This Needs Fixin'

I mentioned yesterday that I had some thoughts on folks with PhDs setting up new universities.

I do indeed.

I’ve been contemplating this for a long time, since U.S. universities started reducing traditional tenure-track positions and replacing them with short-term associate professorships. This lowers the cost of academic staff (freeing up funds to pay ever higher administrative salaries …), but has effectively wrecked the careers of a generation of scholars.

We end up in a situation with a large surplus of folks with PhDs in a lot of fields who can’t even start a viable career in college-level teaching. Most of them can’t even get subsistence-level work as associate professors, much less career-track positions.

So, academia was well along the path to self-destruction even before Trump 2.0 got involved.

But I like academia; it’s important and I don’t want to see it wreck itself.

I attended to a deeply liberal arts university; everyone should have that opportunity. Study, especially breadth of study, makes better people and better citizens. This is important.

And then there’s the absurdity of cutting teaching costs at a time when the cost to students of a university education has been rising drastically.

We need to find a new way to do this.

So, we have a large population of un- and under-employed academics along with a very large population of potential students who need less expensive educations.

The answer here seems obvious: qualified academics who can’t get other work need to organize new professor-run universities that avoid the costs of executive and administrative staff as much as possible.

Charge students only what you need to pay professors and necessary staff a decent living. At 10-20 paying students per class, there’s no excuse for any school to be having financial problems as long as they have students.

Start with online schools, since real estate is crazy expensive and servers are not. Expand to in-person when you have enough participants in any particular city or town, using whatever facilities can be gotten cheaply.

Schools don’t need campuses, endowments and large administrative staffs.

Those are nice, but they’re really expensive. And not necessary.

The software you need to set up an online school is open source and available for free:

• iRedMail – email, contacts and calendars
• Jitsi – video conferencing
• Gibbon – school management

There are others, these are just what I’d go with first.

There’s really never been a better time to do this.

Whether you’re an early-career academic who can’t get a position that pays a living wage or a later-career academic who can see what the old universities are becoming, you can do this.

Talk to the folks you know who are in the same position as you. You already have the means of production, but you do have to get together to organize it.

If you don’t know the tech well enough to do that part yourself, contact me via this blog.

I don’t have a PhD, but I have servers.

•