Saturday, February 10, 2024

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.

Friday, February 9, 2024

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 HE. 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 were salaried workers, subject to the authority of boards of trustees, whose members included some of the most powerful industrialists in the United States. 

Wednesday, October 25, 2023

PSA Takes Its Liberalism with a Dash of Neo

This latest explication of the Professional Society of Academics (PSA) model for the provision of higher education (HE) responds to a common charge pressed by individuals and organizations like Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education (SFNDHE), the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the California Faculty Association (CFA), that seek to address substantial problems in the higher education institutional (HEI) model of universities and colleges. As the Plaintiffs in this case, they tend to respond as SFNDHE did when offered links to exposition of PSA:

Sunday, September 17, 2023

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.

Sunday, September 3, 2023

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.


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Historical Roots of the PSA Model – Part 1

When people first learn of PSA, they tend to view it as something without precedent. It is not. Like most “new” ideas, it is merely a mix of...

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