Institutions Are Essential, But Not for Higher Education (Part 2)

In the first post of this two-parter the Professional Society of Academics (PSA) apparatus for gatekeeping and oversight was compared to that found in the institutions of our inheritance. The tradition of institutional employment and enrollment is not required or recommended in the facilitation of academic service and stewardship to higher education. At the same time, universities and colleges are positioned as the sole legal means by which individuals can earn and learn in higher education.

How’s that for open pursuit and propagation of knowledge? How’s that for the right to earn a living or the right to free higher education? How’s that for academic stewardship of a social pillar? How’s that for freedom of speech and expression in the academe?

No one knows.

Universities and colleges are part of the problem and solutions meant to improve them are footnotes to facilitation failure, mends for mangled mechanics, band-aids like tenure, shared governance and academic freedom. Oxford, Stanford, Rutherford, and other ‘fords of the academe are examples of an institutional inheritance that I disclaim, and offer in its stead, a model that boasts better elegance, economics, and emancipation than does a heritage of monopolistic employers and enrollers that organizations like the American Association of University Professors struggle generation after generation to tape up and put back on the field.

An Academe of Ignorant Hypocrites

The American Association of University Professors (@AAUP) has blocked me from communicating with them on X. Over a decade ago, Dr Sara Goldrick-Rabb, formerly of Temple University, did the same on Twitter when I challenged her plan for two years of free college during the Obama administration. She blocked me, but not before making derogatory comments from her publicly paid faculty position.

To my knowledge, the AAUP hasn’t roasted me, though, like Sara, people there certainly have the right to, notwithstanding explicit or implicit professional codes of conduct and ethics that require restraint. For the record, this is some of what I think about some of the work done and not done by the AAUP in the name of higher education – not the institutions of higher education but the social good we depend upon for earning and learning.

The AAUP champions freedom of speech and so-called academic freedom, with its recipe for protecting and promoting individual and institutional (higher education) rights and freedoms in iterations of increasing complexity that these days include, the freedom and neutrality of institutions, shared governance, tenure, disclosure, divestment; and can include whatever else might come under the  assumption of earning and learning exclusively in institutions of higher education--universities and colleges.

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.