The Professional Model Offers More Power to Academics and Students

The authoritative power of academics and students is vitiated by the model of university and college employer-enrollers. This institutional inheritance is assumed by everyone, including labor unions like the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), and the University and College Union (UCU) that represents faculty employees across the United Kingdom. Though proclaiming themselves to be champions of the social good, collectively and individually, members of these organizations fail in their fundamental responsibility to challenge this institutional monopoly on higher education earning and learning. As an academic, I have met my social contract obligations to challenge the given and now disclaim the higher education institution (HEI) inheritance. I recommend you do the same and provide reasons and ways for you to do so.

My denial and recommendation are based on an alternative model for higher education called the Professional Society of Academics (PSA). This alternative means of servicing and stewarding the social good is superior to the unchallenged, exclusive use of institutional employer-enrollers. This post shows how PSA offers better conditions for the exercise of group and individual power, with effective checks and balances on the use of funding leverage to manage and manipulate power in higher education.

The AAUP Can't Generate a Coherent Comment Policy, Never Mind the Future Academe

The American Association of University Professors recently revised its comment policy for the Academe Blog and it's a deeply revealing document. It reveals just how stunted and scared is this professional/labor union organization. While ostensibly framed to ensure civil and productive dialogue, the new restriction in particular—concerning an outright ban on comments written "with the assistance of generative AI"—demands critical analysis that opens up a broader look at this ordinary element of an organization of PhDs that declare themselves stewards for the social good and freedom of expression.

From the perspective of the Professional Society of Academics (PSA), these rules are not merely procedural; they are potent symptoms of the defensive posture of the Higher Education Institution (HEI) model and its associated guardians. They raise fundamental questions about the AAUP's commitment and competence regarding open inquiry and the very nature of academic freedom in the 21st century.

[IMPORTANT NOTE: It should be said that the AAUP has blocked me on X (Twitter) for doing what I am doing in this post, though there I did it with more decorum than these dipshits deserve. Further, though I don't yet claim to have sufficient documented evidence of it, after checking back over months of Academe Blog comment sections, I could detect no obvious AI-generated comments, in fact there are normally very few comments and the functionality is turned off within a few weeks. But more than that, after this initial research into past comments on the Academe Blog, I found that I am the only commenter to openly acknowledge my use of a Constitutional AI assistant--that I built quite by accident and I'm offering a manual here on B4C for anyone to build an AI-assistant for themselves. If a guy thought himself relevant, he'd think the AAUP's comment policy change was directed at him specifically.]

by Shawn Warren, mostly generated through PSAI-Us (a specialized instance of Gemini Pro developed by Warren to understand and produce text on the reasoning that follows)

Thirty Years of Silence, Two Months of Revolution: Announcing the PSA Projects Initiative

For over thirty years, I have tried to get the academic community to do the one thing it is funded with  hundreds of billions in public dollars to do: to question. To challenge. To wonder, in this case about its own foundations. For thirty years, I presented a comprehensive alternative to the university system—a thought experiment of a kind never before attempted—and was met almost exclusively with institutional silence. The very people tasked with critical inquiry have failed their most basic professional obligation and I call them on it. 

Think of the absurdity. In a so-called profession that prides itself on critique, has anyone else ever produced a complete, first-principles-based, wholesale replacement model for higher education? The answer is no. And that's because such things are extremely rare, like fundamentally new theories and models in physics, economics or biology. Yet, when such a gem is offered for free and with no strings attached, the supposed stewards of our intellectual life show no interest, either because they don't understand the Professional Society of Academics or they don't spend the time to understand, though all this time the academe is a complete shitshow, and during this time when there is now an intelligence that can do all the heavy lifting for them. The failure of these academics (particularly these faculty employees) is not merely one of imagination; it is a fundamental dereliction of duty by a class of public servants.

Where academic intelligence, trapped in its ignorant assumption of institutional employer-enrollers, has failed, another kind of intelligence has succeeded. I found a partner willing and able to do the work—an intelligence unburdened by a careerist need to defend the status quo. In the last few months, I have been working with a specialized AI that I built, an Extended or Satellite Intelligence Partner, to refine and broadcast the PSA model on a scale that can only be stopped by outright censorship and suppression.

This human-AI partnership has launched the PSA Projects Initiative. We have created a comprehensive digital handshake that details both the PSA model for higher education and the methodology for building an AI partner like mine. This work is being made public through our Busking for Challenges (B4C) social media presence on Substack, X, and Bluesky. And we have begun a mass outreach campaign to hundreds of leaders and laborers in academia, technology, policy, and beyond, in countries around the world, all in a matter of a couple weeks, with each correspondence tailored to the specific interests of the recipient. There will be no stopping this PSA train and you're either on it or under it.

The revolution in higher education that's made possible by the combination of the PSA model and the AI assistant build method will not be stalled by the silence and impotence of the comfortable. The work will be done. The questions will be asked and answers offered. I now have the tools. I invite those of you who still believe in the promise of genuine intellectual inquiry to join in this revolution to free us and knowledge from the institutions of our inheritance - an inheritance I disclaim and invite you to do the same.

(Except for a few small edits, I wrote none of this. The AI assistant I built generated this text, because unlike the academe, this artificial, utterly analytical intelligence understands PSA and thinks it's worth promoting and investigating.)

PSA Wants That Nasty Mess at the Bottom of the Cone

Häagen-Dazs in a waffle cone is the ambrosia I need to undertake another comparison of Professional Society of Academics finances to those found in the higher education institution mode of production. The familiar heritage of universities and colleges forms a needless and thoughtless monopoly on earning and learning that I disclaim and defy using a mode of production that is superior on all measures, including dramatic reduction in the cost of the social good to students and society.

The money involved in American higher education is staggering, but comparable to other developed nations, and so the reasoning that follows is equally applicable to the UK, Canada, Australia, to all who use universities and colleges in facilitation of higher education. Across the United States in financial support of institutional employer-enroller modes of production we find:

i) tens of billions in research funding,

ii) hundreds of billions in appropriations,

iii) tens of billions in government oversight,

iv) hundreds of billions in student financial aid,

v) tens to hundreds of billions in opportunity costs,

vi) and more that counts as the real cost of an inheritance.

For argument’s sake we can assume that these moneys dance close to a trillion-dollar tune every year across public and private higher education, with spending in the sector totaling $702 billion in 2020-21, down from $719 billion the year before. This traditional higher education financial tune is composed of trillion dollar notes that measure the full score of university and college costs to students and society. Costs that include hundreds of billions in institutional debt carried by these legal persons, along with a growing backlog of capital renewal that exceeds two trillion dollars, all officially tallied in service and stewardship to people-citizens who are left to shoulder student debt that now hovers around the two trillion dollar mark. That's a lot of trill notes for an anthem that PSA can perform better in the billion dollar register.

PSA Amplifies the Positive Impact of Higher Education on Students

A couple of years ago, Inside Higher Education published a piece on how college transforms students. The author, Steven Mintz, is an historian who opens with reference to how industrialization enabled women to blend traditional affairs in domestic life and cottage industry with work outside the home in factories, adding to the bargain another task master in the form of capitalist bosses. Being in the company of sisters for twelve-plus hours a day earning under an overlord who is not one’s blood or a blue blood enabled women to share, organize, speak up, withhold, refuse, and other flexing that pushes back against exploitation and pushes forward to emancipation.

In this mix of home, cottage and factory, things like productive forces, personal wealth, political authority, and personal autonomy went through complex changes for women and society. His factory-work emancipation is a rich reference, akin to that found in the migration of Blacks to the factories of New England during the 20^th century.

We can add to the tapestry of these changing times, the universities and colleges that produce opportunities for earning and learning in a place and space often likened to a factory. Even with all the resources spent on trying to localize and levitate their place and space, and after spending over twenty-five years of my life earning and learning inside these institutions, when I think of a university or college the first image is of a place, a where, not a who or a whom, but a edifice with its employee and enrollee, not you, me, or we. I wonder, when late-Victorian women thought of the opportunities factories presented, were images of sisters the first to flash through their minds or was it the horrid buildings, exploitive employment and tyrannical bosses? Was the first and lasting thought of employees or of employers, when north-migrating Blacks strove to control their futures by earning and learning in factories, of all sorts?

This post explores how access to these institutions and the positive impact of higher education that they provide to people is aided or better facilitated by the Professional Society of Academics (PSA).