FOTF Is At It Again ...

Focus On The Family (FOTF) is at it again - that is, they are spamming people who don't want their media offerings and who don't support their organization.  FOTF is an American right-wing evangelical organization that has sold its soul to support the Rethuglican - er, I mean, "Republican" party.  On Monday of this week they sent me an email telling me how I could "save children".  I called up their Colorado office and told them in no uncertain terms to take me off their mailing list.  I thought they had agreed to do so, but today I found another email from them in my inbox.  They claim to be a Christian organization, but I guess they have chosen to ignore those parts of the Good Book that say that we're not supposed to tell lies...

By the way, last year the Federal Election Commission allowed political advertising emails to bypass automated spam filters of most email service providers.  This policy change was due to pressure from the Republican Party.  

The Educated Precariat: The Modern University - Birth, Growth, Late-Stage Diseases

This post is a continuation of my series of posts on economic precarity.  As I mentioned in recent posts in this series, we have begun to delve the subject of the educated precariat - that is, those people in the early 21st century who have obtained either bachelors or more advanced graduate degrees from a college or university, yet who cannot find stable work in their chosen profession.  The most recent previous post in this series discussed the origins and evolution of formal education and of the creation of higher education systems in ancient societies.  Here we discovered that these societies left records of the creation and operation of institutions of higher education, and that these institutions served the following purposes:

• The creation of cadres of people who could either participate in politics and governance as ruling practitioners of statecraft, or as people who could serve as competent administrators/bureaucrats under these ruling elites.
• The teaching and research of basic scientific knowledge and skills in such arenas as medicine, mathematics, and astronomy.

This previous post also discussed the widespread distribution of these institutions throughout the world, in the ancient societies that existed on the African continent, in Iran, and in China, as well as the ancient Greek and Byzantine schools.  This point is important, as our present society tends to hold up Europe as the sole source and origin of lasting intellectual inquiry.  This point of view is clearly not valid if one examines the history of other societies.  (See "Ancient Centers of Higher Learning: A Bias In The Comparative History of the University?", Michael A. Peters, January 2019.  Peters also points out the existence of ancient centers of higher learning in India that existed thousands of years before any such institutions in the West.)

Nonetheless, most institutions called "universities" in the 21st century can trace their structure back to the medieval European university as it came into being from the 11th century onward.  So today's post will briefly sketch the origins and motivation for the medieval university.  We will then examine the functions of the medieval university, and how those functions evolved over time to produce the modern research university.  We will close with an examination of how the growth of certain ancillary functions within the university have distorted the mission and focus of the university system.

Origins of the Medieval University

(Sources: "State-Building and the Origin of Universities in Europe, 800-1800", Hollenbach and Pierskalla, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, October 2022; and Wisdom's Workshop: The Rise of the Modern University, Chapter 1, James Axtell, Princeton University Press, 2016.)

The medieval university arose from the growth experienced in European societies from the eleventh century onward.  This growth included the growth of European populations (with a resulting increase in the number of new towns and cities), and a corresponding growth of trade.  This was accompanied by a growing need in the new parishes of the Roman Catholic Church for advanced training for its new priests and administrators, along with a growing need for trained secular administrators in the newly forming towns, villages, and cities.  The training and education of an administrative class had been formerly performed by monasteries, but these monasteries were unable to provide the increasingly complex and advanced training needed by secular and ecclesiastical administrators from the 12th century onward.

The Church responded to this need by establishing "cathedral schools" for advanced training of its clerics.  From these schools came academics who desired a freer rein in teaching and scholarship than the Church was willing to grant them.  One of these scholars, Peter Abelard, founded his own schools for advanced learning in the twelfth century.  In addition, some of the secular scholars that studied at cathedral schools also went on to found their own schools.  These schools eventually organized themselves into self-governing "guilds of masters and scholars", or studia generale which received and taught aspiring scholars from any locale.  In order to free themselves from the kinds of obligations and interference that both Church and secular authorities imposed on ordinary people, these guilds petitioned both the Pope and the kings of their respective nations for the granting of formal legal autonomy and freedom of operation.  Such formally sanctioned guilds thus became the first medieval universities.  Note that the Catholic Church competed with these universities sometimes by co-opting some of them into its own power structure, and sometimes by founding universities of its own.

The charters granted by either State or Church or both, combined with the organization of these universities as scholastic guilds, produced a unique internal structure and operating environment for the medieval university.  Let's examine that structure and operating environment more closely.

Functions And Structure of the Medieval University

(Sources: ""Ancient Centers of Higher Learning: A Bias In The Comparative History of the University?", Michael A. Peters, Taylor and Francis Group, January 2019; "The Medieval University", J.E. Healey, CCHA, Report, 17 (1950); Wisdom's Workshop: The Rise of the Modern University, Chapter 1, James Axtell, Princeton University Press, 2016.)

The medieval university had the following characteristics:

1. It received students from everywhere and not just its own local region.
2. It engaged in higher learning, going beyond "the Seven Liberal Arts of antiquity and the early Middle Ages" to include the re-discovered teachings and writings of Greek philosophers such as Aristotle as well as Arabic learning.
3. "A significant part of the teaching was done by Masters (teachers with a higher degree)." (Peters, cited above; Healey, cited above.)
4. It was a self-governing, autonomous institution (a corporation run like the craft guilds) with a high degree of control over its budget and expenditures, and complete academic freedom over what degrees were awarded, and to whom.  Indeed, those universities which depended entirely on student tuition had complete control over their own budgets and expenditures. (Axtell, cited above.)  This self-governance was usually exercised entirely by the university faculty, that is, the collection of masters who taught university courses.  However, sometimes, this self-governance was exercised by students, who could choose which masters to hire or fire in addition to their other administrative powers.  (See the University of Bologna, for instance.)  Note that there were no early cases of universities being run by "administrators" who were not directly involved in teaching or learning.  This point will become important later.
5. Its main function was to produce the European equivalent of mandarins and other "professionals to maintain and lead the established social order, secular as well as religious."  (Axtell, cited above.)  Research was not a major function of the medieval university, although the influence of Aristotelian thought on the university curriculum did produce a spirit of inquiry.
6. The individual universities eventually became part of a European university system in which a degree issued by any one university was recognized as valid by any other university and anyone who achieved the degree of master was to be recognized as such by any university and to be allowed to teach at any university without having to undergo further examination.

This medieval system was adequate for times in which the technologies available to European societies evolved relatively slowly.  This is also why although inquiry was encouraged through Aristotelian thinking, research was not a primary university function.  However, the strains in European society produced by the Industrial Revolution forced a reform and transformation of the university into an institution whose main mission is research.  This transformation began in Germany in the 1800's.  Let's examine this in more detail.

The Birth of the Modern Research University

(Sources: The Challenge for Research in Higher Education: Harmonizing Excellence and Utility, Alan W. Lindsay and Ruth T. Neumann, ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Reports 1988; "The Rise of Academic Laboratory Science: Chemistry and the ‘German Model’ in the Nineteenth Century", History of Universities: Volume XXXIV/1: A Global History of Research Education: Disciplines, Institutions, and Nations, 1840-1950, Chang and Rocke, Oxford University Press, July 2021.)

Although the medieval university system did not deliberately focus on research, the fact is that a large number of scholars who were products (either graduates or professors) of medieval universities went on to do the work that laid the foundation for the Industrial Revolution.  These included such figures as Isaac Newton, Leonhard Euler, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.  It can be argued that the contributions of such intellectuals were greatly amplified and expanded by the transformation of the German university system, even though the stated motivations for that transformation were not initially the pursuit of practical scientific knowledge.  According to Lindsay and Neumann (cited above), the reforms of German universities triggered in the 18th and 19th centuries were "based on an acceptance of the view that the purpose of higher education was to advance as well as to preserve and transmit knowledge."  However, another significant motivation for these reforms was the fact that Prussia had been badly humiliated by France during the wars of the early 19th century, and so the German university system was reformed in order to catch up with and pass up the French.

The main reformer was Wilhelm von Humboldt, who stated that 

"Universities should view knowledge as incomplete and so subject to discovery, although full or final knowledge could never be attained.  Further, knowledge was pure and was to

be found deep within the self. It could not be gained merely by the extensive collection of facts. Only knowledge that came from, and could be developed within, the self formed one's character; and it was character and the manner of behaving that was important for the state and for humanity, not merely knowledge and eloquence ..."

In other words, von Humboldt helped to create a system in which universities engaged in the pursuit of new knowledge simply for its own sake, and not merely for any utilitarian ends.  However, it is undeniable that this focus on research for its own sake produced great advances in German science, including chemistry, and that these advances had a number of immediate practical applications.  Those nations whose universities adopted the German model of fostering pure research also began to reap the pragmatic benefits of the discoveries which that research achieved.  This has been the basis of the astonishing technological prowess achieved by the United States in the early and middle decades of the 20th century.  However, the changes in broad American attitudes toward the public good and the maintenance of the public commons have undercut American investments in basic science from the 1970's onward.  This pressure was felt and articulated as far back as 1988, when Lindsay and Neumann wrote that

"Over the last decade, university research has gradually changed its character under the influence of cost pressures, ambivalent public attitudes, and increasingly narrow notions of "utility." The natural sciences have received higher priority, and research has been increasingly concentrated in large teams and centers. The proportion of applied research has increased and closer links with industry developed. These trends have contributed to a weakening of the teaching-research nexus. Relationships with government have been marked by increasing bureaucratization and control. The business community and the government both stress the contribution of university research to national economic and social renewal, but the pattern of postwar development in higher education has brought utility into conflict with excellence, the traditional criterion for funding research. The challenge is to incorporate utility into research policy and funding without compromising the pursuit of excellence."

In other words, American funding and administration of American universities (both public and private) has fallen victim to the same "free-market" conservative ideology that has begun to destroy many other institutions that once served the public good.  The purpose of this destruction has been to continue to concentrate the majority of our societal wealth in the hands of a few capitalist parasites at the top of our collective food chain.  Thus American universities have become cash cows which have unfortunately fallen into a lake full of piranhas.  Let's close with a picture of the feeding frenzy and how universities have tried to cope. 

The Present Day: Administrative Takeover and the University as Cash Cow

The shift in viewpoint of the American university toward a perspective of the university as a business is not entirely new.  In his 1918 book titled The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men, Thorstein Veblen wrote that American universities are 

"... corporations of learning [which] set their affairs in order after the pattern of a well-conducted business concern. In this view the university is conceived as a business house dealing in merchantable knowledge, placed under the governing hand of a captain of erudition, whose office it is to turn the means in hand to account in the largest feasible output. It is a corporation with large funds, and for men biased by their workday training in business affairs it comes as a matter of course to rate the university in terms of investment and turnover. Hence the insistence on business capacity in the executive heads of the

universities, and hence also the extensive range of businesslike duties and powers that

devolve on them."

In other words, even as far back as 1918, American universities were viewed by their administrators as businesses.  (For a look at this process in an Australian context, see "How we got here: The transformation of Australian public universities into for-profit corporations", James Guthrie and Adam Lucas, 2022.)  (BTW, lemme break one thing down for ya: when Veblen uses the term "captain of erudition," what he means is "business executive as college administrator.")

What's more, even as far back as 1918, the function of governing these universities was being moved away from faculty and students, and was being transferred to administrators who had no direct role in either teaching or learning.  Veblen was ruthless in his evaluation of these administrators: "They are needless..."  (That's "needless" as in, "useless"!)  Yet the ranks of college administrators have grown steadily over the decades, at first slowly, then meteorically during the period from the 1970's onward.  I don't have time to write the statistics here (it's late in the day - gotta clean the bathroom and kitchen, and water the vegetables!), but I will leave a list of articles that interested readers can check out themselves if they are curious.  Suffice it to say that the administrative function of modern universities has begun to displace all other functions, hogging resources like a cancerous tumor even as faculty tenure is eliminated, faculty input into university policy is marginalized, faculty pay stagnates or declines, the percentage of adjunct faculty relative to full-time faculty increases, and student tuition (along with student debt) skyrockets.  

It may well be that the growth of the administrative and non-teaching professional sector of university staff has begun to threaten the long-term economic viability of American universities, both public and private.  This would explain two phenomena which I have noticed over the last decade or so and which I identify as possible coping mechanisms: the increasing promotion of university athletic programs (particularly football) in universities which never used to care much about athletics, and the expansion of a bewildering offering of professional graduate degrees and certificates.  I suggest that these professional graduate certificates and degrees are producing a glut of mandarins of the Global North at a time in which the job market for these mandarins is becoming saturated.

What is to be done about these new mandarins and their dwindling job prospects?  One suggestion comes from Peter Turchin, a corpulent Russian academic who has proposed that elites should limit access to higher education lest their less fortunate yet educated underlings become a source of the kind of upheaval and social transformation that destroys the power of these elites.  I can't say that I agree with his moral viewpoint.  I argue that education should be made as widely available as possible precisely because of the power of educated people to transform situations of inequality dominated by entrenched elites.  But for this to occur, ordinary people must regain a sense of the purpose of education in order that they might produce and revive grassroots expressions of that purpose.  More on that in another post.

Additional Sources:

• "Globalization, Neoliberalism, and International Student Enrolments in Higher Education: Expanding Global Interconnectedness and Academic Commodification", pages 32-42
• "Degrees of Change: How New Kinds of Professional Doctorates are Changing Higher Education Institutions"
• Article by Michael Delucchi, Richard Dadzie, Eric Dean, and Xuan Pham in Review of Social Economy, June 2021 (Language warning!)
• "A Bad Bargain: Administrative Bloat and Low Faculty Pay at UDC"
• "How Much is Too Much? Controlling Administrative Costs Through Effective Oversight"
• "Report: IU Athletics generated 13th most revenue nationally in 2022"

The Educated Precariat: The Seedlings Of Early Trees

This post is a continuation of my series of posts on economic precarity.  As I mentioned in recent posts in this series, we are now starting to delve the subject of the educated precariat - that is, those people who have obtained either bachelors or more advanced graduate degrees from a college or university, yet who cannot find stable work in their chosen profession.  I suggest that the troubled lives of the educated precariat are a symptom of the troubled state of higher education generally - especially in the First World (also known as the Global North).  Two troubled groups come immediately to mind, namely, academics (college professors or salaried researchers) and college or university graduates.  We will explore the plight of new college professors and researchers later.  But suffice it to say that the guaranteed career of a tenured professor is increasingly out of reach for this group.  (See also, "Tenure Track for Professors In States Like Texas May Disappear," USA Today, 13 April 2023.)  A third group that may not know it's in trouble consists of new and continuing college and university students whose necks will one day be broken by the mousetrap of student loan debt.  A fourth group consists of the administrators and employees of the system itself.  Their trouble arises from the fact that they are running out of a key resource, namely, new students!  This is due to a number of factors, such as declining birth rates, as well as a sober realization on the part of young men and women that college education itself has begun to yield sharply diminished returns even as it has become unbearably expensive.

In considering the historical role of higher education in the development of global civilizations, it is natural to ask how things got to this state in which American higher education has begun to crumble. Where exactly did we come from that we have arrived at this destination?  To answer that question, we need to look at where we started from - in other words, it's time to look at the historical origins of education in general and of higher education in particular.

The first thing we notice is that there are records on almost every continent from almost every civilization describing the origins and evolution of formal education and of the creation of higher education systems. Ancient places of higher learning can be found in places such as these (this is a very partial list, by the way):

• Mali, African Continent (University of Timbuktu containing the Sankore Madrasah)
• Tunisia, African Continent (University of Ez-Zitouna)
• China 
• Academy of the White Deer Cavern (白鹿洞書院); 
• Songyang Academy (嵩陽書院) (This was a private rather than public institution.)
• Taixue (太學) ("National University" established by Emperor Wu)
• Greece, European Continent
• The school of Isocrates
• The school of Plato (Also known as the "Academy", which was the first historical use of this term in the West.)  (See also Higher Education In Greece, Kyriazis and Asderaki, CEPES, 2008)
• The school of Pythagoras
• The Byzantine Empire
• The Pandidakterion (known today as the University of Constantinople)

Note that although some of these institutions are called "universities," the actual entity known as the modern university did not come to being until the Middle Ages in Europe.

The entire educational process including both primary and higher education has been documented for the Greco-Roman and Chinese cases, and so it is useful to examine these cases in more detail.  First, let's consider the Greco-Roman case.  And in the case of Greece, we must consider the distinction between education in the Athenian city-state and education in Sparta.  According to Wikipedia, formal education in Athens was reserved for boys who were free-born.  The education of slaves was forbidden.  Formal education was conducted by either public schools or by private tutors.  I was not able to find out how much access to public schooling depended on family wealth, but the sources I have found do indicate that the extent of this formal education did depend on how much a family could afford to pay.  Access to higher education was strictly on the basis of a student's ability to pay, and it appears that the system of higher education was largely created and run by private individuals with sufficient means for leisure.  Thus figures such as Aristotle and Plato could be considered a kind of educational entrepreneur.  As for Sparta, while both free men and free women could participate, the purpose of Spartan education was solely to train the nation for war-fighting.

A funny thing happened to educated Athenian Greeks who had enjoyed the status of free-born intellectuals: when the Greek city-states were conquered by and absorbed into the Roman Empire, these free-born intellectuals became slaves themselves.  However, these educated slaves were able to lighten the burden of their slavery by becoming tutors and founding their own private schools (often with very slim profit margins).  This system of private education began to assume the role which Roman fathers as heads of households had traditionally held as the educators of their children.  In the Roman empire, there was no state-funded public education, either at the primary or the secondary level.  Yet those who wanted to participate in Roman politics were required to obtain a formal higher education.  This limited participation in Roman politics to the wealthy.  Also, whereas in Greece, higher education was seen as an activity of leisure which should not be tainted by any practical application (From Formal to Non-Formal: Education, Learning and Knowledge, pages 8 and 9), in the Roman empire the situation was different.  For Romans insisted that all education should have some practical purpose.  

In China, primary education began as an informal, communal process.  According to Dr. Ulrich Theobald, "The oldest word for "school" is xiang 庠, which actually means a building for livestock with two facing walls, where elderly people reared sheep, pigs or cattle and at the same time were entrusted with the duty to watch children and instruct them."  Primary education in China eventually evolved into a system of both private and public schools.  The public schools came into being during the Tang and Ming periods.  These schools, along with private primary schools and tutors, prepared students to enter the Chinese academy system, which then prepared promising students for posts in the Chinese civil service.  A couple of noteworthy facts regarding these academies is that there were times when private academies were either outlawed, disbanded, or taken over by the state as exemplified by the emperor.  Also, there were periods in which the state created or funded public academies in the academy system.  Lastly, some of the academies of the 18th and 19th centuries assumed research duties in addition to teaching.  The Taixue 太學 "National University" had already assumed a research role during the Southern Dynasties period from 420 to 589 AD.  

From the Chinese and Greco-Roman cases we can see that a key function of ancient higher education was to produce an elite class - that is, people who could either participate in politics and governance as ruling practitioners of statecraft, or as people who could serve as competent administrators/bureaucrats under these ruling elites.  Therefore the function of many ancient institutions of higher learning was not primarily research, although, as noted above, exceptions to this did exist in both ancient Greece and in China.  Stronger examples of a focus on both research and applied knowledge can be found in the Academy of Gondishapur in what is now modern Iran.  This academy was a center for the learning of medicine and science, among other subjects, and the modern hospital system owes much of its inspiration and foundational philosophy to this academy.  The Sankore Madrasah on the African continent also evolved a research function, although its main original purpose was Islamic education.  We don't have time today to explore the beginnings of the modern European university, but suffice it to say that the modern university system seems from the outset to have had the dual purposes of research and teaching.  Thus the early modern universities took over the function of producing the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church (the Western form of the mandarin administrator) in addition to producing research.

What is interesting to note is how systems of higher education fare in societies undergoing decline.  The Byzantine system of higher education is a key example.  The vicissitudes of the Byzantine empire in the 7th and 8th centuries and in the 13th century dramatically decreased the central government's ability to fund higher education and led to the privatization of higher education.  It is certain that this influenced the supply of competent practitioners of statecraft as well as competent administrators.  It is also true that declining Byzantine imperial power also produced declines in the number of jobs available to would-be mandarins who graduated from any Byzantine program of higher education.  This has significant implications for the American system of higher education, as the process of accelerating inequality continues in the United States, and as the rich parasites at the top of the food chain continue to suck nutrients from the rest of society.  More on that in another post.