Talk Amongst Yourselves

What could possibly go wrong?

The ideal of a well-run self-governing body of academics probably runs against many cultural stereotypes, from Asimov's Second Foundation to Jim March's (et al) Garbage Can Model to Sayre's Law. 

It might be argued that middlemen in the academy are a holdover from when we needed scribes and copyists, who evolved (devolved?) to Chief Information Officers, in charge of buying inferior products from the company with the biggest marketing budget, and their ilk. But the trouble remains that someone has to officiate when the physicists tell the biologists that they are not doing real science, or the engineers tell the marketing scholars that a better mousetrap is the sole requirement for customers to beat paths to doors. Now, I cannot claim to see a Utopian future that will only come about when an ideologically pure vanguard sets the tone for the rest of society. But what I can say is that the first gang of 16, who will endure the first non-value-adding phase of my proposed experiment, must in addition to volunteering their time for an uncertain outcome, also suspend some of the habits of thought formed during their period of apprenticeship in the contemporary academy. So, yes, maybe I am demanding not only ideological purity, but also an awareness of how massacres and purges can easily be justified by appeals to ideological purity.

Nonsense? It may well be, but hear me out. What are the characteristics of the pioneering 16 that would help circumvent some of the most obvious failure modes? A list. I love lists.

1. They must genuinely like each other.
   Academics, more than any other class of people, are notorious for standing on principle. And for not all having the same meaning in mind when using the word "principle". So principles will need to bend in a close collaboration such as this. If this is to be done without pedagogically-unnecessary outsiders, the 16 will have to bend principle based on genuine liking for each other.
2. They must be smug enough to neglect their own ego.
   Or, in other words, not need to win every argument just to know they are right. "Intrinsically motivated" is another way of putting it. It is not enough to agree on a destination. Or to take every turn as a group. The important thing is that every wrong turn taken, when back-tracked, does not lead to grudges, whether against or by, the minority that voted against it. Fortunately, the self-effacing genius is a more prevalent stereotype than the that it should not be a barrier.
3. Like all entrepreneurs, everyone must be willing to wear every hat (of the non-academic variety).
   It would compromise standards to give any course to any PhD (which otherwise reputable universities have been known to do) but when we only have 16 people to be registrar, bursar and janitor, everyone must pitch in.
4. And of course it would be a great help if most could cover more than one field. Renaissance men and women are always in demand here. 
   

Risk a little. Gain a lot.

Out of reach?

Reaching the minimum value proposition of 16 professors teaching 256 students over 4 years is ... a hurdle. Hashtag understatement.

But what about sub-minimum value propositions? To be clear, by this I mean steps that take us closer to the goal but which subtract, instead of adding, value. Another word for this is investment. Not in capital, but in time, trust, and effort. Investment requires a surplus - more of the item invested than one has immediate need for. Where can we look for this surplus?

One logical place to look would be in the crevices of the crumbling system that we are trying  to replace. Professors in diminishing affiliation with universities, students facing unsupportable tuition raises, employers who face a need to completely retrain or hire from abroad to get the people they need.

Let me get concrete. Suppose a large group of enrolled college students students wants to make a statement against an unusually large tuition hike. So they might be willing to take a negative-value-added step to express their frustration. It would take a lot less sacrifice for a group of professors in the same system to join in the protest. How? By being willing to sign non-university-approved graduation certificates for those students. The professors would be invest their reputation to attest that these students completed all the requirements to graduate except for paying the administration's arbitrary surcharges. But, they would not be giving up their income, except maybe over a much longer tome span and assuming near-suicidal vindictiveness by the administration. Similarly, the students would not be fully giving up the "brand" of the university, since the professors signing their independent certificate still have the public affiliation. 

What do you think?  Can this work? Anywhere?

Where to start? 

Even with the minimal value proposition of 16 by 256, the hurdle is pretty high before the whole concept can be proven. How can we get

• 16 people with active contributions to research in diverse fields, who can take the time to start this cooperative,
• 256 students who have other options,
• potential employers of these students agreeing to treat them as equal to regular college graduates,
• parents of these students who have never seen this system work, AND
• scholarships, grants, loans etc,. which require certain criteria to treat the cooperative as a college??

Maybe these can all be found based just on wide circulation of this blog and zealous converts to the cause. Yeah, right!

Instead, I  think we need one (or a combination) of two things:

1. A way to start with less than the minimum - part-time commitments from the professors, a smaller class, lower or free tuition, a two-year program.
2. Compelling value-added, such as a specific curriculum from a stellar core group of professors who can commit to provide a meaningful number of hours on small-group interaction with a selected cohort of students.

Creating the "stellar curriculum" might start with a list of things every graduate should know, before specializing. The goal is selective curation, not a smorgasbord. A good list starts the process of forming the core group of professors. Perhaps:

1. Economics (One intro, plus either "Micro" or "Macro" advanced)
2. History (World, plus one of multiple regions)
3. Philosophy (History of, contemporary issues in )
4. Linguistics (Intro, plus multiple semesters of a foreign language)
5. Literature 
6. Mathematics (Statistics, Linear Algebra, Calculus)
7. Physics
8. Biology (Human biology, ecology)
9. Art (Appreciation, Creation of any of music, fine arts, film)
10. Design (graphic or engineering)

In short: 

University is about creating value by bringing professors and students together. Everyone who is not a student or a professor is an intermediary.

Accreditation and degrees are both signalling mechanisms from the 16th century. In an era when you can look up the individual biography of each professor who makes any contribution to your child's education, it is only inertia that gives them the illusion of relevance.

I foresee a wave of technology-enabled professorial-rank entrepreneurs, who get together in cooperatives with just enough credentialed professors to teach a complete 4-year curriculum. A very rough guesstimate of the ":minimum value proposition" would include 16 professors and 256 students.

Here's how it works

• The professors among themselves do all the necessary administrative work - there's really not much of it if you use the right tools. 
• A fair tuition pays a fair compensation to the cooperative members. 
• e.g. $10,000 per student per year pays each professor $160,000
• With that, the professor can afford a house with a basement to hold his 16-person classes.
• The 16 co-op members could also meet in any of the houses. Or outdoors at a public venue.
• Business expenses like library memberships and software licenses would get group discounts and tax write-offs
• Basic research costs can also be written off. Grants to fund more equipment would incur no overhead. Students can participate in research as undergraduates for free.
• The graduates come out with 
• letters of recommendation from their favorite professors, and 
• a statement signed by all 16 professors the they competently completed a course of study designed by these 16 professors. 
• The reputation of the 16 would be easy to verify using a quick Google Scholar search. 
• They are free to use any resources or learning management systems available for free of for money to deliver their lessons, but they are the ones responsible for the one irreplaceable ingredient: the statement that this capable scholar has personally guaranteed that this graduate has certain competencies.
• Workload: Each professor would be responsible for
1.  two required courses and 
2. three electives per year.
   (The required courses have exactly 16 students each since they are taken by all freshmen or all sophomores. The electives would have 8 to 16, depending on how many "majors" they satisfy.)

So, already with this model , we lower tuition, raise professor income, and ensure highly individualized attention and unique "narrative-style" evaluations for employers and grad schools. But for the educational experience to be valuable, it will also have to be bot well rounded and offer meaningful specialization routes. This leads to:

Rules for the make-up of the 16 professors

Of course different groups of 16/256 would emerge with different specializations, and mergers can occur, but since no such cooperatives exist yet, let us just describe the first founding group.

• To create meaningful distribution requirements (i.e. mixes of required courses), perhaps we would want the 16 to include
• Physical scientists, 
• social scientists, 
• engineers, and 
• scholars in the fields of humanities, 
• arts and  
• business.
• Some foundational required courses would be taught by non-specialists. e.g. a physicist might teach calculus, a sociologist might teach writing, a marketing professor might teach public speaking, and an economist might teach history.
• Four professors in closely related field can designate a major for students who take most of the electives of the group of four and selected "related" electives from others.
• Every one of the 16 professors should be versatile and flexible enough to adapt to the skill sets of his colleagues and the preferences of the different student cohorts.
• Every one of the 16 should be able to make meaningful contributions to the running of the cooperative, such as 
• Recruiting
• Database management
• Logistics
• Curriculum design
• Peer review

Critical mass

The biggest challenge to making this happen is the sheer size of the student body required to make the first incremental value. Professors who are interested might be able to seek each other out and form part-time arrangements while holding on to university appointments, or full-time short-term commitments during paid sabbaticals, or during post-tenure-refusals searches. But students are needed in greater numbers and required to make a greater leap of faith to enter this model. The cooperative would suffer from a need to maintain reasonable admissions standards and from lack of access to various student financial aid sources.

I will address this in a future blog post.

and as they say in Egypt: Campus No, Doctor Yes!