Challenging Assumptions in Higher Education

The Challenge: Reclaiming Higher Education’s Promise Contemporary Higher Education Institutions (HEIs)—universities and colleges—face a multifaceted crisis: escalating costs leading to unsustainable student debt, inequitable access for both students and qualified academics, a widespread reliance on precarious academic labor, and questions regarding the ultimate value and societal relevance of their degrees. Traditional reform efforts, often operating within the existing institutional framework, have largely failed to address these systemic issues at their root, which stem from an “unchallenged inheritance” of institutional structures not always aligned with the core mission of education or the foundational principles of professional autonomy and public good.

The PSA Vision: A Principled, Practitioner-Led Alternative The Professional Society of Academics (PSA) model, developed over three decades by Dr. Shawn Warren (in collaboration with Dr. Peter March and Dr. Robert Ansel), offers a radical, comprehensive, and first-principles-based alternative. PSA re-imagines higher education not as a system dominated by large employer-enroller institutions, but as a dynamic ecosystem of autonomous academic practitioners directly serving students and society, stewarded by a peer-governed Professional Society – as one finds in the legal and medical professions.

Foundational First Principles: PSA is built from the ground up on a coherent set of foundational principles:

1. Primacy of Individual Human Liberty, Dignity, and Integrity: For all participants, ensuring freedom of thought, inquiry, and self-determination.
2. Inherent Authority of Academics: Recognizing that intellectual and pedagogical authority derives from cultivated expertise and the essential work of knowledge creation and dissemination, not from institutional employment.
3. Higher Education as Dynamic Action by Co-Responsible Agents: Centering HE on the direct, active engagement between academics and students, who share responsibility for the educational endeavor.
4. Higher Education as a Social Good within a Direct Social Contract: Affirming HE’s vital public purpose and structuring its provision through a direct contract involving academics (as a profession), students, and civil society.
5. Professional Self-Governance: Empowering the academic profession, through its Society, to set standards, ensure quality, and steward the field.
6. Radical Transparency and Direct Accountability: Employing mechanisms that make performance, standards, and outcomes openly accessible.
7. Efficiency, Parsimony, and Focus on Essential Functions: Designing a system that minimizes overhead and directs resources to core educational activities.

The PSA Model Architecture:

• Independent Academic Practitioners: Qualified academics, licensed by the Professional Society, operate as autonomous professionals (in solo or partnerships/cooperatives). They design and deliver courses, conduct research, and provide mentorship directly to students, controlling their own practice and professional lives. This ends the exploitative HEI employer-employee dynamic for academics.
• The Professional Society of Academics (The “Society” or “STC”): This legislated or professionally self-proclaimed body is the cornerstone of the PSA system. It is governed by its licensed academic members (ideally with democratic student/community input on certain parameters). Its key functions include:
  • Licensure: Granting licenses to practice to all qualified academics based on expertise and ethical commitment.
  • Standard Setting: Defining profession-wide standards for curricula, pedagogy, ethical conduct, and credential requirements (from Associate to Doctoral levels).
  • Degree Conferral: Serving as the sole and ultimate authority for conferring all legitimate higher education degrees and credentials within the PSA system.
  • Quality Assurance & Insurance: Implementing and overseeing robust QA/QI mechanisms.

Key Operational Mechanisms:

• Objective Crowd-Sourced Evaluation and Assessment (OCSEA): A system where summative student work (and often the academic’s assessment design itself) is anonymously evaluated by multiple licensed academic peers from the Professional Society. This ensures objective, fair, and standards-based assessment, underpinning the value of PSA credentials.
• Public Performance Records (PPRs): Transparent, publicly accessible records for each licensed academic practitioner/practice, detailing qualifications, course outcomes (validated by OCSEA), anonymized student evaluations, and peer reviews of course design. This fosters direct accountability and empowers informed student choice.
• Direct Student Funding: Public and private funds for higher education would primarily flow directly to students as grants or vouchers, which they then use to pay for services from their chosen licensed PSA practitioners. This promotes student agency and market responsiveness based on quality and value.

Anticipated Outcomes and Impact:

The PSA model, by operating on these principles and mechanisms, aims to achieve:

• Drastic Cost Reduction & Enhanced Accessibility: Potentially making higher education tuition-free or highly affordable, thereby eliminating the student debt crisis and broadening access for all qualified students.
• Empowerment and “Freedom of Academics”: Liberating academics from institutional constraints, allowing for true professional autonomy, fair compensation, and diverse practice models.
• Improved Educational Quality & Relevance: Fostering direct, meaningful student-academic engagement and ensuring learning outcomes are rigorously and transparently validated.
• Increased Systemic Efficiency and Accountability: Focusing resources on core educational functions and making the entire system accountable to its stakeholders through transparency.
• Democratization of Knowledge: Potentially transforming scholarly communication towards more open and accessible models, stewarded by the profession itself.

Conclusion: The Professional Society of Academics is more than just a critique; it is a detailed, coherent, and philosophically grounded blueprint for a revitalized higher education system. By returning to first principles, PSA offers a transformative vision designed to restore academic authority, empower students, ensure public trust, and realize the full potential of higher education as a vital social pillar for the 21st century and beyond.