Trouble, As Sparks Fly Upward

It's looking like my blogging may be on hold for a while.  Last week I was informed that one of my siblings has been diagnosed with a severe health issue.  I am obliged therefore to drop a number of things so that I can fulfill my duty to my family.  I don't exactly know yet what will be needed.  I am flying to So. Cal. next week to find out.

Precarity, Late Capitalism, And Artificial Intelligence: Pinocchio's Mischief

This post is a continuation of my series of posts on economic precarity.  As I mentioned in recent posts in this series, we have been exploring 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 two most recent previous posts in this series discussed the fact that there are now more college graduates being produced in our society than there are jobs into which to plug those graduates.  The most recent post discussed why this is the case.  As I wrote last week, 

"...the decline in opportunities for college graduates (along with everyone else) is correlated with the rise in the concentration of economic power in the hands of an ever-shrinking elite.  In fact, I will go even farther and assert that the decline in stable employment for college graduates (even those with technical professional degrees) is a direct outcome of the concentration of economic power at the top of society.

Consider the fact that as of 2015, "America's 20 wealthiest people - a group that could fit comfortably in one single Gulfstream G650 luxury jet - now own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population combined..."  These people therefore have an enormous amount of economic and political clout.  And they have used (and continue to use) that clout in order to turn the American economy into a machine whose sole function is to make them as rich as possible.  The increase in precarity, the casualization of increasing types of employment, and the increasing use of task automation and artificial intelligence are typical of the strategies which these wealthy and powerful people have deployed in order to maximize the wealth they can extract from the American economy while minimizing the amount of wealth they give to the rest of us.  The aggressive expansion of the "gig" economy is another such strategy..."

A basic strategic aim in capitalism is that business owners should maximize profit.  A basic tactic for the achievement of this aim is to maximize profit per unit of goods sold by lowering the cost of production for each unit of goods sold.  Lowering costs can be achieved by attacking the cost of materials, capital machinery, energy, and labor.  In the limit, at the extreme of optimization, this leads to extremely flimsy goods sold for extremely high prices, goods that are produced by extremely poor laborers.

The labor part of this tactic is what we have been discussing in our consideration of precarity.  By making employment casual and temporary, with no fixed covenant between businesses and laborers and no benefits (other than a wage) granted to laborers, businesses have succeeded in driving down the cost of labor.  As mentioned in last week's post, that pressure on labor costs has reached even technical professions requiring a baccalaureate degree or above.  This is leading to an increasingly unsustainable situation in which, for instance, you might spend more than $40,000 to earn a four-year engineering degree - only to find yourself working for an engineering temp agency after graduation!

Labor casualization has been part of a larger tactical aim to reduce labor costs by reducing the number of laborers.  If you're the CEO of a large company, the progression of this tactic can be sketched as follows: First, destroy any expectation of stable employment or decent wages among your labor pool.  Then, reduce the actual number of laborers you use.  This reduction of the total number of laborers can occur by a number of means (including working employees to death by giving each employee the amount of work that should normally be handled by two or three such employees).  It can of course also be achieved by replacing employees with machines.  That replacement has been occurring from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution onward, but in the last two or three decades it has accelerated greatly due to advances in artificial intelligence (AI).  A long-standing motive behind the recent massive investments in research in artificial intelligence is the desire by many of the world's richest people to eliminate the costs of relying on humans by replacing human laborers with automation.

So it is natural to ask what sort of world is emerging as the result of the use of increasingly sophisticated AI in our present economy.  Here we need to be careful, due to the number of shrill voices shouting either wildly positive or frighteningly negative predictions about the likely impacts of AI.  I think we need to ask the following questions:

• First, what exactly is artificial machine intelligence?  What is the theoretical basis of AI?  How does it work?
• What can AI do and not do?
• What countries are at the forefront of AI deployment in their societies?
• How will AI capabilities likely evolve over the next few decades?
• What effects might AI have on human life and human societies over the next few decades?
• How will AI affect the world of work over the next few decades?

The next few posts in this series will attempt to tackle these questions.  I must warn you that what you'll get in those posts are merely my guesses at an answer.  However, because I want the guesses to be educated guesses, I'm going to need to do some research.  So these guesses might be slow in coming.

The Educated Precariat: Why The Mismatch?

This post is a continuation of my series of posts on economic precarity.  As I mentioned in recent posts in this series, we have been exploring 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 university system as a machine that produces graduates for use within the larger machinery of modern late-stage capitalism, and what is happening to those graduates because of the fact that there are more graduates being produced than there are jobs into which to plug those graduates.

That previous post highlighted the fact that from at least the 1990's onward (and possibly starting from the 1970's onward), there has been a growing number of college graduates who have found themselves underemployed after graduation.  Moreover, as time has passed, the number of college graduates who have entered long-term underemployment after graduation has increased as a percentage of total college graduates.  Note that to be underemployed as a college graduate means to hold a job that does not require the knowledge, skills, and abilities that a person would acquire as part of a college education.  As a hypothetical example, think of a gas station cashier with a recent baccalaureate degree in organizational psychology.  Moreover, the sources cited in that post listed the types of college major most likely to lead to underemployment and precarious work.  From those sources it would seem that baccalaureate degrees in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) offer the greatest likelihood of full employment and decent wages.  However, note that a 2018 Canadian study titled, "No Safe Harbour: Precarious Work and Economic Insecurity Among Skilled Professionals in Canada" cited the fact that a technical professional degree is no longer an ironclad guarantee against precarious employment.  

Why then is there such a huge mismatch between the number of people obtaining degrees and the number of available jobs which would utilize the skills implied by these degrees while paying the degree holders a decent living wage?  That is the question which today's post will try to answer.  

First, let's consider the answer offered by people like Peter Turchin, the well-fed Russian emigre to the United States whom I mentioned in another post in this series on precarity.  Turchin asserts that the supposed "excess" of college graduates, the supposed "mismatch" between the number of college graduates and the number of appropriate jobs for these graduates, is the result of an imbalance between the higher education sector and the rest of the economy.  He also asserts that the "excess" of college graduates is increasing the likelihood of instability in society caused by the radicalization of these "excess" graduates.  To put it in the language of Wikipedia, 

"Elite overproduction is a concept developed by Peter Turchin, which describes the condition of a society which is producing too many potential elite members relative to its ability to absorb them into the power structure. This, he hypothesizes, is a cause for social instability, as those left out of power feel aggrieved by their relatively low socioeconomic status." [Emphasis added.]

Note the first sentence and its mention of the capacity of a society to absorb newly educated citizens into an existing power structure.  I will return to the notion of existing power structures later in this post.  Note also that Turchin's "solution" to this problem of "overproduction" is to limit access to higher education.  This "solution" is remarkably similar to the "solution" proposed by Richard Vedder, Christopher Denhart, and Jonathan Robe in their 2013 report titled, "Why Are Recent College Graduates Underemployed? University Enrollments and Labor-Market Realities" which I cited in the previous post in this series.  To quote their report,

"The mismatch between the educational requirements for various occupations and the amount of education obtained by workers is large and growing significantly over time. The problem can be viewed two ways. In one sense, we have an “underemployment” problem; College graduates are underemployed, performing jobs which require vastly less educational tools than they possess. The flip side of that, though, is that we have an 'overinvestment' problem: We are churning out far more college graduates than required by labor-market imperatives. The supply of jobs requiring college degrees is growing more

slowly than the supply of those holding such degrees. Hence, more and more college graduates are crowding out high-school graduates in such blue-collar, low-skilled jobs as taxi driver, firefighter, and retail sales clerks..."

In evaluating whether these assertions are valid, it is helpful to consider the present-day structure of the American economy as a representative of the typical economies of the Global North.  It is also helpful to consider the background of the people who have made these assertions in order to glimpse something of their possible motives.  As I mentioned previously, Peter Turchin is an academic who is already both tenured and well-established (thus well-fed, with multiple income streams), and his assertions of the need to limit access to higher education are not likely to hurt him in any way.  As for Vedder, Denhart, and Robe, Vedder is an adjunct member of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).  Denhart is one of Vedder's former students.  I don't know how much of Vedder's ideology was passed on to Denhart and Robe, but I do know that Vedder is a strong supporter of big business even when it pays exploitative wages to workers, as seen in his support of Wal-Mart and of the 2008 taxpayer bailout of American businesses deemed to be "too big to fail".  (Note that that 2008 taxpayer-funded bailout is one of the biggest reasons why the richest Americans are now so rich!) Moreover, the AEI itself has the policy goal of supporting big business at the expense of small businesses, going as far as advocating that the role of the American government should be to help big businesses grow bigger.  The AEI wants further to eliminate all government support for small business, especially small business incubation, as I pointed out in a previous post.

From such observations, it is possible to move to a consideration of the structural reasons for the mismatch between jobs requiring a college education and the supposed "excess" of college graduates.  I will once again state my belief that high-quality, advanced education should be made available to as many people as want it - regardless of race, creed, national origin, or economic status.  Moreover, I once again assert that education is one of the great equalizing factors in a society, as it is a key component in the struggle of historically oppressed peoples to liberate themselves from historical and ongoing oppression.  This, for instance, was the motivation for the Polish underground "flying universities" which were organized in the 1800's when Poland had been partitioned by Germany, Austria, and Russia, and these nations had forbidden Poles from having access to higher education.  This was also the motivation for the underground "freedom schools" which sprang up in the American South during the antebellum days when white Southern power made it illegal to teach Black people (my people) to read.

But education alone is rather impotent without an opportunity to use it.  And the opportunities for the use of education are constrained by the structure of the society in which that education must operate.  Too often, the structure of a society is dictated and constrained by the dominant power-holders in that society.  I will therefore suggest that the decline in opportunities for college graduates (along with everyone else) is correlated with the rise in the concentration of economic power in the hands of an ever-shrinking elite.  In fact, I will go even farther and assert that the decline in stable employment for college graduates (even those with technical professional degrees) is a direct outcome of the concentration of economic power at the top of society.

Consider the fact that as of 2015, "America's 20 wealthiest people - a group that could fit comfortably in one single Gulfstream G650 luxury jet - now own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population combined..."  These people therefore have an enormous amount of economic and political clout.  And they have used (and continue to use) that clout in order to turn the American economy into a machine whose sole function is to make them as rich as possible.  The increase in precarity, the casualization of increasing types of employment, and the increasing use of task automation and artificial intelligence are typical of the strategies which these wealthy and powerful people have deployed in order to maximize the wealth they can extract from the American economy while minimizing the amount of wealth they give to the rest of us.  The aggressive expansion of the "gig" economy is another such strategy, as is the crafting of laws and regulations (especially by Republicans) which disadvantage small businesses (and all the rest of us, especially those of us who are not of their "tribe") while giving breaks to big business.  

What would a society look like if it provided citizens with the maximum optimal education and the maximum optimal opportunity to use that education in the pursuit of meaningful work?  I'd like to suggest that first, such a society would have a mechanism in place to prevent any one person or entity from concentrating more than a very small fraction of economic output into one set of hands.  Second, I suggest that such a society would be composed largely of artisans, artists, and small businesses owners who exercised their knowledge, education, and creativity to a maximal extent.  In other words, this society would be largely composed of "yeoman entrepreneurs" similar to the "yeoman farmers" idealized by Thomas Jefferson.   Some might say that such a society would be impossible in the 21st century, but I'd like to suggest that some positive aspects of what such a society might look like can be found in the depiction of the fictional Mars City in Hao Jingfang's novel Vagabonds.  I will mention that novel again in a future post. (Note also that although there was much to like about Mars City, it was not exactly a perfect utopia - there were indeed a few flies in that ointment, so to speak.)

Lastly, I suggest that such a society would be resilient - much more so than a more stratified, unequal society would be.  This is because such a society would have a much higher degree of decentralized group intelligence than would exist in a society of stratification and inequality.  This would make the more egalitarian society much more able to respond to emergent threats and opportunities than the more stratified society.  Consider the late 19th century and early-to-middle 20th-century history of Britain as a stratified society of the Global North.  Consider how its rigid class hierarchy and caste system prevented some of its principal actors from seeing the big picture and acting appropriately in the face of challenges.  Cases in point include the failure of Robert Scott's Antarctic expedition in comparison to the successful expedition of Roald Amundsen, as well as failures in World Wars 1 and 2 that resulted from a hidebound British system of honor, privilege and caste which blindsided British leadership.  The strident attempt by the Republican Party and other right-wing elements in the United States to re-establish an American system of caste and privilege constitutes the real threat to the "existing power structures" cited by Turchin, because it is leading to the "fragilization" of these structures.

The Educated Precariat: Mandarin Spoilage

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 the modern university as a European institution and its spread as a model of higher education throughout the world.  That post also discussed the late-stage signs of dysfunction which have begun to appear in the modern university system during the last 40 years, particularly in English-speaking countries such as the United States and Australia.

Today's post will consider the university system as a machine that produces components for use within the larger machinery of modern late-stage capitalism, and what is happening to those components because of the fact that there are more components being produced than there are slots into which to plug those components.  The "components" in this case are recent college graduates.  Historically, an American guy or gal who managed to earn a mortarboard perched on his or her head, an academic robe on his or her body, and a sheepskin in his or her hand could expect to pursue one of two possible vocational paths after graduation:

• He or she could become a career scholar, otherwise known as an academic.  This academic career could be focused on teaching or on research, or on a mixture of both.
• He or she could become a member of the professional class, the "managers, officials, and professionals" described by Gary Roth in his book The Educated Underclass.

The next three paragraphs will cite extensively from Gary Roth's book.  

The prospects for those college graduates pursuing either path were very bright from the late 1800's until around 1970.  This was true because the rapid expansion of the American economy and the growth of urban populations produced a need for professionals with the requisite training to serve the resulting societal needs.  The pre-existing system of private higher education was inadequate to produce these professionals, as noted by Roth: "Tuition-driven institutions have never been a viable model at any level of the income spectrum ..."  Thus the government (at both the Federal and State level) intervened to fund public universities that could fill the demand for degreed professionals and managers.  These universities became important research centers which boosted commercial development as they published their research findings, particularly in agricultural science.  These public universities also helped to rapidly expand education in law, medicine, and engineering.

Although the absolute number of degreed professionals thus steadily increased, the number of these professionals as a percentage of the total American population remained small until World War Two.  On the eve of the war, less than 5 percent had a four-year college or university degree.  However, the war drastically increased the need for degreed professionals, and the G.I. Bill of 1944 stimulated the supply of these professionals and the expansion of the American public university system.  This stimulation was amplified by other non veteran-related Federal and State funding for higher education.

The demand for the graduates of this expanded higher education system was fueled by the drastic expansion of the managerial class of the American business sector.  For instance, between 1950 and 1970, the number of American white-collar workers grew by 75 percent.  Many of these workers could be considered to be "private-sector mandarins" involved in management and the administration of big business bureaucracy.  The growth in the numbers of these private-sector mandarins was paralleled by the growth in public-sector mandarins as Federal and State governments expanded.  Indeed, the number of State and local government employees increased much more drastically than the number of Federal employees.  The demand for graduates was also fueled by the growth of the public university system itself, which saw the addition of 200,000 faculty positions between 1950 and 1970.  Thus in 1970, higher education had come to be seen as a guaranteed means of upward social mobility.  By 1970, 32.1 percent of all Americans between 18 and 24 years of age were enrolled in some sort of college.  

But 1970 was the beginning of a tangible slowdown in American fortunes, a tangible curbing of American power and prestige.  Some of the causes were obvious, including the rejection of American values by many nations of the Third World, and the loss of prestige of the American military in Vietnam.  One of the causes was hidden to most observers, namely, the peak in American conventional oil production which occurred in 1970 and the beginning of the outsourcing of American manufacturing to other countries with cheaper labor.  These changes wrought changes in the American economy which began to curtail the opportunities open to people holding college degrees.  Although the conventional wisdom held that a college education remained a key to upward mobility, reality began to look different.  A growing number of college graduates began to experience the phenomenon of underemployment, that is, working in jobs which require less education than the job-holder possesses, or, working in jobs which offer less than stable full-time employment even though the job-holder would like to be fully employed.  Let's close this post with a discussion of both types of underemployment.

First, although underemployment has gained recent attention as part of the phenomenon of precarity, there are sources who indicate that underemployment has existed for the last several decades.  For instance, a 1963 U.S. Government publication titled, Two Years After The College Degree states that "Two years post-graduation, 18 percent of the class of 1958 reported that a four-year degree was not necessary for the jobs they held." (Roth, Chapter 4.)  However, Gary Roth points out that those graduates were living in an environment in which there was a surplus of available job positions and a relative shortage of workers with college degrees.  

That has not been the case for at least the last two decades (and perhaps longer).  For instance, in the 2013 paper "Why Are Recent College Graduates Underemployed?" by Vedder, Denhart and Robe, Figure 10 shows the number of degree holders who occupy certain occupations which do not require a college degree, and shows how the percentage of these jobs occupied by degree-holders has increased between 1970 and 2010.  Note, for instance, the steep increase in the number of college-educated taxi drivers, salespersons, and retail clerks.  Also, in the 2014 New York Fed paper "Are Recent College Graduates Finding Good Jobs?" by Abel, Deitz, and Su, we can see that already by 1990, the underemployment rate for recent college graduates was over 40 percent.  Younger college graduates had underemployment rates that were nearly 50 percent.  Recent college graduates who were working part-time after graduation were also above 15 percent in 1990.  Those recent college graduates who occupied low-wage jobs was around 15 percent in 1990.  These numbers did not show any consistent long-term improvement from 1990 to 2014.

According to Vedder, Denhart and Robe, the number of Americans with a bachelors degree or higher was expected to grow by 31 percent between 2010 and 2020, whereas the number of actual jobs requiring such degrees was expected to grow by only 14.3 percent.  This would translate to 19 million additional Americans with bachelors degrees or higher compared to only 7 million additional jobs requiring such degrees.  This would also mean that the number of underemployed graduates would increase to 30 million.  

What's more, those who start their post-graduation careers underemployed are at great risk for remaining underemployed five and ten years after graduation, as noted in "The Permanent Detour: Underemployment’s Long-Term Effects on the Careers of College Grads," a 2018 paper by the Strada Institute for the Future of Work and Burning Glass International, Inc.  According to this paper, 43 percent of college graduates are now starting their post-graduate careers underemployed.  Of these, 29 percent will continue to be underemployed after five years and 23 percent will be underemployed after ten years.  The figures are worse for women: 47 percent will start out underemployed and 31 percent will be underemployed after five years.

Why is there such a mismatch between present-day numbers of college graduates and the present-day number of education-appropriate job positions for these graduates?  What coping mechanisms are the college educated precariat using to cope with underemployment?  And how are these coping mechanisms affecting those members of the precariat who do not have a college education?  We'll start tackling those questions in the next post in this series.

The Flight Of The Tarnished Superheroes

I've been following Cosmic Connie's blog Whirled Musings lately, and I came across a series of posts about a movie titled Sound of Freedom which was released by Angel Studios this summer.  Angel Studios is an arm of the American evangelical media industry, an industry about which I made a few comments in a recent post.  

The movie purports to document the efforts of Tim Ballard, a Mormon and former employee of the Department of Homeland Security who supposedly formed his own special private organization in order to rescue children from child-trafficking rings.  Both Ballard and the organization he founded are unabashed supporters of the Rethuglican (er, I mean, "Republican") Party and Donald Trump (who "protected" Mexican migrant children at the southern border by violently ripping them from the arms of their parents and throwing them into detention centers where some of them died).  The lead actor in Sound of Freedom is also a rabid Trump supporter and QAnon spokesperson.

The movie is an example of the longstanding strategy of the American right wing, in finding a group of people whom they can brand as monsters while claiming that the champions of the Right (and only they) can and will effectually deal with the monster they have identified.  Now I fully agree with those who say that the present operators of human trafficking rings (especially those which sexually exploit children) are monsters.  But for the Right to claim nowadays that its members are the pure and holy fighters of these monsters is laughable, especially when we see how the recent exposures of the sins of the Right (especially those of the evangelical/Protestant/religious members of the Right) have so severely damaged its credibility.  

This definitely applies to the makers and financial backers of the movie Sound of Freedom.  Let me summarize some of the points made in Connie's posts:

1. Both Tim Ballard and the organization he founded are guilty of factual distortions in their presentation of the problem of child trafficking and of the efforts of their organization in fighting it.
2. These factual distortions have actually made it harder for legitimate governmental organizations to fight child trafficking.
3. Some of the financial backers of Sound of Freedom are themselves involved in child trafficking or have groomed underage minors for sex or have trafficked in illicit drugs.
4. Some of these backers have also committed fraud against government programs.  Among these is Andrew McCubbins, the executive producer for Sound of Freedom, who pleaded guilty to Medicare fraud in the amount of at least $89 million (one source says $100 million) in September 2020, and who was indicted later in 2020 along with other defendants for defrauding the U.S. Government of an additional $4.5 billion in medical billing.  McCubbins has not yet been sentenced and has not yet gone to jail.

If you want all the details concerning these points, please read Connie's posts.  

I guess moviemaking is politics by other means.  (Didn't Clausewitz say that? ... Oh, ... he said it about something other than movies.  My bad!)  But here we are, not even out of the dog days of Summer 2023 and election year campaigning has already begun, courtesy of a movie made by the American religious Right.  As I have frequently already said, the American religious Right is interested in religion solely as a means for advancing white supremacy.  They themselves have no intention of obeying the New Testament.  This is obvious when we see how the white male defenders of "traditional morality" who come from the American Right keep getting caught engaging in pedophilia, fornication, adultery and homosexual behavior themselves.

And this is but one reason why I haven't been to church since March 2020.  Let me be clear about this.  I know that everyone has issues, and that anyone who wants to become a decent person will find himself struggling with his own besetting sins.  That is a tragic consequence of our fallen condition.  I also know that I can't point to others and say that I'm any better than them.  All I can say is that whatever our personal demons, we can band together to support each other in leaving those demons behind.  But when you willfully and deliberately use religion - especially the Bible and the name of Christ - as a political tool for promoting the supremacy of your own people and as a justification to enslave or trash or oppress me - simply because I am not a member of your tribe or skin color or ethnicity - then I say God damn you.  When you portray yourselves as perfect and the perfect upholders of God's holy Law in order to justify your continued oppression of people who haven't done anything to you, I say, to hell with you.  May God punish you not only for not leaving your personal demons behind but also for your hypocrisy in claiming that you and you only are the sole defenders (and thus the sole beneficiaries) of all that is good in the world.  God damn you to hell.

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"