by Sheldon Greaves

There have been several excellent posts on the net recently about the problems facing higher education, and some of the reasons why things have deteriorated. Debra Leigh Scott’s excellent summary, “How The American University was Killed, in Five Easy Steps” has provoked some excellent discussion and comment. Another, not unrelated article, Lynn Parramore describes the work of ultra-right-wing Libertarian economist James Buchannan (“Meet the Economist Behind the One Percent’s Stealth Takeover of America”) sought to use the university system to nurture an intellectual basis that sought to undo that system. Then there is “What’s wrong with secret donor agreements like the ones George Mason University inked with the Kochs” by Alexa Capeloto, which discusses ongoing efforts by the Kochs and others like them to buy influence at what are supposed to be public universities—something that has been going on for some time. Jon Paul Sydnor outlines what’s at stake in his post, “In the liberal arts vs. economism, the liberal arts must win.”

Building a University

My experience in the world of academia is unusual, but hopefully instructive. After graduating from Berkeley with a Ph.D. in ancient Near Eastern Studies, I did what anyone in my field would do at that time, and became a technical writer; jobs in the humanities were scarce enough, but in my particular field they were as extinct as the civilizations I had studied.

However, through a strange and highly-improbable set of circumstances, the year after I graduated I found myself recruited to co-found a university. The target audience was to be workers in the intelligence, counterterrorism, and executive protection industries.  This was particularly interesting because at that time, formal degree programs in those fields did not exist. I began this venture in 1997, when Americans were still flush with the end of the Cold War. In other words, investors found it difficult to understand why we were doing this. A few years later when the twin towers came down, they figured it out.

Meanwhile I was working alongside subject matter experts, education consultants, and others to craft courses and degree programs in new territory.

Henley-Putnam University received California State approval in 2003 and was nationally accredited in 2005. We offered undergraduate and graduate degree programs, including one of the very first professional doctorates in Strategic Security. This year, the school became part of National American University as the Henley-Putnam School of Strategic Security. Unfortunately, the crash of 2008 resulted in the institutional investors gaining a majority share, and I was laid off from my post as Chief Academic Officer. As a result, I spent some time as an adjunct professor myself, and came to know first-hand the depth of the exploitation that goes on there.

Building a university literally from scratch gave me some interesting insights into a university education, and the process of delivering it. Starting one is surprisingly uncomplicated but laying the groundwork does involve a lot of paperwork, attention to detail, and a tolerance for tedium (rather like graduate school). You have to document everything; the classes, learning outcomes, policies, the catalog, student records, and so forth. These problems have all been solved before; it’s mainly a matter of finding the right solution for your particular school and adapting it for your needs. The basic threshold for becoming a university is to receive approval from the bureau of post-secondary education in the state where you are operating. Interestingly, this is more about satisfying concerns that students won’t get cheated; most state post-secondary bureaus are part of the department of consumer affairs, not the education department. If you keep it simple and small in scale, it is entirely possible to run a perfectly legitimate university out of a spare bedroom.

Once you have that approval, you are a bona fide, honest-to-goodness university. You can offer courses for college credit and confer degrees. Those degrees are not accredited, however. Accreditation is a different process; similar to getting state approval, only more so.  Most colleges won’t accept transfer credits from unaccredited schools, and accreditation opens access to many funding streams. But there are also good reasons not to seek accreditation, which I’ll discuss later.

A Bit of History…

The student protests of the 1960s were often directed at the very universities those students attended at the time. They were angered by the use of university research facilities to serve the Military Industrial Complex, strictures placed on student’s rights to speak out and engage in political activity, and other grievances. There was a strong sense among both students and faculty that the university had somehow lost a measure of moral standing. Many felt that the curricula were irrelevant to the needs of the current crises of nuclear war, expanding militarism, the environmental crisis, racism, sexism, corporate excess, and other concerns that still resonate today.

Two developments of note took place. The first was the gradual subversion and seduction of the university system to serve corporate ends.

The second was a spontaneous attempt over hundreds, if not thousands of iterations to reinvent the university. A veritable Cambrian Explosion of new “alternative” colleges and schools sprang up. Starting with the “teach-ins” on college campuses, frustrated students and disillusioned faculty left conventional schools to form new institutions of higher learning. Many of the laws governing charter schools come from roughly this time. They were passed to grant legal space for these experiments in education. It was also the time of the Free Universities, most of which failed. A few became community learning centers and continue today. The vast majority of these new schools went under, but a few such as Reed College and Evergreen State College survived. However, they had a significant impact on a generation of American students and continue to exert influence today.

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Now, I beg your indulgence while this post becomes a “think piece.”

The de-professionalization of the university which Scott describes so well has also been going on in other parts of the economy. Workers find it harder and harder to make a living wage, let alone enjoy benefits or pensions. But there is a quiet revolution taking place in the form of worker coops, using innovative business models designed to serve the workers and the local community.

It seems reasonable that small, local universities could be constructed using variations on these cooperative models, offering educational services to the local community, perhaps in conjunction with existing community colleges. Accreditation is possible, but I would not recommend it. For one thing, the administrative bloat that is choking the life out of our universities is often justified or even mandated by accreditation standards. These standards have less and less to do with actually improving higher education and more about justifying the accreditation process. They are also a way of distinguishing one accreditation body from another; more inane requirements somehow imply greater rigor and seriousness. Accreditation is a very expensive process, and not guaranteed. Once obtained, there are hefty annual fees to the accrediting body. Besides, many of the assurances of accreditation can be replicated by an iron-clad dedication to transparency or reputation.

But what would these smaller local colleges teach?

The Liberal Arts, which encompass the skills of effective politics.

Writing, speaking, reasoning, debate and discourse, exposure to the Big Ideas, exploring the human condition and what makes for a good life and a healthy society. That is why we teach them, and probably why they are so reviled by today’s conservative extremists.

“But,” I can hear you ask, “if these credits or degrees are not accredited, what good are they?” If the goal of the student is to pursue a bachelor’s degree or graduate study, then yes, that would be a problem. But if there are a growing number of workplaces and companies where workers solve problems by dialogue and consensus, with an eye towards improving the community, they would want workers who have these skills. (Take a moment to revel in the irony of “liberal arts” as “job skills.”) Of course, in years past, the working world understood the value of liberal arts, if not in quite the same way. It was still commonplace to get a paying job with a degree in, say, Philosophy or Comparative Literature even if that job didn’t actually involve that subject directly.

Many of the difficulties the universities face today stem both from a decades-long effort to break them to the corporate harness, and a fraying contract between the universities which provide the graduates and the private sector that hires them. Perhaps by working more deliberately with local business leaders and innovators, a new partnership can emerge that can move us more quickly towards re-shaping a society that is freer, fairer, healthier, and more humane.

To be continued…