association (ABA) curriculum, with a concentration in activist law that prepared students to write the bar, practice law, go into politics, business, or, dare I say it, use the education qualification and professional licensure to earn from a joint academic-attorney practice made possible by a service and stewardship model like PSA.

[https://www.calbar.ca.gov/About-Us/News/News-Releases/committee-of-bar-examiners-withdraws-registration-of-peoples-college-of-law-due-to-noncompliance]

Using my old contract law instructor as an example, I recently posted about the personal intersection of academic and attorney, faculty employee and independent practitioner, the member of a union and the member of a profession. In this post, the People’s College of Law (PCL) is used to explore intersections at the institutional level, and how with a professional service and stewardship model like PSA, the law school could be thriving, not archiving, gainful, not charitable, boutique, not unique.

Professionals for Hire, But Not for Higher Education

Once I thought I had the fortitude to study and practice law, so I enrolled in a contracts course. The course was fine but I don’t have what it takes to be an attorney. I know this because I was married to one. We were together when she applied to law school, was called to the bar, and then practiced as an associate for a law firm. Where earning a living is concerned, I know the practice of law and the practice of higher education.

The course instructor was an attorney with a solo practice of mixed civil law. Such professor-professional hybrids exist in other fields of post-secondary education such as medicine, accounting, and business. This is an intersection of institutional faculty employee and independent professional practitioner, in one life, in one person, but two models. The clarity this juxtaposition offers is useful in addressing the challenges, crises and absurdities of the higher education institution model that we have inherited.

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.

Mixing Collars, PSA Makes Light Blue Higher Education

This post explores earning as an academic and as a blue-collar worker, both of which I have done for extended periods of time and often with overlap. I make the case that the vocationalization of higher education – the notion that the pillar’s principal personal and public value is to help land a job that satisfies a return on investment – is forced on us by the institutional model that we have inherited without necessity or challenge. I disclaim our inheritance of university and college employers, and offer an alternative in the professional service and stewardship model for higher education.

Starting my second year of faculty employment with Saint Mary’s University, I received mail at my home from SMU informing me that I was placed on probation and no longer permitted to enter campus or use university facilities. The first claim was true, but in Canada campuses and facilities such as university libraries are open to the public and the institutional employer-enroller cannot deny me access merely because I managed to fail all courses in my first year of an undergraduate anthropology degree.

25 Years Ago In the Academe: Same Shit Different Day

It’s worth reaching back to the start of this century, to an exchange between two academics in Canada, to see how meaningful improvement is not coming to higher education so long as the university and college model remains unchallenged. I do not mean challenge to some peculiarity of its players, positions, policies, procedures, processes, or practices, but a winner-takes-all contest. At any rate, improvement is not coming from academics who fail to see beyond the campuses they cling to for validation and vacation, memory and mortgage; beyond the peaks and valleys of unionists, trustees, capitalists, and politicians that interfere with proper stewardship of higher education.

To see how the Professional Society of Academics (PSA) offers better, the model is inserted as a third party to this cookie-cutter academic exchange between two academics. Exposition is provided by exposing the fundamental irrelevance and practical impotence of such exchanges to the well-being of higher education, and how such dialogue is happening still, a quarter century later in a similarly charged academe, and still at the expense of the social pillar.

This must stop. Not by getting your version of your institution in a secure enough position to act as some paradigm for generations to come. It’s by doing exactly the opposite. It’s by recognizing that Oxford, Stanford, Melbourne, McGill, Peking and the rest are the price of an inheritance. They are instruments in a service and stewardship model. They are not higher education. They are not the only means of providing the teaching, researching and community servicing of higher education. They are not many things that they need to be in fulfillment of their social contract, but principally, they are not required.