An Alternative University

solving the neutrality problem

My previous post argued that, for the modern corporate university, there is an essential contradiction between the desirability of neutrality on controversial issues and the need to take positions on such issues in the course of its ordinary functioning. In that post I took it for granted that education and academic research would be done in the context of a corporate structure, something like Harvard or the University of Chicago.

That is not how it was always done in the past. The early European universities, of which Bologna was the first, were places where students, individually or as organized bodies, bought teaching from professors, not corporations hiring professors and selling schooling to students. It seems to have been about two hundred years before Bologna, founded about 1088, started to pay salaries to its professors. In Edenborough when Adam Smith taught there, more than four centuries later, the income of the professors consisted mostly of payments by the students who chose to attend their classes.

Smith wrote of Oxford, where the professors had salaries:

In [some] universities the teacher is prohibited from receiving any honorary or fee from his pupils, and his salary constitutes the whole of the revenue which he derives from his office. His interest is, in this case, set as directly in opposition to his duty as it is possible to set it. It is the interest of every man to live as much at his ease as he can; and if his emoluments are to be precisely the same, whether he does, or does not perform some very laborious duty, it is certainly his interest, at least as interest is vulgarly understood, either to neglect it altogether, or, if he is subject to some authority which will not suffer him to do this, to perform it in as careless and slovenly a manner as that authority will permit. If he is naturally active and a lover of labour, it is his interest to employ that activity in any way, from which he can derive some advantage, rather than in the performance of his duty, from which he can derive none.

If the authority to which he is subject resides in the body corporate, the college, or university, of which he himself is a member, and in which the greater part of the other members are, like himself, persons who either are, or ought to be, teachers; they are likely to make a common cause, to be all very indulgent to one another, and every man to consent that his neighbor may neglect his duty provided he himself is allowed to neglect his own. In the university at Oxford, the greater part of the public professors have, for these many years, given up altogether even the pretence of teaching.

There is no obvious reason why the modern corporate university could not be replaced by something closer to the older model, a number of separate organizations cooperating in their mutual interest through the normal processes of the marketplace. These presumably would include businesses renting out the use of classrooms to teachers and teachers charging students who wished to take their courses whatever price was mutually agreeable, each student choosing his courses according to what he wanted to study, the reputation of the teacher, and his price.

Other organizations might coexist with these. There might be one that did nothing but give examinations and grant degrees to those who passed; presumably teachers would be hired to spend part of their time writing and grading such examinations. Another might perform clerical functions, printing or offering online a course catalogue listing courses offered and their prices, compiling transcripts for students who wanted them and were willing to pay for them. There might be groups publishing and selling evaluations of teachers and courses, like the Confidential Guide compiled by the Harvard Crimson.

There might be research groups, working in the same community in order to use students as inexpensive research assistants and allow researchers to supplement their income by teaching. Some members of the community might be simultaneously teaching elementary courses in a subject and paying other members for advanced instruction. There might be privately run dormitories for those students who wished to live in them.

The essential characteristic of this scheme is that, like any market system, it produces what the consumer wants. To the extent that the students, even with the assistance of professional counselors and written evaluations of courses, are less competent to judge what they are getting than are the people who now hire and fire teachers, that may be a disadvantage. But it does guarantee that it is the students’ interest, not the interest of the university as judged by the university, that determines what teachers are employed and what they teach. If some students, or their parents, believed that they needed a more conventional structure, they could choose to go instead to a school on the current model.

Under the sort of system I have described a majority of students, even a large majority, can have only a positive effect on what is taught; they can guarantee that something will be taught but not that something will not be. As long as there are enough students interested in a subject that a teacher can make money teaching it that subject will be taught, however much other students dislike it. Hence it would result in intellectual diversity, with luck a live intellectual environment, provided that students did not all wish to be taught the same views.

The problem of the conflict between neutrality and actions in the real world vanishes with the corporate institution. Markets don’t take positions.

Cost

How much would it cost? Assume that the average course has twenty students and the average teacher teaches three courses per semester. A thousand dollars per student would give him $120,000 a year, assuming he takes the summer off — substantially more than the average professor currently makes.

Students typically take four courses a semester, so $1000/course is $8,000/year. Currently average tuition and fees come to $43,505 at ranked private colleges, $24,513 at public, not including the cost of housing, food and textbooks.

Medieval universities were not limited to the equivalent of the modern college, they included, in some cases originated as, law schools and medical schools. The same could be true of their modern equivalents. An earlier post described a bare bones law school based on a blog post by a law student about to graduate, still a corporate institution but a minimalist one. He estimated the cost at $10,000 a year, about a quarter of what his law school actually had cost him.

How To Start

There are two problems a startup version of what I have described would face. One is getting degrees awarded by its certifying firm or firms accepted, the other getting enough students to support the structure. It might solve the first by leveraging the reputation of existing institutions. That could mean setting up to do Microsoft certifications and the like. It could mean finding an existing university willing to give external degrees to students passing suitable examinations.

The simplest solution to the second would be to start next to an existing university. That would provide a body of teachers willing to supplement their salaries by offering classes for pay, existing students who might be willing to pay for classes their university did not offer. Students not attending the existing university could still be part of the same social network as those who were, shop at the same bookstores.

The ad, paid for by either a private dorm or a certifying firm:

A Cambridge education for a fifth the price

works for both the US and the UK.

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