The hyperfocus on the invoice practices of grant writers deflects from a much larger problem: the potential for a small group of individuals — three people — to determine how millions of federal and state tax dollars are distributed to grant applicants.

In recent years, the grant profession has ping-ponged between diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and anti-DEI priorities. In 2021, following the George Floyd murder, the Inclusive Language Guide circulated widely in the grant professional world as a keyword manual for grant narratives. If a grant writer failed to signal his or her understanding of the differences between “asset” and “deficit” based language, the entire grant application could be torpedoed by a grant reviewer. In response, the Trump administration led a new effort to flag "double plus ungood” words in grant applications and federally-funded programs. Grant writers have been whipsawed by these efforts to police words in the past eight years.

Recently, grant reviewers have been circulating a (presumably) humorous “grant writing bingo card” to flag the words and descriptive terms that stigmatize a grant narrative as unworthy of funding (buy one on Etsy!). Several of the trigger words / descriptive terms recently added to the bingo game are troubling signs of conformance to the anti-DEI MAGA regime. “High-impact” appears prominently on one “bingo card,” notwithstanding the fact that “high-impact practices” as defined by George Kuh in the early 2000s has been a formative concept in higher education for nontraditional student support services. “Evidence-based” features in another bingo square despite its significance in the concept of “evidence-based practices” for SAMHSA clinical work in the health and human services field for persons experiencing homelessness (and other traumas or afflictions). Terminology from DEI initiatives once popularized by the profession are bingo “winners.” In effect, grant professionals seemingly have drifted with the times, beholden to “double plus good” words approved by the current federal administration.

Unfortunately, and sadly, grant reviewers appear to use superficial rhetorical guidelines and tools rooted in the choice of words to score narratives that determine how millions of dollars for social services are distributed to Americans. The federal and state programs for government services, however, are based on decades-long academic research that aims to deliver “reliable and valid” (bingo squares!) scientific conclusions on what works in…education, social services, residence security, and self-efficacy. The academic experts and scientists and intellectuals who created the architecture of opportunities for grant-funded interventions have been displaced by “gamers” who read grant application narratives like fodder for a bingo score card.

The current federal administration has exposed the ridiculous nature of federal (and state pass-though) grant funding based on the “best narratives” as defined by wordplay “experts.” Perhaps we can do better after 2028. We can return federal- and state-funded grant programming to reviewers with the academic expertise to recognize projects with the potential to deliver empirical and actionable results for the field of study and area of knowledge they are designed to advance.

A Question of Efficacy | Three Reviewers and Grant Funding in Higher Education

Waiting for Institutional Effectiveness

In 2010, after completing a PhD in US History, I returned to college administration as a Director of Institutional Research and Effectiveness at a community college in Illinois. At the time, community colleges were aflutter over Obama’s college graduation goal to “once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.” Several colleges had serious discussions about how to increase college retention and graduation rates, while others strategized how to increase graduation headcounts with procedural or policy changes designed to inflate those rates artificially (by historically acceptable standards). As Figure 1 illustrates, fulltime freshman retention rates at public community colleges have demonstrated no appreciable improvements in the past twelve years. By comparison, the three year (150% of time) graduation rates have climbed steadily since 2013, including the COVID-19 pandemic years. The discrepancy suggests the advocates for procedural changes and certification tricks have largely won the decade. If community colleges have proven unable to attain continuous improvement in first-year student outcomes (retention), should we celebrate improvements in three-year outcomes (graduation) or question whether a new system of inequity in credentialing has been established to reward students who persist into the second year?

Note: All data are from the Integrated Postsecondary Educational Data System (IPEDS).

Figure 1 | National Measures of Public Community College Student Success for Fulltime Students

“A Highly Promising Strategy” for the Nation’s Community Colleges

Nationally, the higher education sector has been seduced by news media to believe that a handful of institutions have made significant, evidence-based advances in student retention and graduation rates, whereas other colleges somehow refuse to follow their lead. At the time of Obama’s challenge, higher education news sources and the federal government heralded Kingsborough Community College (KCC) as having created an administrative approach to first-year college education, retention, and graduation that other community colleges should emulate. Its partner, MDRC, “a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization,” promoted and catalyzed interest in KCC at the time and – now – for nearly twenty years (Bloom & Sommo, 2005; Weiss et al., 2022). After two decades, the question is: why are we (and the federal government) so enthralled with MDRC and KCC as a model of improvement for community colleges when so little has changed for retention and graduation rates nationally?

In 2014, I had the privilege of serving at a community college (Prairie State College in Illinois) invited to participate in a Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) grant project, “The Community College Jigsaw: Putting the Pieces Together,” led by Kingsborough Community College (KCC) of the City University of New York (CUNY) system. I met many dedicated professionals who genuinely believed that KCC as an institution had hit upon a transformative approach to the first-year experience and student success. As the below chart shows (Figure 2), however, MDRC’s research on “evidence-based practices” have had no material impact on student success at KCC in the subsequent decade. In comparison to national trends (Figure 1), KCC is underperforming the entire nation over the past 12 years. No doubt, MDRC will protest that COVID-19 undermined the advances measured by prior research, but retention rates at KCC began falling in 2017. Improvements in the graduation rates improved until 2019 (before a recent decline) but – in the absence of sustained improvements in first-year student retention – the increases for graduations may be the result of credentialing gimmicks as discussed above. KCC apparently reached the limits of generous credentialing after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Figure 2 | Public Community College Student Success at Kingsborough Community College

More importantly, in subsequent years, the supposed advancements in developmental education and the first-year student experience at KCC has failed to materialize in the City University of New York community college system. In 2015, MDRC evangelized interventions across the entire CUNY system as strong evidence of the efficacy for student success according to the What Works Clearinghouse based on a randomized controlled trial (RCT). As Figure 3 illustrates, first-year student success (retention) in contrast declined between 2011 and 2022 at every institution in the CUNY system. The average first-time freshman retention rate dropped from 75% in 2011 to 66% in 2022 (unweighted by college headcount). Moreover, the average first-time freshman retention rate in the community college system did not improve appreciably between 2011 and 2017 — the period of time in which MDRC featured the KCC/CUNY approach. Clearly, the assertion that KCC revolutionized developmental learning and the first-year student experience in the early 2000s has been grossly mischaracterized. The supposed transformative innovations at KCC and CUNY had no (or little material) impact on the primary measures of student success for first-year students — retention has hit ten-year lows after dropping since 2017 (pre-pandemic).

Figure 3 | Community College Student Retention Rates in the CUNY System

Department of Education Postsecondary Student Success Grant Awards

During the summer of 2023, the Department of Education announced a notice of funding opportunity (NOFO) for the Postsecondary Student Success Grant Program (PSSG). The grant program sought to “fund evidence-based strategies that result in improved student outcomes for underserved students.” The grant program offered two tracks, Early-Phase and Mid-phase, with the latter expected to yield “‘moderate evidence’ or ‘strong evidence’ to improve postsecondary student success for underserved students, including retention and graduation” according to the What Works Clearinghouse standards. To be eligible for WWC review, “a study must be a randomized controlled trial (RCT) or a quasi-experiment.” Only 3 to 4 awards averaging $7,000,000 over 48 months (4 years) would be available to Mid-phase PSSG applicants in the entire United States (i.e., 3 to 4 awards available for the thousands of higher education institutions in the nation).

When the PSSG announced awardees, City College of New York (CCNY), “a flagship campus of the CUNY system,” earned a $7.32 million grant to “test whether the Open Doors study at Kingsborough Community College…can be replicated in a similar population in a 4-year setting.” Astonishingly, the program referred to — Open Doors — the very same program from the 2005 study by MDRC at KCC that has proven to have no appreciable impact on retention rates at KCC, CUNY, or in the nation. More surprisingly, the CCNY abstract published with the PSSG notice of awards, fails to mention key aspects of the scoring criteria:

• Significance (15 points): CCNY is simply exploring “whether” a twenty-year old intervention (Open Doors) at its “fellow CUNY campus” has potential for “scalablility from a large unit of the college to the whole campus.” In other words, CCNY has no idea if the intervention will be meaningful.

• Strategy to Scale (35 points): CCNY commits to interventions “to meet the RFP’s minimum sample size of 2,000 students over the span of the grant.” In other words, CCNY has no concrete projection for the number of participants in the required RCT and seeks only to meet a minimum requirement.

• Project Design (15 points): The abstract vaguely describes how “existing programs…will be adjusted to incorporate cohort-based learning…[a]dditional advising and dedicated tutoring…” Does that level of detail routinely meet the evaluation criteria for project design at the Department of Education? No member of the CUNY community, the student body, the academic community, or U.S. citizens in general have any idea what actually is happening to improve student success at CCNY based on this description.

• Project Evaluation (35 points): The abstract does not explicitly describe a randomized controlled trial (required) for the project. Instead, CCNY posits (in a nonacademic and passive voice): “The goal is to study whether the intervention increases credit accumulation rates, retention, persistence and graduation rates, and to examine the characteristics of exactly who benefits (and who does not) from the intervention and whether the effects are significant; results will be disaggregated into subgroups to better understand the intervention’s impacts to different subpopulations.” Essentially, all of these research activities may be accomplished with descriptive statistics that have no basis in social scientific research to measure statistically significant effect sizes per the NOFO.

The Department of Education has awarded one of three $7.x million awards to an institution that does not meet the conditions for improved retention rates during the past 5 to 10 years (see Figure 3), has no prior knowledge if the proposed intervention will be scalable in its educational setting (“a 4-year campus setting”), and has no testable hypotheses — “whether…increases” is not a scientific premise — for its proposed grant program. On a 100-point scale, it seems unlikely that a full proposal narrative as summarized in an abstract as sparsely detailed in the PSSG program award notice could muster more than 50 of the 100 points possible in the above four scoring criteria. Nonetheless, institutional researchers and higher education executives are now asked to wait with bated breath for four years (the PSSG 48+ months period of performance) to learn “whether” CCNY/CUNY and its research advocates are able (this time) to provide reliable, valid, and actionable research for the nation’s colleges – in direct contradistinction to the last decade of public evidence from their own data in IPEDS records.

Is the Competitive System for Federal Grants Merit-Based?

We, as institutional research consultants, have no interest or expectations for the CCNY/CUNY PSSG program to pave a new path for the first-year experience and student success in colleges. The CRT conducted by MDRC and other researchers obviously has no measurable reliability or validity — retention rates at the CUNY institutions, individually and as a whole, are in multi-year declines. The same analysis could be written in regard to the other awardees — Georgia State University and Colorado State University Pueblo — two state university systems. Georgia State University was ballyhooed as “the ‘moneyball’ solution for higher education” in 2019 – whereas IPEDS data show that its first-year full-time student retention rate has fallen from 84% in 2018 to 78% in 2022. Perhaps Pueblo, Colorado has struck gold in the search for college student success — we have not investigated how that application won. We only note that CSU did not include a reference to a RCT in its abstract or press release to a campus community that is now subject to a vast experiment. Apparently, the Department of Education plans to happily dole out over $22 million to three institutions that show little regard for the PSSG priorities in their abstracts, informed consent to subjects of social research on their campuses, and/or nationally available statistics on retention (IPEDS).

The question then is: were other applicants more worthy of funding than the national darlings of federal grant reviewers and non-academic print media as “strongly evidenced” by the Department of Education PSSG awards?

Figure 4 | Community College Student Retention and Graduation Rates at City Colleges of Chicago (CCC)

As Figure 4 (above) illustrates, City Colleges of Chicago (admittedly close to home) has established a remarkable trajectory for improvements in retention and graduation rates over the past decade, the COVID-19 pandemic notwithstanding. Retention rates jumped and have maintained since 2016. Graduation rates have increased incrementally over 12 years — and truly doubled in the past decade (in contrast to claims by CUNY and MDRC). By improving both retention and graduation rates, institutional researchers outside of the City Colleges of Chicago may regard the improvements on the community college campuses as potentially substantive, effective interventions that transcend the usual gimmicks to credential students who proceed to a second year of studies (one-year certificates). In effect, City Colleges of Chicago has possibly implemented on its seven campuses “evidence-based strategies that result in improved student outcomes for underserved students” — the purpose of the PSSG program.

Nevertheless, we may never know because the federal government chose to fund a failed method of intervention that has proven to be ineffective at the local institution, in its own urban community college district, and for the nation as a whole over the past two decades. We are not able to say, one way or the other, if City Colleges of Chicago applied for a PSSG grant. As an institutional researcher, we are only able to say that we have immensely more interest and faith in what has transpired at the community colleges in Chicago than at those in New York City over the past decade. Oddly enough, City Colleges of Chicago already invested in a randomized controlled trial (RCT) and published results in a major higher education research journal in recent years (Hallberg et al., 2023). Research and analysis of the RCT is likely ongoing since six- and eight-year degree outcomes (bachelor’s) will not be available until 2026 at the earliest. In addition, with PSSG funding, the original RCT data could be supplemented with more institutional records and made available to academics and scholars of higher education for years to come to fully measure the significance and effect sizes of evidence-based practices in the district.

It seems that City Colleges of Chicago exemplifies the purpose and the priorities of the PSSG program even before the funding had been defined and announced to the rest of the nation last summer. The Department of Education had an opportunity to enlist a new partner in the search for evidence-based practices to improve college student success and to provide a comprehensive data set for academic researchers to analyze for the discipline of higher education for years to come. Presumably – like CCC – many other colleges, districts, and systems with verifiable and sustained improvements in both retention and graduation rates had something to offer to scientific researchers and the nation with regards to college student success. Instead (seemingly), the Department of Education allowed three reviewers to tank applications from across the nation in order to dump $15 to $21 million in speculative and questionable — if not failed — practices at two (if not three) colleges that have proven to deliver non-replicable results within their own institutions, to their community college districts or state university systems, and for the nation as a whole — for over a decade.

For posterity, the original website and abstracts published by the PSSG:

• Announcement

• CCNY/CUNY

• GSU/Georgia State System

• CSU Pueblo/Colorado State System

We encourage other colleges that sought 2023 PSSG Mid-Phase funding to send us their unpublished Abstracts as comparisons with the “winning” abstracts! Email contact@historiaresearch.com.

Postscript: I posted the original text (“A Question of Efficacy”) in March 2024 on my business website. Subsequently, City Colleges of Chicago and its program evaluator, University of Chicago Inclusive Economy Lab, have continued to study and report on the long-term outcomes of an effective intervention for community college students. The most recent report and a summary of the results demonstrate the improved employment and salary outcomes for past participants. These studies of long-term outcomes for a proven model of intervention could have been funded, augmented, and publicized more effectively with a PSSG grant. Instead, we wait for KCC, GSU, and other institutions to evidence “whether” they have a useful model whatsoever.

We are now making Arcane Cage available through Substack over time. It is not literary art or anything, but a fanciful effort to write about “the world’s first social democracy” at a time when “magic” introduced promising technological change to a growing economy and portended upward mobility in the social conditions of its (or most) citizens. As the subtitle also hints at, the events take place near the end of a long era of prosperity when a cabal of “magicians” worked to destroy the very democracy that empowered their ascent—“the decline and fall of the Provenance.”

We released the Preface earlier here.

Now, as is evident in the AV episode (above) and the text (below), the “historian” of Arcane Cage regards the narrative to follow as a record of factual events that hold important historical truths for the modern reader. There are of course many “scholarly references” embedded in the book such as the opening chapter that baldly (or badly!) imitates the literary approach of Alexis De Tocqueville from Democracy in America — to enter the world through a description of its geography. Despite the addition of a map, a timeline, and far too many footnotes, the first chapter does not add up to make history per se. Nonetheless, in Chapter One, the author of Arcane Cage introduces his historical subject matter (um, fantasy world) with an in-depth description of the continent, culture, and conflicts at the heart of the Demesne, the known world, during the Arcane Age.

Signed, The Publisher

Chapter One | The Outward (and Inward) Configuration of the Demesne

Near the southern end of the Orpheön Mountains, Eurynome reached upward toward the sky as if to drink the light of the heavens and return the known world to its original darkness. Eurynome, pronounced yoo-RIN-ә-mee, boasted the highest peaks in the Orpheön range—she stood without equal, the highest mountain in the entire Demesne. And, yet, scholars demur when dilettantes describe the colossal formation as merely a “mountain.” Over thirteen day’s journey by foot around its base, Eurynome’s one-hundred-and-one rocky spires aligned to form a C-shaped phalanx of well-hewn, precipitous bluffs that opened at a vast fissure on her southernmost side. In this respect, Eurynome gave the appearance of a conic-shaped volcano that violently cast off her peak, including a fifth of her mass on the “sun-bleached” cliff.1[1]

The array of spines created a vast chasm at the center of her elevation, protected by impenetrable embankments on three sides. The opening consumed the light of the sun as it passed overhead at the acme of its path in the sky, while Eurynome’s grotesque shadows ruled over the surrounding lands to the west, north, and east for much of the day. In name as well as stature, her great heights and immense shadows gave substance to Eurynome’s title in the arcane tongue: “(our) wandering ruler.”

While only a few igneous rocks accompanied the massive boulders and common stones strewn about the vast territory that she ruled, the upper most spires of Eurynome possessed “a black hue as if scorched in a tremendous blast,” according to the earliest account in written history. A swirling cloud of mist and dust often lingered in the precipitous crater that veiled the basin and cast a pall over the interior of the cragged formation as a final testament to Eurynome’s infernal origins. Had Eurynome fully formed with a single mountainous peak, its highest point may have touched “the fiery lashes of the sun above”—as the arcane commoners’ lore once claimed.2

Understandably, the peoples governed by Eurynome’s shadowy realm often attributed the whole of creation to her. Arcane lore suggests Eurynome was the last of the colossal sierras to rise from the ground of the Demesne. In this retelling, “the titan revolted against the powerful mountain deity” who thrust skyward the entire range of the Orpheön Mountains. In a “grand refusal” to press further and further southward, drawing to an end the winding lifeless spine of desolate mountain peaks stretching from the north, Eurynome made possible the running rivers, the tillable plains, the plentiful forests, and even the seas. All being, to the arcane mind, “flowed out the gaping maw on her sun-bleached face.”

In another account, from a later but more trustworthy source, Eurynome itself first “rose from chaos to give birth to all things.” In a violent explosion, the likes of which no incantation by the mightiest wizards ever repeated, Eurynome discharged “the astral tapestry in darkened aether” that chased the light from the depths of the sky. Her conflagration set the world in motion, “separating night from day in the Demesne.” The recoil of the blast raised the Orpheön Mountains to the north to form the backbone of the known world, and the first children of Eurynome’s “cosmic birth”:

She thrust the land upward as if to transgress,

Of the celestial sphere that surrounds all,

To tear apart beings from their mute shadows.

To her south, the lowland rivers, plains, and forests spilled out from the gorge in Eurynome’s underside, “giving life—and death—to the plants and creatures” of the known world.3

While both myths won favor among the peoples of the Demesne, one fact seemed to belie both stories of Eurynome’s labor at the creation of the world: volcanic activity no longer disturbed her massive crater. Instead, far beneath the tallest spires, a field of clastic and organic sedimentary rocks littered the expanse between the bluffs high above. Worn by winds and rains throughout countless ages, the smoothed rocks that remained at the center of the basin rest motionless on a remarkably unbroken, easily passable, and seemingly petrified floor that extended as a horizontal plane at the bottom of the deep crater. Nearly a league in diameter, terra firma seemed to flow from the crater’s crevice down the steep formation and onto the earthen base below. Although the fertile plain beneath her gaping maw escaped her dark lashes, the immediate territory spent much of the day and night shrouded in the shadows of the “wandering ruler.” The image of rock, forest, plains, and waters emanating from Eurynome’s countenance left few to ponder why peoples of the Demesne frequently attributed the origins of the world to her majesty.4

Then, as now, the name, Demesne, roughly translates in modern languages as “the known world.”5 In the arcane times recounted on these pages, one must note, the known world was indeed a far smaller sphere than our modern world’s unmasked globe. The peoples of the Demesne visualized its space in terms of the length of time it took them to cross the immense territory. One league measured roughly the distance that a typical traveler on foot covered on flat terrain in an hour. The inhabitable land of the Demesne, in such measures, covered an estimated 640,007 square leagues, extending for over 523 leagues from the infertile tundra of the northern barrens to the ashen deserts of the southern boundary. The Demesne stretched for approximately 1,201 leagues from the eastern seashores to the furthest outpost of the vast territory explored in the west. Assuming a half day for movement and a half day for rest, the Demesne ostensibly could be traversed in a little more than three months.6

In a certain way, such means to measure the Demesne proved to be nothing more than “a cruel joke,” in the words of one adventurer. From the comfortably-inhabited capitals of the east to the sparsely populated outposts of the west over twelve hundred leagues away, the terrain presented a number of obstacles: rolling hills, violent rivers, unbridgeable ravines, and entangling forests. The bold pioneers who ventured westward led beast-drawn carts heavily laden with the sundry baubles and broken dreams collected from their humbled youths or miscarriages into adulthood. In total, the journey from the oceanic shores of the eastern cities to Eurynome required “approximately 151 to 181 days” during the hottest season of the year—and that is an accurate estimate only for the unlucky sots who did not perish in an assault by monstrous beasts or scheming brigands during the treacherous journey through the howling expanse of the Demesne.7

On arrival, weary settlers reached the tectonic geology flowing from the south-side gash in Eurynome, producing a kind of passable road into the obdurate heart of the titan. While making possible the ascent of peoples and carts, Eurynome welcomed only those whose inclinations and vitality conquered the steep slope that climbed into the mountain fortress. The carriageway snaked through her crags and nooks for nineteen leagues, forcing judicious travelers to complete the final leg of their journey in over five days. As a final test, after months of laborious travel through the Demesne, more than a few imprudent mortals drove their beasts to the point of collapse, eager to ascend into the immortal corona of spires that reached to the sky above, only to disappear with carts and belongings over the high cliffs near the top, their destination darkly looming above.

A fortress, twice over. Protruding from the obscuring mist animating the mountain goddess’s crown, the fortress Akropolis seemed to float between the sharp, onyx-limned cliffs of Eurynome like a span suspended across an abyss. The outpost’s defensive structures stretched for over one-third of a league on each of its five sides, occupying over one-quarter the ground space in Eurynome’s crown. Moreover, seemingly inspired by the natural gifts of manifold spires, the dwarven architects and engineers erected the outer walls of the Akropolis to serve as a second rampart that defied penetration on all but one side. The one entrance permitted access to the inner commons of the Akropolis through narrow and well-guarded gates that faced to the southeast.

The calculated design forced enemies who transgressed Eurynome’s natural defenses to circumnavigate the Akropolis’s walls standing thirty-one cubits tall and about one-third as wide.8 Advancing enemies typically wilted during the march beneath the deadly rain unleashed by the defenders’ bows and crossbows.9 Exploiting the impenetrable precipices of Eurynome’s spires on three sides, the Akropolis possessed all of the bulwarks and amenities of a well-planned, strategic military outpost—a vision erected from the adamantine mind of a dwarf. Duly named, “the city at the extremity,” the castle–edifice testified to the severity of life in a colonial fortification constructed by a vast empire that ruled much of the Demesne at the end of the Arcane Age.

The peoples of the Provenance, “the empire for liberty,” populated the garrison at the edge of arcane civilization. As one of the earliest cultures in our world’s history, the archaeological and archival records remain scant and ambiguous. For many years, the leading modern historians dismissed Provenancial history as the romantic fantasies of amateur mythologists and popular history buffs. The discipline produced such a wide variety of scholarship and specialization—or, according to the most acerbic critics, novels and literature—that many professional historians disputed the very existence of the Provenance in our distant past. Indeed, only one consensus perhaps exists among historians of the Provenance: “The peoples of the Provenance ‘knew’ the Demesne, ‘the known world.’ To understand the place one must also understand its people. Both must be studied together.” Despite that kernel of accord, scholarship on the Provenance divided into hundreds, maybe thousands, of unrelated lines of inquiry deploying all manner of technical terminology and fanciful idioms that led to far too many acrimonious debates.10

The fractiousness of scholarship aside, a few basic details about the Provenance stand out to the modern mind. The political boundaries and social world of the Provenance embraced the vast majority of the Demesne at the height of its power. The earliest evidence traces the empire to the city-states near the shores of the ocean to the east of the Demesne. For a hundred heptakaidecades,11 the Provenance extended its dominion over the ever-increasing expanse of the Demesne in the period of history that we now call the Arcane Age. Although a comprehensive history is beyond the scope of this narrative, and its primary sources, let it suffice that the civilization of the Provenance reached its zenith near the time when the events of the late Arcane Age, retold in this work, took place.12

With an imperial concept of the Demesne in mind, the people of the Provenance commonly regarded the territory beyond the limits of its political power and cultural influence as the Limen (see Illustration 1). The best cartography available from this period divides the Limen into four cardinal regions surrounding the Provenance. The East Limen began at the shores of the Tempestuous Ocean, the great waters that frustrated and swallowed every naval adventurer who dared to penetrate its secrets during the Arcane Age. To the North, the lifeless tundra extended for at least 311 leagues—no explorer made it further than 23 days into the Barrens before his or her crew revolted in fits of despair and privation. At the South Limen, the gulfs of the Tempestuous Ocean gave way to hot and blinding sands that limited the availability of new lands and scotched the grasping advance of merchants and their combative mercenaries.

Confined by the topography of the Demesne on three sides, the Provenance pushed its borders ever westward for over a millennium, bringing the illimitable resources of the Ferrous Mountains, the fertile fields of the Central Plains, and the inhospitable climate of the Golden Dunes under its mercantile and bureaucratic control.13 Agrinio, of the Ėróchthoi or “Sacred” Forests, served as the final waypoint before the empire pressed its limits to the mountain fortress at Eurynome. For the Provenance, the only barriers to its westward expansion were the will of its people, the stock of its resources, the diurnal dread for magical beasts, and—of course—the numerous cultures that already made their homes in the West Limen.

Illustration 1 | Hermiou’s Map of the Demesne

Our narrative herein begins at a time when Eurynome and the Akropolis marked the furthest advance of the Provenance into the West Limen (see Illustration 1).14 For a period that lasted longer than two epochal primes (277 years, or 16.3 heptakaidecades), the Provenance failed to push beyond its mountain outpost on the West Limen. In fact, the Akropolis only gradually earned its reputation as the “city at the extremity” after several generations tarried on the borders of the brutish and intractable wilderness to its west.15

Guided only by the visual aid of maps, the archives suggest that the Demesne divided territorially in two: the Provenance and the Limen.

When examined with more subtlety, however, the cartographic boundaries of the Provenance and the Limen mask the ceaseless exchange of cultural practices and economic wares along the border of the two worlds. More than a millennium of political intrigue, as well as social conflict, colored the “manifest destiny” of the Provenance as its dominion spread from the eastern coast to envelope the continent. In fact, while the Provenance may have swallowed the Limen with its citizens and their westward advance, the redrawn boundaries failed to consider how the Provenance became more pregnant with the Limen following each new conquest. For this reason, a brief history of the social world of the Provenance and the character of its people will aid readers who begin this story unfamiliar with our most fantastic age.

“In world history,” the historian Maad Miths proclaimed, “there have been four great ages: Preternatural, Arcane, Metal, and Golden.”16 As students of history know, many of our modern civilizations trace their origins to the Preternatural Age, the obscure age that gave rise to seven godheads who established the seven original city-states of the Demesne. A prehistorical time, from which no written records remain to account for the origins of the godheads, the age remains cloaked in mystery and conjecture. The art of writing itself begins only after the founding of the seven cities—an invention of the theistic bureaucracies that extended the godheads’ control into every facet of the cities’ social worlds.

The sprawling bureaucracies of the Preternatural Age godheads, including their written languages for record-keeping, unfolded as a by-product of population growth and agricultural intensification. The fecundity of the land matched the fertility of the people, producing new and more plentiful crops that required increasingly detailed systems of notation to account for the wealth accruing to the godheads. Beyond these generalities, the archaeological evidence proves scant, leaving unanswered why the Demesne witnessed the sudden explosion in architectural advancements and agricultural engineering that corresponds to the foundations of the seven cities of the godheads.17 To the modern reader, the Preternatural Age largely remains an inaccessible period in world history, shrouded in a cloud of unknowing, inscrutable for all but those capable of suspending disbelief.

What is known is that the godheads ruled the seven cities with despotic authority. Anthropologists often refer to the state, religion, and economy as the tripod that supports the formation of societies. In the Preternatural Age, one may say, the cities of the godheads united the three legs into a single stump. Each godhead assumed total command of a city, issuing a Statement of Principles that directed the labors of their subjects, and dictated the indulgences afforded for their subject–laborers’ predilections. Although the Statements established vastly different moral and legal codes in the seven cities, all seven lawgivers uniformly demanded fealty from the subjects who fell under the cities’ jurisdictions. In addition, all seven Statements rewarded the godheads with the annual surpluses of their subjects’ labors. These two commandments, paramount to all other laws in the city-states, effectively bound worship and wealth to the godheads.18

In this respect, the political order of the Preternatural Age introduced the first main division of political and social order—that of the ruler and of the ruled, the nobles and the commoners, the few and the many, or the state and the people, as we know it today. For many centuries, scholars judged the irreconcilable conflict between the state and the people as the essential social struggle that defined the history of the Demesne. With a tidy distinction between those who controlled and those who served the instruments of government, most scholars of the Demesne worked in the tradition of Maad Miths’s “grand narrative” that emphasized political strife and civic constitutions as the drivers of historical progress. According to one disciple, history unfolds like an inevitable march to liberty, spurred by an “Absolute Spirit” that animated every great popular revolution that swept inequality and slavery from the world stage. “The History of the known world [‘Demesne,’ sic] is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom,” claimed Eggor Leghe, “a progress whose development [is] according to the necessity of its nature.” In the patient passage of time from the Preternatural Age to the Golden Age, our world has become more conscious of freedom, our politics more civilized, our work more bountiful, and the will of the people more inviolable. The “enlightenment” of the Absolute Spirit determines world history like the iron fist of the despot.19

Consonant with his overweening nature, Eggor Leghe argued that three deadly conflicts stand as the turning points between the four great ages of Miths’s world history (see Illustration 2). In the Preternatural Age, the godheads’ control of state power and the nobles’ administration of the bureaucracy taught the people law, morality, and civility. In this sense, the godheads’ city-states proved to be necessary evils to instill a sense of public good among the commoners. Despotic benevolence notwithstanding, Leghe contends, the Preternatural Age divinities remained the natural enemies of the people’s liberties. The first of the Demesne’s three deadly conflicts, the Glorious Revolution, witnessed the commoners’ inevitable revolt to depose the godheads, bringing the Preternatural Age to a close.20 In sum, Preternatural Age slavery proved to be no more repressive than the chains of a “self-incurred tutelage” that the commoners cast off with mind, time, and more than a little egoistic puffery.21

Between the civil upheavals of the Glorious Revolution and First Great War, the history of the Provenance records the most important advances in liberty during the Arcane Age. Foremost, the sovereignty of the people triumphed in the adoption of a revolutionary constitution that placed limitations on the power of the state and established the self-rule of the common stock. Equally significant, in recognition of certain self-evident truths, the socioeconomic order of the Provenance unchained commoners from their customary agricultural peonage under control of a state regime, resulting in innovations that added to an endless variety of economic opportunities for many generations. Third, to discourage the long-standing effrontery of the nobility, the cultural values of the Provenance encouraged its citizens to regard virtuous character as the bedrock of social order.

Illustration 2 | The Four Ages of World History

Behind the politics, then, stood a social world unlike any other in world history. While the march of freedom lightens the burden on popular historians’ imagination,22 the past was much more like the societal conflict that the long-discredited radicals in the Interpolis Commoners’ Association (ICA) once described.23 According to works recovered from the once-lost ICA papers, three “interests” influenced the political events and shaped the social conditions of the late Preternatural Age: the classical powers, the mechanic arts, and the mercantile cartels. The classical powers, also known as arcane philosophy, referred to the class of individuals who possessed magical abilities for combat arts and spellcasting. The mechanic arts encompassed the handicraft and skilled artisans who created and forged amazing weapons, wands, scrolls, and assorted talismans during a millennium of invention that continues to excite the acquisitive modern imagination. Lastly, the mercantile cartels represented the traders and proprietors who traveled far and near in the Demesne to stimulate the exchange of goods, reagents, artefacts, and other assorted bounty. Together, the three separate interests forged an interlocking network that stimulated the principle social and economic activities of the arcane world: adventuring, crafting, and trading.

Notably, these three interests first took shape during the Preternatural Age to serve the bureaucratic needs of the seven cities of the godheads. Each city organized its interests into guilds that regulated, and bridled, the persons who engaged in the new economic activity that followed the discovery of the classical powers—or, magic, as modern skeptics prefer. Whichever terminology is employed, the “middling rank” of arcane philosophers, artisans, and proprietors emerged in the social order to complement the two original castes formed from the deistic state: the nobility and the peons who toiled on the land. Under the watchful eye of bureaucrats and mercenaries, the middling ranks initially enhanced the political power marshaled in subservience to the godheads ensconced in their municipal palaces.

Eventually, though, the middling rank introduced turmoil into the superficial tranquility of the despotic cities. In time, the multiplicity of interests and the economic wealth of the middling rank divided the allegiances of nobles, guilds, and commoners such that the people in every city served their various social interests more stridently than they served the godhead of their respective metropolis. At the forefront of the anti-deistic factionalism, the arcane philosophers grew in both personal stature and material force to the point that the most powerful champions and spellcasters openly defied the will of the godheads. The arcanists, “when collective wisdom eventually dared,”24 deposed the godheads at the end of the Preternatural Age, lending their collective name to the epics and the lore of a new historical era—the Arcane Age, the setting for our narrative.

For now, a concise introduction will acquaint new students with the nature of the classical powers, or arcane philosophies, of the antebellum Demesne. Although the exact nature and abilities of the classical powers were lost to posterity after the First Great War, scholars of the Arcane Age have been able to piece together several general facts from the extant fragments of the early ages. First, a small percentage of the population in the Demesne—no more than twenty percent in the most liberal estimates—possessed the ability to call forth primal forces of the universe with their minds and bodies. Some cast powerful spells of lightning and fire, some mastered the forms of wildlife, others learned great feats of combat, while still others channeled therapeutic spirits to heal the dying and diseased. In a time when many held the occupations of farmer and mercenary, the fortunate few touched by the gift of arcane wisdom quickly found far greater opportunities and earned a much better lot than the laity of the Demesne. In time, those who commanded the classical powers adopted traditions and codes of conduct that made them into the most prestigious interest of the Demesne.25

Aside from the personal abilities to manipulate the forces of nature with their wills or what not, the masters of the classical powers honed skills to imbue common objects and weapons with magical effects that aided them in battle and diplomacy. The combat masters in the mountain city of Pallene first learned to craft magical weaponry. Fighters highly regarded the benefits in combat from magical enhancements to weapons, so much so that they required all of their novices to apprentice in the arts of the weapon and armor smith in addition to the mysteries of their classical powers. Initially, the other practitioners of the classical powers imitated this example, requiring their own apprentices to master all aspects of their classical powers, including the design of equipment and the transmutation of reagents. In time, though, the practice proved too onerous for many students who needed many precious hours to study the crucial arcana of a classical calling.

Additionally, many prominent students who failed to master basic feats of the classical powers discovered that they possessed an extraordinary facility to craft advanced equipment, weaponry, and vials—often more artfully than masters of the classical powers. As a consequence, “a second social division of labor produced ‘the Mechanic Arts’”—crafts and trades which supplied the classical powers with needed equipment and magical items.26 Crafting weapons to be imbued with magic frequently required rare minerals or reagents, as well as the artistry to “tune” the components precisely for a specific type of enhancement. For this reason, the middling ranks of the mechanic arts and the classical powers shared fortunes throughout the second age of the Demesne. More importantly, since many craftsmen spent years studying alongside acolytes in the classical powers, the two “interests” identified strongly with each other. Persons engaged in the two separate interests mutually aided each other in this period. By the end of the Arcane Age, per the ICA, advancements in the mechanic arts “made the second great interest the equal of the classical powers and formidable in its own right.”

The division of labor between the classical powers and the mechanic arts increased the movement of peoples and objects between the cities of the Provenance. The geographic mobility and economic exchange spawned networks of commerce that resulted in a third major division of social labor: the mercantile cartels. In point of fact, the mercantile cartels actually traced their origins to the nobles who acted as the tithe collectors of the godheads in the Preternatural Age. At that time, there were two main suborders, the mercenaries and the merchants.27 In this respect, the mercantile cartels were older than the classical powers and the mechanic arts, but the balance of power shifted at the end of the Preternatural Age, changing the character of the interest.

In the long era before the advent of the classical powers, when the godheads ruled unchallenged, the mercenaries thrived among the commercial class. Known as the Hekatomononkheire, the “hundred-and-one-handed one”—a unit of fifty combatants plus one one-armed “purse-bearer”28—the mercantile cartels enforced the city’s Statement of Principles, collected tithes for the state, and carried the standard of the godhead between the cities. During the Arcane Age, when a distributed system of commerce between members of the mechanic arts and classical powers flourished between the cities of the Provenance, the purse-bearers became the elites of the mercantile cartels due to their knowledge of writing, basic recordkeeping, and accounting ledgers. Thus, as the wealth and trade between the classical powers and the mechanic arts grew, so too did the wealth and importance of the mercantile cartels.

For reasons attributable to their growing interdependency, among other reasons, the three interests collectively became known as the “middling rank,” or, as the merchants characterized it, “three sides of the same coin.”29 The Interpolis Commoners’ Association called it, the “Inner Limen”—the self-interest, the lust for gold, and the desire for stature that seduced individuals to stray from the public good of the Provenance.

The notion of an Inner Limen remains an important intervention in the spatial and social imagery of the Arcane Age, it must be noted. In one respect, it exposes how dubious it is for historians to draw a clear line between the Provenance and the Limen using the boundaries on a map of the Demesne. In a second respect, the lines on a map persisted long after the lines among the character of the people ceased to exist, one might say. In other words, the Provenance embraced both the territory and the character of the people of the Limen, just as the Limen absorbed the territorial expansion of the Provenance.

These final considerations introduce one further complication that undermines any formal distinction between Provenance and Limen in the arcane history of the Demesne. No fortification existed at the threshold of the West Limen for any length of time before some of its citizens eventually adopted the affectations of the cultures that vexed the Provenance and resisted the dominion of its councils. In this respect, the Akropolis truly was the “city at the extremity”—not entirely on one side or the other of the border arbitrarily drawn between the Provenance and the Limen.

Lastly, it must be noted that many peoples in the Demesne possessed long-held traditions and customs that did not adhere entirely to the proclamations and summons of the Provenancial councils. Dwarves, elves, gnomes, orcs, goblins, gnolls, and a wide assortment of other cultures30 populated the Provenance and West Limen. Events recounted in this work will afford ample time to discuss the diverse peoples of the Demesne, their origins, and their allegiances and their defiance of the Provenance. For now, let me say, these cultures oftentimes found their collective interests divided by the boundary between the Provenance and the Limen—and no bond proved stronger or more durable, at the end of the Arcane Age, than the bond of language and culture among the peoples of the Demesne.31

Note: Arcane Cage is designed to be a paperback. The footnotes appear at the bottom of the pages in reference to the text. Read the sample on Amazon to see how the first chapter is intended to be read.

“Ad Hoc Hominem Part II” concludes our satirical axe grinding of the economic theorizing of Gary S. Becker. Again, I insist that nothing is to be gained by reading this aside from the typical headache that accompanies review of the economic theories of “Chicago School” economists. If, however, you are pursuing a Ph.D. in U.S. History, please consider writing a history of “economics imperialism” and its detriments to academia and governance in the past fifty years. The economic policies enacted in recent years in the United States (by partisan legislation, judicial fiats, and presidential orders) have been a half century and more in the making by the Chicago School of Economics.

Ad Hoc Hominem, Part II

Although Becker professed disdain for ad hoc assumptions to explain economic behavior, his new home production model (or “new home economics”) did not succeed in eliminating economists’ reliance on expedient assumptions. His search for “insights” merely adorned economic assumptions in sociobiological rags.

Mark Blaug notes, “Becker’s own method of analysis is almost as ad hoc as the conventional one; the qualitative calculus of the one period, static household production model is simply incapable of producing definite quantitative conclusions about various aspects of human behavior without the arbitrary addition of extra information.”1 Specifically, Becker frequently references or invokes essentializing differences that are easily represented mathematically as invariable modifications (“constants”) in the economic equation. What one discovers in a systematic, chronological review of Becker’s works is a spiraling descent into twentieth-century cultural prejudices – and the refusal to heed the call to name the beast.

Preferences (“tastes”), as given, increasingly enter Becker’s economic models as standardized effects and coefficients of environmental proxies for production efficiencies that do not directly constitute economic behavior and changes in economic behavior. The more static the coefficient, the more easily it may be incorporated into the linear economic models as a standardized effect. This occasions Becker to delegate the study of the formation of preferences to biologists and psychologists. As Jillian Hewitson notes, Becker’s recurrent use of “biological reductionism, especially the recourse to sociobiology,” became a means to circumvent the economic analysis or theoretical treatment of “tastes.”2

The powerful tool of “biological reductionism” entered into his human capital theory of wages and income wholesale. Becker struggled to demonstrate that the two parameters that can be treated by his framework “supply and demand” did not themselves engender the differences between male and female human capital or human capital investments. The home production model represents his ignoble effort to depict the supply of married women’s labor as the result of purely rational economic decisions to maximize family utility within the constraints of an ad hoc biological reductionism.

Becker’s work on labor distributions in the modern family epitomizes the all too familiar case of a dull intellect that proved incapable of answering the call for a great discovery. Hidden behind ivory walls to evade the bull-headed truth, Becker refused his summons to critique the explicit and implicit failures of a staid economic theory that could not explain the modest education behaviors of men and women from all backgrounds. Instead, he recoiled into the study of misguided problems about women’s labor force participation in the U.S. during the twentieth century and appealed to biological imperatives as the unquestionable forces for the division of labor in households. That is to say, the Swedish national back (Sveriges Riksbank) award-winner chose to wait out his mortal tenure in order to cling to his own demographic interests and economic advantages.

The Optimal Capital Stocks

In Chapter 2 of A Treatise on the Family, Becker unfolds his theory of the division of labor in multi-person households and families.3 He first hypothesis proclaims the existence of two discrete types of human capital, H¹ and H²: “H¹ only raises market wage rates and H² only raises the effective amount of household time” (31). Aggregate consumption Z is defined by equation 2.1:

Z = Z [aH¹t_w/p_x, t_hφ(H²)], (Eq. 2.1)

“where H¹ and H² are the optimal capital stocks, aH¹ is the wage rate, t_hφ(H²) is the effective amount of household time, and p_x is the price of market goods” (31). An economic actor allocates time between market (t_w) and household (t_h) sectors such that they maximize their “aggregate consumption Z during each year.” The total allocation of time is constrained by the total time available each year after allowance for the time spent maintaining capital (t’), resulting in the condition (Equation 2.2):

t_w + t_h = t’. (Eq. 2.2)

The optimal allocation of time between the market sector (t_w) and household sector (t_h) occurs when the “marginal product of working time equaled the marginal product of household time” (32), defined in Equation 2.3 as

δZ/δt_w = δZ/δt_h. (Eq. 2.3)

That is, the change in aggregate consumption per year (δZ) due to a change in time in the market sector (δt_w) equals the change in aggregate consumption per year (δZ) due to a change in time in the household sector (δt_h), resulting in an economic actors indifference to a change in their allocation of time. Additionally, utility maximization principles require that an economic actor driven from this equilibrium condition would adjust their market and household sector time until they no longer deviated from this state of indifference to the allocation of time to the market and household sector.

Following the delineation of Equations 2.1 through 2.3, Becker introduces “the theory of comparative advantage (which) implies that the resources of members of a household (or of any other organization) should be allocated to various activities according to their comparative or relative efficiencies” (32). Stated otherwise, the members of a multi-person household will be distributed between H¹ and H² activities based on the advantage of each member in comparison to the other household members. For example, if a household member had a comparative advantage over all other members in the market sector (H¹), then the household benefits most by allocating all of that household member’s time to the market sector and shifting all H² activities to the remaining household members (also based on their comparative advantages).

Stipulating that all individuals are initially identical in terms of prices and the market wage rate per human capital H¹, Becker defines the comparative advantage of an individual in the market sector solely in terms of the two types of human capital in Equation 2.6:

H¹_i/H¹_j > φH²_i/φH²_j, (Eq. 2.6)

or if the ratio of human capital H¹ exceeds the ratio of human capital H² for member i in comparison to member j, household member i is said to have a comparative advantage in the market sector over household member j (32).4

Notably, the entire foundation of Becker’s economic analysis rests upon the presumption of two separate spheres of human capital that ultimately will influence the household to divide its labors. Although his theoretical development of the “new home economics” outlined in the previous section broke the former market/household dichotomy of production/consumption and imputed commodity production to the household sector, he defines the market and household in terms of the differences in the type of production undertaken and the type of human capital appropriate for production in each sphere. Spellbound by the powerful tool in his hands, Becker persisted in the negative way of separate (gendered) spheres of activity for the market and the household - gussied up with fancy equations, as Paul Krugman would say!

Not–Very–Startling Conclusions

Before moving on to his application of these formulas to the decisions of a multi-person household, four significant choices in the design of his model beg further consideration. First, in order to define the existence of two “sectors,” the market and household, Becker introduces an essentializing and dichotomizing difference in the human element (H¹ and H²) that ultimately determines the economic actor’s effective participation and allocation of time. Immediately, one finds at the heart of the model, a systemic assumption of “separate spheres” ideology, a division of human activity, that often results in a tautological conclusion to perpetuate the presumption of gendered differences.

Second, the immediately preceding chapter of his treatise does not condition the total time of a single-person household with any specific time period, “t is the total time available during some period, such as 24 hours a day or 168 hours a week” (22). However, in the multi-person household, Becker adds—without explanation—a temporal condition to the participation of household members in the market and household sectors that formally binds utility functions to a specific unit of time. By defining Z as “the aggregate consumption in a year (my emphasis),” Becker directly binds the multi-person household’s behavioral model to annual marginal products. This has the convenient effect of excising any theoretical consideration of the inefficiencies in the marginal productivity of households for any given hour, day, week, month, or unit of time other than one year.

Third, although aggregate consumption (Z) is related to the price of goods (p_x in the equation aH¹t_w/p_x) in the allocation of time to the market sector, the allocation of time to the household sector [t_hφ(H²)] is not explicitly tied to the price of goods. Conceptually, at least, the effectiveness of household time is not directly related to the price of goods in the market, which essentially establishes the independence of household effectiveness from cost (or budget) constraints.

And lastly, by defining the total time (t^’) as the time in a year after allowance for the time spent maintaining capital, Becker eliminates the need to account for the costs of maintaining certain levels of human capital, H¹ and H², during a given year and indiscriminately sets aside considerations for any marginal differences in the costs of maintaining particular levels of H¹ versus particular levels of H².

Having outlined these equations, Becker then issues several theorems that theoretically demonstrate his model’s ability to predict the division of labor in households. In Theorem 2.1, Becker writes, “If all members of an efficient household have different comparative advantages, no more than one member would allocate time to both the market and household sectors” (33). Because all members of an efficient household have different comparative advantages, only one member can meet the criteria of Equation 2.3 (marginal product of market equals marginal product of household); all other members have a marginal product that tends to favor the market or the household and, thus, dedicate their time accordingly.

In Theorem 2.2, Becker states, “If all members of a household have different comparative advantages, no more than one member would invest in both market and household capital” (34). Since Theorem 2.1 results in a discrete division of labor for all but one member of a household, all but one member of a household will demonstrate a return on investment in both market and household sectors. All other household members invest in their respective activity requiring either or H², but not both.

Theorem 2.3 attempts to prove that “at most one member of an efficient household would invest in both market and household capital and would allocate time to both sectors” (34). Since this theorem does not assume comparative advantages differ, the possibility for more than one household member to meet the criteria of Equation 2.3 exists. Yet, Becker is unable to proceed with a proof of this theorem without introducing another unstated assumption about the allocation of hours by the household members. In the proof, Becker relies on the assumption that the total market sector time of both members is less than the total time any one member can provide, such as both members spending more than half their time in the household sector. He attempts no unconditional proof for Theorem 2.3.

Additionally, the proof to Theorem 2.3 makes the logical error of assuming that one household member will accept responsibility for the total market sector time of both members before that member receives additional investment in market sector capital H¹. Becker states, “output would not be changed if one of them spent 2t_w hours in the market and the other specialized completely in the household” (35). However, in order for any individual member of the household to accept additional market sector hours or household sector, that member must violate the marginal equilibrium of Equation 2.3. If a household member accepted an increase in market sector hours, that individual would create a dis-equilibrium in which their marginal product of household time exceeded their marginal product of market sector time.

This is equally true for the individual who relinquishes their market sector hours to another individual and creates inefficiency in their disregard for the increased marginal product of their market sector time. In order to complete this argument correctly, Becker would have to prove that not only hours in the labor market (t_w) are transferable and additive between household members, but the human capital of household members (or H²) are also transferable and additive. Consequently, only an unstated violation of marginal utility maximization principles outlined in Equation 2.3—either in the distribution of labor or in the distribution of investments—enables Becker to complete the stipulated proof.

Finally, culminating in Theorem 2.4, Becker seals the division of labor between H¹ and H², “If commodity production functions have constant or increasing returns to scale, all members of efficient households would specialize completely in the market or household sectors and would invest only in market or household capital” (35). In effect, if investments in human capital H¹ and H² are not subject to diminishing returns, then the comparative advantages of the individual household members are not subject to inversions.

Constant or increasing returns to scale ensure that the effectiveness of an investment is positively correlated with the sum of all previous investments, investing more always returns more. Any deviation from equal distributions between household members in investments in human capital H¹ or H² substantiates the effectiveness of unequal distributions of all further investments. Once some member specializes in either market or household to any degree in comparison to another household member, by comparative advantage, that member forever becomes a less effective investment in household or market capital, respectively.

At this stage in the analysis, it must be further noted that the stipulated and unstipulated assumptions that bolster Becker’s model and theorems do not in themselves lead to an understanding of the gender division of labor in heterosexual households. If abilities are randomly distributed among the populace regardless of gender, then the economist may expect to find as many heterosexual household groupings in which the female participates in the market sector (either entirely or in conjunction with household time) and the male participates solely in the household sector. In order for his model to result in a division of heterosexual household investments and labor along gender lines, Becker must invoke the assumption of “intrinsic differences in the sexes.”

And, of course, Becker invokes gender prejudices in order to shore up his theory with a new assumption:

From biological differences emerges the not-very-startling conclusions that the sex of household members is an important distinguishing characteristic in the production and care of children, and perhaps also other household commodities and in the market sector. Analytically, these differences can be distinguished by the assumption that an hour of household or market time of women is not a perfect substitute for an hour of the time of men when they make the same investments in human capital. These differences between men and women illuminate several aspects of the composition of households and the division of within households that are not explained solely by the advantages of specialized investments in human capital (38).

Becker explains the actual division of labor in heterosexual households only by assuming that females have a comparative advantage in the household sector over males. His theorizing actually culminates in a footnote, in which Becker writes:

If the man allocates time to both sectors,

(δZ/δx)(w/p) = δZ/δt’h.

Then the woman allocates all her time to the household because her marginal product would be greater there than in the market:

α (δZ/δx)(w/p) < β (δZ/δt’h) (footnote3, 38).

Note that w = market wages, β = the female’s coefficient adjustment for household sector time, and α = the female’s coefficient adjustment for market sector time, where β > α. Only the introduction of asymmetrical coefficients (β > α) in the second equation as efficiency proxies in household production for biological differences actually determines the female household head’s decision to allocate her time entirely to the household.

Nonetheless, the final biological assumption is tied to the entire design of his model. First, the dichotomization of human capital enables Becker to assert a comparative advantage for female over male productivity in the household sector. Without the bifurcation of human capital to the market sector and household sector, a biological reduction such as this would have forced Becker to assert the less tenable position that men have a comparative advantage in the accumulation of an undifferentiated or singular human capital.

Second, by stipulating that household utility is measured as aggregate consumption in a year, Theorems 2.1 and 2.2 insure that as long as a husband splits some time between the household and market sectors during the year, a wife will allocate all of her time to production in the household. But if the utility functions were not explicitly tied to annual aggregate consumption, then the model would compel Becker to explain why the female household head chooses the household sector in any particular hour, day, week, or month that the husband does not spend any hours in the market sector. The cognition and empirical analysis of these “inefficiencies” in the “efficient household” are circumvented by the assumption that a husband allocating his time between the two sectors is maximizing utility as defined by Equation 2.3.

Third, since the “effective amount of household time” is not directly tied to the price of goods (p_x), the wife’s allocation of time to the household sector in a heterosexual household is not constrained by the wage and income earnings of the husband. If the opposite were true, then at some time t_e (< t^’ or less than the total time in the year after maintenance of capital), the wife would exhaust the available financial resources supplied by the husband and spend time t_u in a state of unproductivity (time allocated to neither t_w nor t_h and greater than 0) due to lack of financial resources. However, in Becker’s model, the wife’s household productivity is independent of the husband’s market productivity.5 Scarce means and competing ends, which Becker insists “should be a source of pride rather than embarrassment to economists”6 and represents the method of economic analysis (as outlined earlier), is a non-factor in household production.

And, fourth, since Becker externalizes the cost of maintaining capital and disregards the possibility of diminishing returns on human capital investment, the entire model requires no explanation for the fact that females’ comparative advantage over males could result in the most efficient households choosing to allocate females’ time to both sectors rather than the males’ time. If subject to capital maintenance costs or diminishing returns to any reasonable degree, female’s comparative advantage in the home would result in lower costs on capital maintenance and a higher aggregate return on investment if she were the party working in both sectors.

Ultimately, the swathe of assumptions that maintains this model of the division of labor in households results in the conclusion that females invest most in human capital that increases their household efficiency (H²) and males invest most in human capital that increases their market efficiency (H¹). Becker adds, “”Such sexual differences in specialized investments reinforce any biologically induced sexual division of labor between the market and household sectors and greatly increase the difficulty of disentangling biological from environmental causes of the pervasive division of labor between men and women.”7 And later, “If only a small fraction of girls are biologically-oriented to market rather than household activities, and if only a small fraction of boys are biologically oriented to household activities, then in the face of no initial information to the contrary, optimal strategy would be to invest mainly household capital in all girls and mainly market capital in all boys until any deviation from this norm is established” (40).

Confounding, shameful, unfalsifiable nonsense to sustain a gendered colony in the family...Becker’s circular argument of separate spheres of human capital and the assumption of biological difference close in on itself forming a self-perpetuating segmentation and socialization of gendered roles for productivity in the market or the family. In substance, Becker shriveled up when faced by the demand for an empirical study of women’s labor force behaviors in the late twentieth century and retreated into a willfully formulaic masquerade to disguise his infantile desire that mommy be home to care for him.

The Inescapable Reality of the Social World

In the supplement to Chapter 2 of the second edition of A Treatise on the Family, published ten years after the first edition, Becker notes, “The modest increase in the hourly earnings of women relative to men during the last 35 years in the United States and many other Western countries has been an embarrassment to the human capital interpretation of sexual earnings differentials, since this interpretation seems to imply that increased participation of married women would induce increased investment in earnings-raising market human capital” (56). Since Becker designed a model of new home economics that ineluctably results in discrete divisions of labor and optimal allocations of female investments in home-care capital, the increasing labor force participation of married women in two-worker households discredited the predictive value of the model.

More so, his original human capital theory suggested that the increasing labor force participation rates of married women would also have resulted in increased investments in market sector human capital and increased wages paid to females relative to males. Following from this analysis, it should not be entirely surprising that Becker’s model failed to adequately account for the economic behavior of females during the 35-year period since its publication.8

Without extensive analysis, Becker then proposed to rectify the anomaly of reality from his two theories with yet another statistical adjustment (coefficient) to account for the assumption that females supply less effort in the market sector due to energy exhaustion and make “rational” choices accordingly.9 He states, differences in effort explain why “married women with responsibility for child care and other housework earn less than men, choose ‘segregated’ jobs and occupations, and invest less in market human capital even when married men and women work the same number of market hours.” Of special concern, is the manner in which Becker introduces the term “segregated” in quotations, as if choice determined the division of labor in the market rather than other environmental or demand factors.10

In his subsequent work, Social Economics, he dismisses non-white, non-male individuals from the real world: “The analytical approach relies on the assumption of utility maximization and equilibrium in the behavior of groups...” Failing repeatedly to bring minority and female individuals under the suppositions of individual utility maximization in a white male dominated culture qua “real world,” utility maximization suddenly extends to the behavior of a group acting out its social economics.11 Without individuals to maximize utility, we now enter a world incorporated with essentializing groups exercising “social force.”

Much like “tastes,” effort and group utility is now introduced as a stochastic “environmental” variable that supplements the inability of economic models to describe economic behavior accurately. Although the economic propositions on “tastes” certainly possess shortcomings for the economist and economic historian, Becker’s predilection to reify “tastes” or “effort” or “groups” as biological and environmental invariants ostensibly displaces the explanatory power of the other human sciences of behavior in favor of the twin meta-environmental catalysts of economic activity: supply and demand.

As our study of Becker indicates, the primary methodology of Beckerian “economic imperialism” is not the rigorous application of Chicago School economic theories to non-economic domains. Rather, the Chicago School represents the expedient elision of neoclassical axioms in both economic and non-economic models to bury the failures of economic theory to explain economic activity adequately -- or, the suspension of economic analysis in an increasingly elaborate web of assumptions. In sum, the Chicago School of Economics proved to be neither a sufficient methodology for understanding economic phenomena nor a necessary methodology for the analysis of non-economic behavior.

Conclusion

Oh, hell, I have abused you, the dear readers who faithfully trudged through the dense language and arcane formulæ of an adulterous abomination of man-flesh and rational mind. I fear only the economists, with lustful eyes in the presence of seductively-dressed economics equations, have reached this paragraph. My intent was to call attention to the ad hockery – the buried footnotes, the endless refinement of assumptions, the special conditions, the abandonment of theory for prejudice. The ad hockery is not an exception to the rule, or an application of theory to phenomena, but a practicable and efficacious tool to “excite” young men – economic bros – eager to game the real world.

Ad hoc assumptions: these are no mere exceptions in a project of intellectual dishonesty, no mere exceptions in the agenda of economic imperialism, no mere exceptions to silence the social sciences in favor of social prejudices. Economic theory is “a powerful tool to analyze the real world” – provided one understands “analysis” in its root meaning: “to separate any material or abstract entity into its constituent elements.” The game of economic analysis “for the real world” is a game to sunder the world into antagonistic constituent parts.

What are the constituent parts that so amused Becker? Race, gender, and class. Becker’s Chicago School of Economics separate the real world into antagonisms between race, gender, and class as a means to dress white male privilege in equations that suggest it is a naturally occurring outcome. Economic theory is indeed a powerful tool – a weapon of untruth – to separate the real world into phenomena that are not subject to empirical study and likely do not exist at all—human capitals of the market and the household. Alas, we must have no doubt lest we plunge once again into the economic warlocks’ dream of rational action—the “life-negating spells” of utility maximization, comparative advantage, and increasing returns to scale. We must not tarry like a sailor in need of being lashed to the mast, but rather seize the helm like clever historians who always seek and find the hegemonic intrigues of the ruling class in the field of economics!

End

Well, that is what I was told by my committee chair for an M.A. in U.S. History in 2001. “Economics Imperialism” was a thing in higher education in the 1970s and later. If the Wikipedia entry is any indication, not enough has been written about the history — the rise and fall — of “economics imperialism” in the late 20th century.

In an odd way, I have been writing about “economics imperialism” my entire academic career. I wrote a master’s thesis on “married mothers’ labor force participation between 1918 and 1950” in the years after Gary S. Becker won a “Sveriges Riksbank” prize. My academic career was almost ended because I refused to buy into the nonsense of “Chicago School” economic theory. There is an entire chapter in my thesis on married mothers in the workforce simply dedicated to deconstructing Gary S. Becker because my committee chair drank the Kool-Aid.

Years later, the “Chicago School” of economics showed up in my research on “institutional research” in higher education as a variant of the anti-scientific, anti-regulation policy making advocated by “the theory of the firm.” The new discipline invented by the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) in the 1970s embraced the basic tenets of the “Chicago School” of economics as a means to deploy “institutional autonomy” against American democracy and scientific research.

The following piece is intended as a satirical examination of the economic theorizing of Gary S. Becker during his career. You will gain nothing by reading this aside from the typical headache that accompanies the economic theories of “Chicago School” economists. But, if you are pursuing a Ph.D. in U.S. History, please consider writing a history of “economics imperialism” and its detriments to human thought during the past fifty years.

Ad Hoc Hominem, Part I

“My first encounter in 1951 with Milton Friedman’s course on microeconomics renewed my excitement about economics. He emphasized that economic theory was not a game played by clever academicians, but was a powerful tool to analyze the real world.”1 Gary S. Becker (2012)

“I think I can escape the censure of the world by my own admission that I am not telling a word of truth. Be it understood, then, that I am writing about things which I have neither seen nor had to do with nor learned from others which, in fact, do not exist at all and, in the nature of things, cannot exist. Therefore my readers should on no account believe in them.”2 Lucian of Samosata (circa 160 CE)

“How did economists get it so wrong?”3 Paul Krugman marveled (2009).

“Economists have warned that the measures [proposed by President Obama] could jolt the economy back toward recession!”4 Clever Academicians (2012)

Paul Krugman, an economist himself, picked apart the inability of his own profession to predict and address the financial collapse of the American economy in 2008 – the “Great Recession” which damaged the wealth and well-being of the globe. The short answer, Krugman suggests, is that economists mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth. The slightly longer, more excitable, but no less metaphorical answer, was: economists fell in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy...gussied up with fancy equations.

Krugman’s gendered pun, an “unpredictable” financial collapse as a femme fatale in scientific drag, gestured to his colleagues’ homoscedasticity—the largely monotonic group of men tracked by the federal reserve bank’s rankings of the top 1,000 economists in the world—the “they” who got it so wrong.5 In his column, nonetheless, Krugman pointed his finger at a more-narrow group of economists as the johns seduced by the vision of a perfect, seductively-lubricated market system — The Chicago School of Economics, or the fresh water economists (a more general reference to the location of the schools of research), got it so wrong.

Slightly less apologetic, but no less hyperbolic about the lusty urges of his colleagues, Brad DeLong, an economist at University of California Berkeley, concurred, going so far as to define the Chicago School economists’ failure to genuinely analyze the 2008 crisis as an “intellectual collapse.” Whether a failure of body or mind — a non-economist is tempted to say, “whether a failure of taste or rationality” — the sudden discovery of a collective absence of virtue among economists set economists against each other in outrage: on one side against the failure of the Chicago School of Economics and on the other side for those at the vaunted school who disdained others who hurled the accusations of failure.6

Take heed, readers, for the blunder of economic theorizing during the Great Recession summoned forth suppressed desires and unleashed hidden conflicts among the navel-gazers of “economic activity.” The crown prince had been transformed, nay, exposed, as a frog: unintelligible, unseemly and unworthy. What now beckons us is the opportunity to strike at the heart of its fateful kingdom for earthly purposes — the accumulation of wealth — and squish the frog into a bloody pulp under our boots!

A True Example of Economics Imperialism!

The preeminence of the so-called Chicago School of Economics was by design, not merit. After 1968, the influence of Chicago School economic theorists grew inside and outside of the profession. With each passing year, an anachronistic, self-indulgent Swedish national bank — Sveriges Riksbank — distributed its faux international award, “The Nobel Prize in Economics,” to advocates of the Chicago School’s methodology of neoclassical economic analysis. Headstrong and prideful for its new laureates, the Chicago School deliberately advanced beyond economics and into the social sciences as a whole with the intent of marginalizing other theoretical models and debates in the human sciences.

In the words of J. Hirshleifer, “As economics ‘imperialistically’ employs its tools of analysis over a wider range of social issues, it will become sociology and anthropology and political science. As other disciplines grow increasingly rigorous, they will not merely resemble but will be economics. It is in this sense that ‘economics’ is taken here as broadly synonymous with ‘social science.’”7 The grand scheme for economics to become all other social sciences so that all other social sciences may be economics succinctly articulated the agenda of the Chicago School after 1970. Sociology, anthropology, history, and other disciplines each gained adherents to a transplanted Chicago School model that promulgated a unidirectional transfer of ideas under the scheme of economics imperialism.

A complete history of economics imperialists’ advances on the social sciences lies outside the confines of this meager assessment of the failure of the Chicago School of Economics. The intellectual rancor among economists, writ large in national newspapers and international blogs in 2009, consequently, nonetheless invites reconsideration of the most radical adherents inside the field of economics and the sallies this supposed theoretical method rigorously inflicted on the social sciences. A focused critique on the failure of a so-called interdisciplinary model of social science qua economics must necessarily be regarded as holding ramifications for the entirety of academic research during the past fifty years.

While it is a precarious endeavor for non-economists to weigh-in on the failures of economics as a discipline or profession, social scientists may take solace in the evident failures of economists, generally, to know their own profession’s most salient facts during the Great Recession. A theoretical model of economics — the Chicago School of Economics — that produces such disastrous misconceptions in its own discipline and, by extension, for national economic policy and the global economy — surely requires more intense and renewed scrutiny by those who endured its imperialism during the past thirty years. The failures of one economist, who argued that immigrants should pay Britain and the United States for the right of entry, seems like a good place to start.8

One problem for social scientists, however, is that Keynes’s book, as John Cochrane sniped, the zero lower bound and the liquidity trap — the subjects that incite the most pressing and contentious debates in the discipline of economics — were not part of the arsenal that the Chicago School’s economic theory deployed against the social sciences.9 The deafening clarion call to expose the failures of the Chicago School’s social scientific endeavors, then, must take place elsewhere, in the social sciences subjected to economics imperialism. In fact, the Chicago School’s flight from Keynesianism — the forgetfulness so evident in economic discourse now — may serve merely as a key to explain its imperialistic endeavors into other social sciences.

An easy place to begin then is the work of the most triumphalist economist in the Chicago School empire, Gary Becker10, who long advocated for the reduction of human behavior to problems soluble with the apparatus of economic assumptions and analysis and who characterized his most significant contributions to the social sciences as the project of economics imperialism:

It is my belief that economic analysis is essential in understanding much of the behavior traditionally studied by sociologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists. This is a true example of economic imperialism! In other words, I argue that broad definition of economics in terms of scarce means and competing ends should be taken seriously and should be a source of pride rather than embarrassment to economists since it provides insights into a wide variety of problems.11

In 1992, in acknowledgment for his efforts on behalf of the Chicago School’s empire-building, Becker received the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences” for having extended “the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behaviour and interaction, including nonmarket behaviour.”12 Hundreds of miserable, tenured Benedict Arnolds in the social science professions suddenly required graduate students to pay homage to the Sveriges Riksbank award and provide a testament to the genius of nominally passable economic theorizing in Gary Becker’s scholarship. Many young aspiring sociologists, anthropologists, and quantitative historians of the late 20^th century who had never heard of Gary S. Becker — because more worthy philosophers and theorists had directly contributed to the historical trajectory of the social sciences — were forced to read and confront the research and writings of economics imperialism published from the 1960s to 1990s.

Becker therefore is uniquely qualified for renewed scrutiny of economics as a serviceable discipline. Becker attempted a wide variety of analyses to gain insight from an application of economic analysis in order to understand market discrimination and family labor strategies. His forays into other social science subject matter stemmed directly from his own repeated failures to apply the apparatus of economic analysis to explain economic phenomena with the extant empirical measurements then available. In short, what Chicago School economists got so wrong is not limited to a singular crisis in the analysis of financial markets; economic theory itself is the reason why economists “get it so wrong.”

The methodology of Chicago School economic analysis, with an eye to supplant other social science methodologies as a whole, merely reduced the explanation of human behavior to optimized responses to economic conditions of supply and demand, i.e., a frictionless market. The Sveriges Riksbank award to Chicago School’s Gary Becker lauded his works on the concept of human capital in the social sciences and various explorations of racial discrimination and gendered differences in the labor market. A re-examination of the works is warranted for no other purpose.

A closer analysis exposes the degree to which Becker’s mathematical formulas rely not simply upon the explicit assumptions of neo-classical, micro-economic theory, but also auxiliary assumptions — explanations buried in footnotes — about what differentiates the behavior of specific human groups: non-minorities vs. minorities, men vs. women, etc., etc. Specifically, a venture into Becker’s model of economic behavior relies on essentializing dichotomies of biology (male vs. female, white vs. nonwhite) and the application of arbitrary coefficients in mathematical formulas that serve to codify the marginalization of female and nonwhite workers in the American economy.

Important Demographic Sources of Bias

In his 1971 work titled, Economic Theory, Gary Becker suggests that lectures on microeconomic theory can be said to be lectures on price theory. Early studies of prices by economists revealed a problem of interdependence and mutual determination that resulted in the conclusion that prices tend toward equilibrium, or, in economics everything depends on everything else. To cope with the interdependent complexity of prices, economists turned to a powerful tool to simplify the economic world, supply and demand analysis. Supply and demand conveniently sunder the interdependency of prices as the function of two distinct fields under the assumption that many variables effect either demand functions or supply functions, but not both.13

The key to understanding Becker’s characterization of economic theory as price theory lies in the realization that supply and demand are not directly measurable economic forces. Prices operate as the proxies for supply and demand functions, presumably the driving forces behind the fluctuations in prices. As the engines of analysis in economics, however, supply and demand offer the additional benefit of an elementary taxonomy for variables: variables can enter into supply functions or demand functions, but not both. The simple process of parsing variables into supply functions or demand functions linked by price is the crux of Becker’s analytical forays into the fields outside of economics proper.

Becker’s research on the labor force participation of married women exemplifies the application of this methodology. This body of research first developed in conjunction with his prior work on the theory of human capital and investments in education or other forms of personal enhancement that determine the productivity and distribution of earnings to workers. In particular, discrepancies between males and females14 in the rates of return on college education in the United States obliged Becker to formulate the effects of discrimination in the market and the role of the family in decision-making on married women’s labor force participation.

A significant portion of his work subsequent to his human capital theory focused on the distribution of labor and production within the family and differences in males’ and females’ behaviors. In these works, Becker attempts to determine and demonstrate the extent to which married women choose to leave the labor market and work exclusively in the household. Taken as a whole, Becker’s program seeks to advance an understanding of married women’s labor market participation that rests solely on the orthodox economic determinants of supply and demand, a program that substantially demarcates the research and work of economic historians of married women’s labor force participation since the 1980s.

Mark Blaug, a historian of economic analysis and the philosophy of economic science, cites Becker’s early publication, Human Capital15, as the opus classicus of human capital theory.16 Originally intending to supplement the studies on the economic benefits of education by his contemporaries (1964), Becker observes that the ad hoc methods of determining the benefits or financial returns from participation in specific types of occupations and education levels beckoned for a more formalized theory and analysis of the investment in education, training, child care, health care, etc.17 From this observation, Becker attempts to outline a unified explanation of a wide range of empirical phenomena that ostensibly correlated human capital investments with wage earnings.

Becker dedicates Part One of Human Capital to the development of a theoretical framework that extends an investment model and ties the purchase of educational services, considered in his work as a form of human capital investment, to the wage earnings of individuals. He assumes, “Earnings are made dependent on the amounts invested in human capital, and the latter are assumed to be determined by a rational comparison of benefits and costs.”18 In other words, the total earning of any individual is the direct result of an individual’s investment in education, as an example of human capital, and the real rates of return on earnings from that investment.

Additionally, derived from a general neo-classical economic assumption that guides an investor’s decisions in this model, an individual will invest until the financial benefit from an additional amount of investment no longer exceeds the costs (i.e., time and money) for the investment. Becker asserts, “An important attraction of this theory is that it relies fundamentally on maximizing behavior, the basic assumption of general economic theory” (135).

The presumption of utility maximization in the investment model enables Becker to consign other non-educational factors into the education variables. Because rates of return vary from individual-to-individual, persons receiving a high marginal rate of return would have an incentive to invest more than others (84). Factors such as intellectual capacity will tend to increase the rates of return on an investment in education (as human capital) and therefore increase the amount of time and money an individual will invest in their human capital (i.e., utility is maximized at higher levels of investment).

Becker states the separation of “nature from nurture,” or ability from education and other environmental factors, is apt to be difficult, for high earnings would tend to signify both more ability and a better environment (85). This separation of education and ability is not necessary in his formula. For instance, the wage differentials between college graduates and high-school graduates may result from both a difference in ability and education, but the amount of investment in education operates as a sufficient proxy for ability since the investment in education level is determined by the expected rate of return due to one’s ability. Consequently, Becker considered the incorporation of institutional factors another alluring feature of his human capital model.

In principle, Becker’s theoretical model is a heady attempt to unite the distribution of wage earnings with meritorious factors such as ability, education, energy, health, and other forms of human capital. In practice, when Becker commences on a systematic empirical test of his theoretical model, however, the introduction of unsubstantiated assumptions and restrictions on the applicability of his model belies the unified explanation originally proposed.

Initially, Becker laments that the effect of education on income could easily be determined if information were available on the income of units differing only in education, for then differences in income could be attributed solely to differences in education (148). He asserts that these difficulties may be overcome by standardizing for other factors to isolate the effect of education.

Although the reader may fully anticipate the data to be standardized for certain variables such as age “as a proxy for experience” that have their own effect on human capital (or due to data collection methodologies of the data sources), he also proposes restricting his empirical test to the analysis of wage earning and education for white-urban-native males to eliminate the more important demographic sources of bias (157). In effect, Becker remarkably contradicts the earlier delineation of his theoretical model with a systematic empirical test restricted to white-urban-native males.

If, as Becker has postulated, education is a human capital investment with rates of return commensurate with personal and institutional factors quantifiable and expected by investors, then the meritorious wage earnings model should predict and demonstrate varying investment levels for individuals without resorting to the willful exclusion of segments of the population, much less the majority of the college-educated population.19 The discrepancies in the wage earnings of different demographic populations should factor into the anticipated rates of return and investment decisions for individual (demographically defined) investors. As Becker later states, “the average gain from college would be seriously overstated by estimates based on white male graduates if, as is often alleged, they gain much more from college than dropouts, nonwhites, or females” (169).

Nonetheless, when Becker considers nonwhite, non-male, and non-urban persons, he often resorts to unsubstantiated assumptions and conditions to account for the intractable results not predicted by his theoretical model. For instance, nonwhite males reported lower rates of return and lower absolute earnings (which results in lower incentives for nonwhite to attend college), yet, the incidence of nonwhite males with some college education was not significantly different from that of white males.

To explain the discrepancy between college attendance and predicted college attendance by his model, Becker states that nonwhites attend cheaper (and “lower-quality”) colleges, as defined by the fact that most nonwhites are [Black] and about 85 per cent of [Black] college students in 1947 were enrolled in [Black] colleges (172).20 Without an adequate explanation, he associates and measures the lower quality education with the price of the institution (without regard for the effects of racial discrimination on college prices or graduate earnings) and appears to reference a difference in ability as an explanation for this discrepancy. However, there is no other statistical evidence presented to demonstrate that the average quality of the students from Black colleges differed from the average quality of students from non-Black colleges.

Similarly, females with some college education reported lower rates of return and lower absolute earnings from attending college, adding a more significant difficulty in the ability of Becker’s model to provide insight into the labor force participation of married women. A large number of college-educated married women abstained from the labor force in the mid-twentieth century, resulting in earnings of $0 per year and in effect reporting no rate of return (or a complete loss of their human capital investment) as defined by Becker’s theoretical model. To circumvent this gap in the explanatory power of his model, he asserts that many women drop out of college after marriage, and college women are more likely to marry educated and wealthy men: “These well-known facts suggest that women go to college partly to increase the probability of marrying a more desirable man” (179).

Thus, Becker indicates that women represent a special case in which the financial gain from additional schooling should be measured by the family earnings of females in order to accommodate the wage earnings of their husbands. Nevertheless, he offers the fact that college-educated women, rather than college-educated men or a random mix of men and women, leave the labor force after marriage without further explication. And even with these conditions, the difference in rates of return on education likely is not commensurate with the proportion of females who attended college.21

Weakness of the Traditional Theory of Choice

It should be no surprise that, after Becker’s brief and unsuccessful attempt to account for the measurable education behaviors of nonwhite, non-male, and non-urban college-goers, he limits further discussions to white male graduates (ostensibly, for the sake of brevity). Becker limited his empirical test of human capital to white, urban males in order to limit the variability in earnings to the perceived investments in human capital. Nevertheless, the difficulties continued. When considering results that demonstrate college dropouts are twice as likely to have fathers in professional, semiprofessional, or managerial occupations than high-school (only) graduates, Becker provides the ad hoc assumption that college dropouts may originate in higher social and economic backgrounds, but they were unable to finish an activity that they had started, and so their (earnings) advantage may be counterbalanced by lack of sustained effort (165).

Of course, Becker could have overcome some discrepancies in his theoretical model by introducing non-meritorious factors in the earnings of white males (racial/gender nepotism) or variables to account for education level as a product of more forces than the anticipated rate of return on personal investment (for instance, the civic value of education). The former solution, however, would have forced Becker to return to an economic analysis of economic phenomena; the latter solution would have required more than a facile grasp of social science methodologies in other fields. Both options surely offered an unappealing task for an economic theorist on the periphery of a vast empire over the social sciences.

Understandably, then, Becker had very little interest in the study of the market demand for labor that would have led his program of research back into economic research. As a deflection, rather than returning to the study of economics per se to explain variances in education and income, Becker relied on the general conclusions of his prior work, Economics of Discrimination22, in which Becker concluded that profit maximization in the long run mitigates the potential inefficiencies of market discrimination in the marketplace. “Supply and demand” for labor productivity allegedly mitigates the possibility for discrimination in the labor force to exclude groups entirely, or for segregation in the labor market to sort targeted populations disproportionately into low-paying occupations, or for non-white, non-male populations to be paid less than white males for the same work.

For Becker, taste for discrimination lacked objectivity:

[I]n the market place, objective behavior is based on considerations of productivity alone. An employer discriminates by refusing to hire someone with a marginal value product greater than marginal cost (39).

In essence, employers paid the price for their own discrimination from the loss of productive efficiency. Sustainable, structural discrimination requires widespread prejudice on the parts of a majority of consumers or employees to offset, or to return equilibrium to, the marginal value and marginal cost of the employers’ labor market discrimination.23

Becker’s research on labor market discrimination directly considered discrimination against African-Americans but, as a matter of economic theory, the research applied to any minority in the economy. Differentials between whites and non-whites have been explained in terms of discrimination against non-whites, Becker surmises, although a theory on nepotism in favor of whites would have almost exactly the same empirical implications. In fact, any type of discrimination, or favoritism, could be expressed literally as the price employers are willing to pay for discrimination in the form of production inefficiencies. Consequently, there is no need to distinguish between the various forms of discrimination, and thus no reason to develop separate explanations of racial and gender discrimination in his economic theory.24

At the time Becker completed Human Capital in the mid-1960s, feminist analysts initiated the documentation of the historical absence of females from the traditional human sciences. While feminist writers in many disciplines exposed omissions in the record and neglect in the explanatory models of women’s history and activities. Against neo-classical economic theory, feminist critiques developed under the general appellation of feminist economics.

Much like the program of compensatory history in the discipline of history, early feminist economists concentrated their efforts on delineating the historical absence of women from economic considerations and the addition of women’s productivity to the analytical record. Gillian Hewitson notes, “The first approach (was) to introduce women or the feminine as objects of knowledge within the relevant discipline. That is, the framework of the knowledge is adopted, but its content is expanded or adjusted in order to make the knowledge a more complete representation of the real world.”25

As in compensatory history, the absence of women (and the non-white, non-male, non-urbanized) from analytical considerations or explanatory models supposedly resulted from economists’ simple omission in the application of economic methodology. Early feminist critiques initially did not consider the absence of women as a methodological exception or a methodological imperative.

To his credit, Becker attempted to overcome the omissions and disregard of female behavior in prior neo-classical explanatory models in a branch of economics that would become known as “new home economics.” Without recourse to an economic theory that accounted for the racial or gender discrimination in the demand function of the labor markets, however, Becker turned almost exclusively to the study of the supply function for labor markets. Within one year after the publication of Human Capital, Becker published, A Theory of the Allocation of Time.26 As Gillian Hewitson observes, the new home economics that attempted to formalize women’s work within the home was nascent with this work in which Becker ventured to circumscribe the allocation of time between home and work within the same framework of neo-classical utility models by formalizing time as a scarce resource.

What Becker specifically aspired to overcome with a theory of home economics was the minor modification to the neo-classical economic model and its reliance on tastes as an explanatory variable in the consumption of goods and services—supply function. In neo-classical economic theory, “The behavior of a utility-maximizing consumer is entirely determined by prices, income, and his ‘tastes.’” If different consumers behaved differently after adjustment for prices and income, the conclusion would have to be that their tastes differed.27 In other words, two consumers with different sets of preferences in the products and services available for consumption would make two different choices in the same market conditions (of price and income functions).

The ordering of these preferences are determined by a utility function and, in Hewitson’s words, “The utility function specifies the pleasure or utility an individual derives from the consumption of combinations of all possible goods and services, and hence represents that individual’s preferences.”28 To quote Becker, “neo-classical economic theory does not explain the formation of tastes.”29 In fact, neo-classical economic theory first assumes an absolute individuality for the utility maximizer and precludes the comparison of individual preferences as well as the social or institutional formulations of preferences. Generally, neo-classical economists utilize preferences as no more than sufficient and inferential reasons to explain the variability and sum of choices made by individual consumers in the economy.

Hewitson also points out that this monadic individualism explains traditional neo-classical economists’ reluctance to deal with issues of endowment, wealth or income distribution, and hence removes a theoretical basis for arguing that existing arrangements benefit the rich more than the poor, and, more generally, men more than women.30 Economists incorporate tastes as no more than randomly distributed conditions independent of the economic variables, resulting in the contention that economic activity may not be entangled in the formation of tastes such as might result from economic discrimination or the generational transfer of wealth.

With reference to the problems revealed for Becker’s human capital theory, the neo-classical methodological framework results in the conclusion that randomly distributed differences in tastes for employment and wages accounts for the radically different returns on investment between white, urban males and women (or non-white or non-urban) college graduates. But again, human capital theory is a theory of earnings and income distribution. Consequently, Becker needed to directly confront discrepancies in the distribution of income (or return on investment) to male and female workers.

If the price and income functions explicitly incorporated into his human capital theory failed to forecast the distribution of earnings in a competitive market, then economic theory results in the unpalatable conclusion that females possessed tastes for lower returns on investments in education. Such a conclusion directly belies the uniform, unsexed utility-maximization principle of neo-classical theory in its implication that the sexes possess two different investment optimization paths. Not surprisingly, Becker decried ad hoc allusions to tastes as an explanation for differences in consumer behavior; The heavy reliance on the presumed difference in tastes when explaining differences in consumer behavior is, therefore, a weakness of the traditional theory of choice.31

The Cost of Producing Commodities

Traditionally, in economic theory, the dichotomization of supply and demand forces was metaphorically represented by the imputed purposes or maximizing functions of activities in the firm and the home. Whereas the business firm is theoretically motivated by the maximization of profits, the household is theoretically motivated by the maximization of utility. Becker states, “A firm is an intermediary between factor and product markets: it purchases a set of factor inputs and transforms them into useful output that is sold. Households also purchase inputs and transform them into useful output, but households directly consume their output instead of selling it” (69).

Originally, then, preference sets or tastes entered the equation as the determinants of the choices made by individual consumers and households (defined simply as an individual utility function embodied by the household head). Stated otherwise, incomparable and immeasurable household tastes determined the demand function for household consumables and the supply function of household labor.

To surmount the logical inconsistencies presented by individual and household tastes for human capital and labor supply, Becker reformulated the activity imputed to households by qualifying households’ purchased goods as one of the inputs into the production of “commodities” that directly enter preferences (45). He speculates:

If purchased goods were considered inputs into the production of commodities that entered directly into preferences, differences in tastes would become less important in explaining differences in behavior. Persons in warmer climates would use less heating fuel not because their taste for fuel was less, but because ‘comfortable indoor temperatures’ could be achieved with less fuel input (44).

In effect, Becker proposes to ascribe production functions to the household and substantiate exchanges between households and firms as exchanges in factor inputs transformed into useful output or commodities by the household. The resulting utilitarian commodities, then, by virtue of their production in the household, are not subject to further exchange or transaction values, and thereby directly enter preferences in the producing household. Becker proudly declares, “This approach reduces the need to rely on differences in tastes” (45).

For whom? The deferment of consumption — and thus the significance and role of tastes — to a non-market activity that occurs within the household reduces the economist’s need to rely on differences in tastes. The attribution of production functions to the household insulates economists from their own assumptions of utility-maximization and allows economic theorists to assert anew that preferences are exogenously determined.

Essentially, then, the economist must no longer define outputs such as comfortable indoor temperatures and, more importantly, account for variability in consumer preferences for comfortable indoor temperatures. As Becker concludes, “In the new approach, the effects of age, education, climate, ability, and other environmental variables on behavior can be introduced through the household production functions instead of through tastes” (47). And finally, the deferment of tastes to non-economic considerations allows Becker to condense the economic triad of behavior to the dyad of price and income, “the two parameters that can be treated by our (economists’) framework” (45). Henceforth, deviations in economic behavior are entirely defined by changes in prices or incomes, the proxies for the dichotomized and mechanical forces of supply and demand.

A Taste for the Family Life

The deferment of tastes to non-household considerations and the introduction of production functions in the household permits Becker the opportunity to incorporate the environmental variables he and any neo-classical economist eschewed in the economic model dependent on tastes. As Becker asserts, “In this model, education and other environmental variables enter the demand functions for goods not because they change tastes, as in the traditional approach, but because they change the efficiency of household production” (48).

Whereas economists avoided measurement of the effects of education and ability on tastes or economic behaviors in principle, the new model invited consideration of the effects of education and ability on the efficiencies of household production as in the firm. As exogenously determined constraints, these environmental factors are no longer treated as variables in the economic equations, instead, environmental factors enter the equations as invariable coefficients and constants applied to the two privileged meta-environmental and systemically variable factors, price and income.

Becker explains, “If an increase in one environmental variable, say, education, improved efficiency by reducing the input coefficients, it would reduce the cost of producing commodities” (48). As Becker attempted to demonstrate in his work on human capital, an environmental variable such as education comes at a price, so the education level of a workforce or of a firm’s employees neatly ties in to the twin economic catalysts of price and income (supply and demand) once again. Since consumers are assumed to maximize their individual utility in every market condition, and thus attain the education and employment level that maximizes that utility at any static measure of time, only a change in price or income over time affects a change in the production efficiency coefficients for education and employment (or supposedly for any environmental variable).

In this respect, the inability of Becker’s work on human capital theory to adequately account for the variances in wages and human capital investments by non-white, non-male, non-urban, and non-native Americans during the 1950s and 1960s ultimately led to his derivative research on the economic family. Rather than directly unshackle himself from the simplicity and inefficacy of the Friedmanesque economic ideology guiding his research, however, Becker extended his irresistible fascination with the engine of economic analysis into an entirely new domain previously regarded by economists as exogenous to supply and demand functions: the family. In the new study of the family labor and consumption, the economic methodology simply disregarded social and cultural phenomena in the family as empirical variables except when reduced to the price function or income value for economic theory.

No matter the topic of study in the social sciences this intellectual deceit, of course, exemplifies the imperialism of an economist gaming the theoretical framework of the Chicago School to suggest that supply and demand functions explain all social behavior. When the presence of “tastes” reveals economic analysis to be insufficient and unreliable, economists deny the presence of tastes in the social domain that strips their emperor of its cloths. Thus, Becker embarked on an imperial campaign to conquer family life, extract its resources (“tastes”), and shore up the failure of the economic theory at the center of his empire.

Continued from Age of Paine, Part I…

“In order to discover the line of our duty rightly, we should take our children in our hand, and fix our station a few years farther into life; that eminence will present a prospect.” Thomas Paine, January 10, 1776.1

“A present that understands itself from the horizon of the modern age as the actuality of the most recent period has to recapitulate the break brought about with the past as a continuous renewal.” Jürgen Habermas, 1985 [originally in German].2

“Should an independency be brought about by [the legal voice of the people in congress], we have every opportunity and every encouragement before us, to form the noblest, purest constitution on the face of the earth. We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Thomas Paine, February 14, 1776.3

The first two pillars of the constitution of the American people as raised in Thomas Paine’s Common Sense rest firmly in the character of frontier society and the maturing hegemony of electoral governance in colonial affairs. In his oblique, plebeian style, Paine challenged his fellow frontiersmen: “It is wholly owing to the constitution of the people, and not the constitution of the government,” that the American colonists enjoyed a freedom and intercourse that stung the national pride and prejudice of the British and their king.

The poisoned republic of Great Britain, corrupted by distinctions inscribed with the “blood and ashes” of monarchy and succession, served no other purpose than the dispossession of liberty and property on the American continent: “Of more worth is one honest man to society…than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.”

Chapter III, with a sober apprehension for the future state of American affairs should the dishonest agents of Great Britain win the day, articulates the constitution of a republican, an “honest man,” who is capable to command the establishment of a democratic government of liberty and law, resulting in the formation of a nation. Paine skillfully counterpoises “the present day” between the past and the future, to endow the American people with the “simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense” to break with the colonial past and to declare independence as the only worthy means to “decide the contest” between the British and the Americans.

In Chapter IV, Paine then outlines the explicit power and threat of force in an American declaration of independence “to take rank with other nations.” An American nation forged from the constitution of the American people in “the present winter” — or, “the present time,” “the very time,” “the seed-time,” “the true time,” “the peculiar time,” “that time so proper,” “the time [that] hath found us,” “a more necessary time,” “that point of time”4 — in other words, in the opportune moment of 1776, American independence was “worth an Age if rightly employed:” The Age of Paine.

The Self-Evident Constitution of a Republican

In a genuinely democratic notion of liberty, Paine establishes the third pillar of the American people’s constitution with the assertion that republicanism, the capacity for self-governance, is inherent to the social individual. As he had intimated earlier, virtue fails to govern the world and “prejudice and prepossession” soon narrow the view of a free people such that their vision fails to extend beyond “the present day.” Paine thereby challenges his readership not to “put off the true character of a man,” the true social order of the frontier peoples who first gathered together to transcend the destitution of natural conditions. “The present state of American affairs,” he submits, is an inherent and permanent condition of “human affairs,” an ineradicable right to form a “government of our own.”

His first aim, however, was to expose the slavish prejudice and nightmarish prepossession for reconciliation as advocated by the Tories and British sympathizers among the colonists. For many colonists, even after Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill, the thought of severing connections with Great Britain posed an inconceivable break with their parent country. To these colonists, Britain was the benefactor of America, its European protector, and the means to further prosperity; a small island destined to perpetually govern the continent. “Men of passive tempers look somewhat lightly over the offences of Britain,” Paine observed, conquering America for Britain “by delay and timidity.”

Paine disparaged notions of reconciliation as “dreams,” “superstitions,” “prejudice,” and “false, selfish, narrow, and ungenerous” suppositions. More importantly, though, he exposed such sentiments in terms directly tied to the concept of frontier freedom and monarchical hegemony outlined in his first two chapters. Those who “put off” the true character of American freedom in favor of reconciliation typically foundered on one of four accounts:

Interested men, who are not to be trusted; weak men, who cannot see; prejudiced men, who will not see; and a certain set of moderate men who think better of the European world than it deserves.

At heart, in his critique, the British monarchy in America engrossed particular individuals in fallacious “counterrevolutionary” arguments and actions. That is, an un-republican element in the American colonies threatened to bring submission and ruin to the continent to secure a myopic vision of propitious protection and power. Paine hints repeatedly that interested, weak, prejudiced, and moderate men see only what has passed, what they have accumulated in their favor, and therefore lack vision for the future.

The first of his well-intended hints occurs at the outset of the chapter in the story of Mr. Pelham, a flawed if “able minister,” who favored “measures…only of a temporary kind” that “‘will last my time.’” Paine disparages the material interests of Mr. Pelham as “fatal and unmanly…[to be] remembered by future generations with detestation.” The second timely clue follows in the analogy of a name engraved on a sapling, growing like a wound on a tree, into a mark of cowardice and sycophancy for posterity to read “in full grown characters.” The third slight, the most mercantile, condemns the “moderate men,” the most calamitous among those who espouse reconciliation, who tarry in indecision, “running the next generation into debt” and thus “bringing ruin upon…posterity.”

Paine’s primary goal, nevertheless, is not to scapegoat, purge, or guillotine counterrevolutionaries, but to cajole and mock the very sentiments of reconciliation in order to realize and restore the memory of frontier liberty for Americans. “Ye that tell us of harmony and reconciliation,” he questions, “can ye restore to us the time that is past? Can ye give to prostitution its former innocence?” His answer, several pages earlier is, of course: “Reconciliation is now a fallacious dream.” The colonists in favor of reconciliation resorted to artifice and self-deception, “folly and childishness” unworthy of the honest man: “there was a time when [dependency on Britain] was proper, and there is a proper time for it to cease.” The American continent’s break with the past is absolute and insoluble; its future affairs hang in the balance, as a state of ruin or of prosperity.

The rhetorical pivot from past to future throughout the chapter, defines the true character of the republican, the frontier-person of American freedom. Notably, the frontier in Paine’s work could easily be misidentified with the past, in the history of Jamestown settlers, Huguenots, Pilgrims, beaver pelt trappers, and other misguided utopians and entrepreneurs. Nothing could be further from his intentions, as his complementary portrayals of the dishonest man and the republican illustrate. In each example of the dishonest, anti-republican man, Paine raises the specter of future generations judging harshly the pusillanimity of his contemporaries.5

The repeated references to the judgment of posterity is calculated to communicate one point: the present is the frontier on the future of American freedom. In his first chapter, Paine argues that frontier societies organize their first laws under “the title only of Regulations, and [are] enforced by no other penalty than public disesteem.” The “public disesteem” of future generations is exactly what Paine suggests as the verdict for the dishonest men of his time. This was no mere rhetorical device in his argument; this was a tacit assertion that the present and future may be bound together under what may be called “the Regulations of American Republicanism” — the first laws of frontier freedom, enforced by no other penalty than civic opprobrium in posterity.

Paine explicitly makes the point early in his chapter on the honest man: “‘Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected, even to the end of time, by the proceedings now.” Virtually present in the contest, posterity presided over the proceedings as the enforcers of Regulations that ultimately determined which colonists proved to be on the side of American freedom, that is, the jurors who would ultimately sort the honest men from the dishonest men of 1776. Paine, thus, generously enlarged the view of republicanism in time, regarding the present as a colony for the future, a horizon along which one continually renews the prospects for freedom.

The present as a frontier on the future emerges in the elaboration of a few simple republican regulations with the capacity to overpass chronological time. Again, in his sketch of the frontier colony, Paine recognized “that in proportion as [the frontier people] surmount the first difficulties…which bound them together in common cause, they will begin to relax in their duty and attachment to each other.” The subjective freedom of individuals solidifies from the auspicious intercourse made possible by the frontier society. But also, “the defect of moral virtue,” establishes the conditions for a society of subjection, distinction, and tyranny.

To counter the natural trajectory of subjective individualism, Paine defines Regulations for American Republicanism that foster continuous breaks with the past in order to renew the bonds of common cause, in other words, regulations for a frontier in a temporal geography, not on a spatial geography. Moral virtue fails to dictate the conscience and to govern the world, republican virtues practically afford the potential to envision action and conduct affairs with future generations in consultation. With this prospect in mind, the true character of the republican “divests” narrow interests borne from the past and inherits insightful plans for self-governance, uniting the “two grand principles of business, knowledge and power,” in an elected congress.

As the obverse of the dishonest man—“the self-interested, weak, prejudiced, and moderate man of the present day,”—as judged by future generations, the republican exemplifies four distinct virtues that regulate his or her actions with respect to posterity: liberalism, independence, enlightenment, and progressivism.

The self-interested man regards time itself as his own possession: “my time.” Subjectivity wholly rendered such men unworthy of trust and incapable of the “duty and attachment” necessary to a frontier society rooted in mutual freedom and a nation formed in a declaration of independence. Similarly, weak men “who cannot see,” dwell in the past, superstitiously in favor of reconciliation, certain that the “former connexion with Great Britain…is necessary towards [America’s] future happiness, and will always have the same effects.”

The first two virtues of republicanism redress the dishonesty of men like Mr. Pelham. Liberalism engages the republican in a time that transcends selfish regard for material distinctions secured by the commercial engrossment of the “Pharoah of England” and his agents. Independence, likewise, manifests a confidence in one’s own ability to “enrich ourselves” and “pursue determinately some fixed object,” some plan for the prosperity and liberty of the American continent, “ the power of self-governance,” without the so-called “protection” of Great Britain.

Prejudiced men esteemed Great Britain as the “parent or mother country” of America. Paine ridiculed the sentiment: “this new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious freedom from every part of Europe.” In key passages, Paine de-centers American origins, describing America as “a free port” for all of Europe and in a “brotherhood with every European.” The point is clear: the enlarged view of the future surpassed the sovereignty of a single European nation; or, America was not a continental shelf in the history of British ruffians. British prejudices set aside, enlightenment empowers the American republican to see the contest over the continent as nothing less than the struggle for humankind itself.

Paine, though, has no intention to elevate Europe as a whole into a lofty continent worthy of American deference. In opposition to moderates “who think better of the European world than it deserves,” Paine paints the European monarchical nations as “monster(s)” whose cruelty “drove the first emigrants from home.” Great Britain was one among many European monstrosities, an irredeemable enemy, for the two continents belonged “to different systems; England to Europe, America to itself.” “The king, the greatest enemy which this continent hath, or can have, shall tell us, ‘there shall be no laws but such as I like.’” In this respect, Paine asserted, “Reconciliation and ruin are nearly related.”

Without the liberalism, independency and enlightenment to make its own laws, America fails. When Paine writes of “the ruin of the [American] continent,” nonetheless, he undoubtedly has in mind the ruin of “posterity.” Here, the progressivism of the republican takes shape, out of concern for the shape of the future. The “American continent” at that time — divided among three major European nations and inhabited by inestimable Native American nations — serves only as a metaphor for humankind united in equality and liberty under “a government of our own [as] our natural right.” Paine drafts a “plan,” an American system, to see the future and to collect “the straggling thoughts of individuals…into useful matter” and devise a system of government over the entire continent, “always remembering that our strength is continental, not provincial.”

A free people determines for itself its constitution and system of laws, he states, “for independency means no more, than, whether we shall make our own laws” and, later, “[in] so far as we approve of monarchy…in America the law [will be] king.” As Paine demonstrated earlier, the natural rights to law-making unite past, present, and future in republicanism, for the precedent of ancestral freedoms guarantees not the right of the laws, but the equal rights to law-making for descendants. Ultimately, joining present and future in common cause, Paine calls for the formation of “a constitution of our own in a cool deliberate manner,” a sufficiently lasting system of government that may be “bequeath[ed] to posterity.”

Chapter 3 is by far the longest of the four chapters in Common Sense. It was no mistake that Paine describes the true character of the honest republican with an appeal to an individual choice between reconciliation and independence, between past and future. The republican virtue of an individual, “the constitution of an American people,” is the foundational microcosm for the macrocosm of a free and independent republic. As such, one who “[shrinks] back at a time, when going a little further, would [render] this continent the glory of the earth” fails to uphold republican virtues and invites the “penalty of public disesteem” from posterity.

The constitution of an American republican required liberalism, independence, enlightenment, and progressivism—a present sense of “duty and attachment” to the freedom of future generations. Consequently, Paine ends his disquisition on the true character of the honest republican with a call to arms: “O! Ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth!”

The Present Hegemony of America on the Frontier of the Future

If the first two chapters delineated the origins of society and government on the destitute frontier of Nature and chapter three proposes a virtual congress of present and posterity as a frontier society ruled by four “Regulations” or virtues of American republicanism, the fourth pillar sets down the means to constituting an American republic and nation: the mastery of time. As Paine transitions to the fourth chapter, he challenges Americans to stand forth in opposition to tyranny and to “prepare in time an asylum for mankind” (my emphasis). What Paine has in mind is no less than the constitution of an Age, a cultural and political hegemony to withstand the crucibles of chance and machinations—an age like a vault resting on the four pillars of the constitution of the American people.

Chapter four considers aspects of national power at great length. Foremost is the unity, both of the colonies and the colonials, to form the “largest body of armed and disciplined men of any power under heaven.” In naval power, “No country on the globe is so happily situated,” blessed with natural resources, to build “a fleet as an article of commerce…the natural manufacture of this country.” More to the point, “In almost every article of defence we abound:” hemp, iron, small arms, saltpeter, gunpowder, knowledge, and, “our inherent character,” resolution. The sea-ports and their commerce were “so happily proportioned to our wants” to ensure defense of trade and the acquisition of riches to manage the national debt. In each of these, Paine makes manifest the geopolitical threat of force that defines a national state and the global potential for an American nation.

In the same passages, however, Paine magnifies the ephemeral qualities of national power. The variation of colonial interests accompanied by the increase in trade and population would, in “half a century hence,” lead to conditions in which “[c]olony would be against colony.” The ability to build a naval power for both commerce and “defence” pressed on the limits of natural resources, as “the timber of the country is everyday diminishing.” Population and commerce, the inevitable future of America, eroded affinity for the common cause, diminishing “the spirit both of patriotism and military defence.” Time itself imperiled the independence of the American continent, the future: “history sufficiently informs us, that the bravest achievements were always accomplished in the non-age of a nation.”

Throughout the first three chapters, Paine deployed the concept of time in his interplay of past, present, and future in terms that literate American colonials easily understood. The re-orientation from past to future captured the very foundations of early modern philosophy and the Enlightenment. As the narrative of independence builds in Common Sense, the term, “time,” recurs more and more frequently with each passing chapter. When it reaches the crescendo in chapter four, suddenly, the simple formula of chronological time, “ past, present, future,” erupts into ecstatic concepts of temporality that suspend the dissipation of time and create a prominence (“eminence”) from which to see a new prospect for the American continent—or, rather, for human freedom and its future.

At the outset, Paine relates the concessions of men, “in England [and] America,” who regard the independence of America as an event that “ would take place one time or other.” Chronological time remains the agency, like a divine Providence, revealing or deferring events as willed by forces far greater than any collective of individuals. For such men, weak men, time affords them only the power of opinions, “to hold an opinion or to confess an opinion,” differing “only in their opinion of the time” when the separation of America from Europe would occur. Paine pricks the apathy of these weak men, proclaiming that “the time hath found us.”

To be the subjects of time, however, is no better for a free people than to be the subject of the past and of monarchy. A break with the past required an absolute break with time, including a break with the inevitability of events in the future and a break with the inertia of the present. Paine recognized, and asked his readers to realize, that time itself could be put on its head, subject to the historical will of humankind:

The present time…is that peculiar time which never happens to a nation but once, viz. the time of forming itself into a government. Most nations have let slip the opportunity, and by that means have been compelled to receive the laws from their conquerors, instead of making laws for themselves…from the errors of other nations, let us learn wisdom, and lay hold of the present opportunity—To begin government on the right end.

The peculiar time, the present time of 1776, was in Paine’s estimation, “the seed-time of good habits” for a nation and the “true time” for the American people to establish a new age. In this sense, time serves as a generative force, fulfilling the values injected into its progression by those who count its passing—humankind. In republican time, as opposed to providential, monarchical, plantation, and market time, the present enlarges the frontier of the future, no longer subject to the foibles of the past, sovereign over the fate of free nations.

For too long have we Americans, posterity, valorized the counterrevolutionary machinations of self-interested (Hamilton), weak (Jefferson), prejudiced (Adams), and moderate (Madison) men who devised constitutions for the individual states and the United States of America. Their paper-thin defences of liberty and prosperity have proven useless against the dishonesty of men — of interested men who cannot be trusted with billion dollar fortunes; of weak men who cannot see fit to think without the yolk of original intent; of prejudiced men who will not see the return of ruin and wretchedness in the unitary executive; and, of moderate men who think better of the founding fathers than they deserve.

Thomas Paine was, and is, the greatest champion of freedom in American revolutionary history. The American people read and embodied his Common Sense of 1776: declaring independence, standing forth in revolutionary war against monarchy, and constituting republican governance. The history of the American continent came to a standstill and entrusted to posterity — “to us” — a singular opportunity in human history to know and embrace the American present as a new frontier on the future of human freedom.

In short, Thomas Paine wrote the constitution of the American people:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

As long as these words stand as the declaration of an American people committed to the free and independent states of America, the “engine of change” in world history is us, “posterity,” who celebrate, on our Independence Days, the satyric severity of our liberty and prosperity during this preeminent age—the Age of Paine.

We are now making Arcane Cage available through Substack over time. It is not literary art or anything, but a fanciful effort to write about “the world’s first social democracy” at a time when “magic” introduced promising technological change to a growing economy and portended upward mobility in the social conditions of its (or most) citizens. As the subtitle also hints at, the events take place near the end of a long era of prosperity when a cabal of “magicians” worked to destroy the very democracy that empowered their ascent—“the decline and fall of the Provenance.”

Now, as is evident in the AV episode (above) and the text (below), the “historian” of Arcane Cage regards the narrative recounted to follow as a record of factual events that hold important historical truths for the modern reader. There are of course many “scholarly references” embedded in the book such as the one to James Harrington’s Commonwealth of Oceana in the opening paragraph. Nonetheless, hundreds of historical allusions do not add up to make history per se. In the Preface, the author of Arcane Cage decides he can no longer mask his bitter disappointment with the neglect that others have shown for his archival research and explains his reasons for self-publishing his magisterial history of the Provenance.

Signed, The Publisher

Preface to Arcane Cage

The republican visionary, James Harrington, in his magisterial Commonwealth of the Provenance makes note of a certain late arcane philosopher who made a lengthy and impassioned apology in defense of the empire for liberty. With the expectation that at the conclusion thereof his audience would burst forth in praise and applause, the rhetorical magician was only to be met by a single lone voice inquiring who it was that disavowed freedom. I fear the same equally applies to me, hereupon, engaging in a shameless defense of an arcane historical study. For without doubt if we held the humanities in high esteem as all humankind surely should, and as the wisest among us still do, then my preface to a history of the Provenance (the very first social democracy of the world and the ancient origin for the love of all classical wisdoms) is as consequential and supernumerary as the performance assumed in an apology for liberty—for it may be said, and truly averred, that the death of the humanities has been greatly exaggerated.

It is our misfortune, however, to live in a golden age when no happiness escapes the gaping maw of conspicuous consumption and invidious distinction. Every pure pleasure falls into the gilded hands of the silicon sultans and bitcoin barons who peer greedily into our private doings and affirm no value in the life or the pleasure of nonsalable pursuits. To be certain, artificial intelligence will not hesitate to slander the Provenance itself as utopian because it lacked digital technologies and zolpidem. And so, I hope, no person of common sense will adjudge my scholarship needless in its search for a method to discharge the public’s indifference to the Provenance that avarice—of those who seek to commercialize the humanities—and folly—of those who fail to understand social progress—devise to foster. Agrigentum’s wisdom translated to the Latin states, scientia non habet inimicum praeter ignorantem: “Arcane philosophy has no foe but the cloud of unknowing.”

My detractors I foretell will divide themselves into three different styles of censure: a very strong faction that condemns any study of arcane history and the Provenance as a fanciful digression with no pecuniary merit; a second and sizable delegation that admits to the value of such subjects but not in this particular genre; and the third, the least numerous contingent, who countenance historical narrative and similar modes of analysis as worthy of the subject matter, but fault my knowledge of the literary canon or interpretation of the primary sources. Self-doubt, it has been truly said, jumps the hedge at its lowest point; so, therewith I endeavor to cloak myself in a shell as hard as steel as a defensive measure and, if I happen to strike a blow or land an insult that gives my assailants a hesitancy for the merits of their indifference or criticism, I accept no fault for my preemptive rebuttal to ensure that the reading public has been afforded the luxury to turn the page rather than put down this work in apathy or disgust.

To the skeptics who question the verity of arcane history itself, I disavow in return your willful ignorance for timeless archetypes of bravery, perseverance, and wisdom that draw power from the commonweal and the occasional toss of devil’s bones to secure an outcome that overwhelms and dismays the eternal forces arrayed against humankind. The dissenters I openly dismiss as wholly lacking in gratitude for the marvelous undertakings of enlightenment and of self-governance—those honorable treasures of world history, in former and later ages, from distant and nearby nations, earned at magnificent and tragic costs—that demand the care, the study, and the practiced resoluteness encouraged and advanced by the humanities. Of the third, I ask my critics only this: to count my cause so good and its intended audience so unprejudiced that the favor of a publishing house to bolster the two or the cunning of an agent to join them are unnecessary where the plain and genuine joy in the humanities is present.

I wholeheartedly acknowledge that this work, from the preface to the index, is derivative and unoriginal in nearly every respect as I have resisted the urge to trouble myself with the preternatural question of what strength of character makes one a scholar or which faculty for novelty defines one as an original author. I do not presume to challenge the specific honors and distinguished achievements accorded to the luminaries whose contributions have made this minor effort possible, nor do I wish to argue the merits or demerits for the accounts others have told about an arcane age in our common global legacy. As these pages attest, the sympathetic figures and exceptional historians, who have preserved for us all the great hope embodied by the Provenance and its people, deserve our utmost respect. I too know my indebtedness to them in inadvertent and untold ways, as I aspired only to pick up the torch they previously hurled into the divine darkness, dust it off so that it may burn anew, and throw it always already further into the void with what good wit remains to me at my age.

If in my efforts I have unintentionally slighted, misstated, or distorted the masters whose works form the fountainhead of Provenancial history, I wish to make known that I borrowed all and stole none, such that I may be called a terrible satirist or poor translator rather than a vicious wordmonger or mercenary novelist. For my part, I thank in advance those who will seek to mend the record or correct what has gone amiss, for I have no great hubris in knowing the immaculate or the final word on this important subject matter. I frankly welcome what criticism may come from friends and colleagues who spend the time on what many others surely regard as a trifling chronicle littered with clumsy translations of verse and fantastical footnotes that offer a deficient gloss on a hackneyed narrative lacking both style and substance.

As to my purpose, a work of superimpositions (as I desire to so call it) may boast of no one singular event or objective as a spur to labors at once foolish and incredible in scope. I first discovered the allure and wonder of arcane history as an impressionable youth, easily carried away by a fascination with an ancient civilization and by an imagination for the many strange phenomena of a magical world. As a young adult, however, the narrow-minded vision for what constitutes higher education advocated by antihumanists encouraged me to put childish interests behind me. I dutifully dedicated my studies to the reasons for the rise and fall of nations during the golden age of world history, earning my doctorate in the field of U.S. History with an emphasis on the late American republic and its economy.

Perchance, my life’s one true romantic interest cared for two children from a previous marriage when we met. Among the new parental duties I assumed, I read to my two new wards and, once having exhausted the children’s classics, I introduced them to the great literature on arcane history that I had not read for myself in almost two decades. When both reached a sufficient age to understand the contingencies involved in historical outcomes, we as a family role-played the great events from Provenancial history as a means to explore and understand more fully the moral quandaries and heroism of the celebrated champions from the earliest eras of civilization. Over the years, vicariously experiencing their wonder and enthusiasm, I gradually grew to have a deeper appreciation for the timeless foibles associated with the human capacity, and responsibility, for liberty—from the distant past to the present.

As one who has given much of his adult life to the academy and its administration, let it not be said that I valued education more than parenthood. Though it may have seemed so to my family at times, my fault has been that I know no other way to express love than as love for the humanities. I do not mean only the canonic treasures guarded by literati or the indulgences dismissed by the angelic investors, but the plain truths discovered in heated squabbles and catty distractions, while seated around the dinner table, over the possibility of historical agency in dicey situations. Out of respect for what I learned, and not what I sought to teach, I dedicate this work to my two sons as an expression of gratitude for restoring sight to my third eye.

Of course, if not for their mother, my life’s partner, I would likely be off in the corner somewhere at a little-known college or university, preoccupied with the technical skills and merits of scholarly research, yet unaccustomed to telling stories or suggesting solutions to problems that warrant consideration in higher education or policy circles. Inasmuch as her companionship has allowed me to press on with an endless series of fatuities, her reenactments of decisions and actions taken by more than one of the characters in this historical narrative have influenced my interpretation of events in more ways than I can recall. Suffice it to say, not a word has been written without the benefit of her reflections and perspective on human experience and on the ethical pursuit of personal happiness and the commonweal.

Research of this nature adds many debts to the ledger, and mine are too numerous to cite at length following years of careful research and revisions. All seven of the great archives of the Provenance and its arcane age offered me ample opportunity to review pertinent factual documents and archeological relics. None, however, afforded me a post-doc fellowship as valuable and as warm as that graciously provided by the Weathermark Center for Rumination on the Classical Powers. To my sundry readers who may find themselves in Chicago on a lazy day, I urge you to pay a visit to the Weathermark’s tavern to peruse the plaques commemorating past graduates (the “rummies”), and to join in thoughtful banter with the remarkable ownership, breezy staff, and chatty, if stern, patrons.

The digital privatization of local intelligence and print scholarship continues apace. As a result, the mission of public libraries has never been more significant for the production of knowledge. The Chicago Public Library (CPL) provided much-needed resources and support when institutions of higher education and university presses rejected my scholarly interests as tedious pedantry or blasphemous fictions—and sometimes both at the same time! The beauty of a public library system is that it knows no standards for admission nor imposes a predetermined set of outcomes on student learning. In these two respects, CPL stands as a fire-bearing titan that commands praise from learned people everywhere. And, as the public library is an appendage of its host, it seems to me, the city deserves recognition for holding true to a simple preamble when its nation faltered.

Whereas I could make mention of the insights and corrections incorporated here and there from the feedback of friends and kin who have received advanced copies of this volume, I choose rather to bemoan and reproach the many others who forswore my academic potential or begrudged me paper certifications without endorsing my suitability for a tenured academic career. I beg pardon, thereof, if in this work I have appended citations where needless or made redundant statements of wisdom where obvious in an effort to reckon discrepancies between my reputation and my vanity; and, I ask for leniency, if in the omission of events and abridgement of subjects, I deemed it best to submit a fact where careful interpretation called for a story, or to abbreviate a fabulous tale where a pithy aside encapsulated the moral of the story. Having made these disclaimers, I otherwise accept sincerely and without hesitation the limitations of any historical work drafted in studious obscurity and unwonted disinterest.

Now, as conclusion, I urge my readers who have conceded to read this disgraceful prologue to disregard further errors and, if only out of respect for the humanities, to suspend disbelief in my flights of fancy when the historical evidence proved wanting or inadequate to the larger narrative; presuming this compact, I have no doubt that you will join in my admiration for the many characters and in my curiosity about the histories retold herein, and that we shall part on good terms without injury or injustice.

Signed, The Author

We take solace in the idea that the nation’s ruling class is on the run. A state or municipality proposes a “millionaire tax” then the specter of capitalism rears its ugly head with the suggestion that “the rich” will take flight to other states and cities. Socialism may be a “disease” or “cancer” to the rightwing podcasters and think tanks, yet the nation’s billionaires and conservative officeholders cannot line up fast enough to fund “Trump Accounts” for the nation’s newborns between the years of 2025 and 2028 in order to buy favor with American voters before the next midterm election.

Progressives may be “powerless” at the moment, but their ideas have gained much ground – enough traction among red-state lawmakers and their financier-bootlickers to put in place the framework for a managed economy (tariffed | state-owned) and a wealth redistribution system (minimum basic income | wealth) for working families in the United States. The yellowbellies (yellow is the color of capitalism!) will act the cowards as they are wont to do – giving ground to the progressive ideals and mutualist values at the heart of the American experiment. But we need not wait for the American billionaires and their political party to meet us halfway at some indeterminate moment in the future…

After the Great Recession, Moody’s Investors Service began releasing dour public outlooks regarding the financial health of colleges and universities, an annual tradition it continues through 2025 — now with support from S&P Global Ratings and Fitch Ratings. Not to be outdone, Forbes nobly soldiers on in its tradition of (down-)grading the financial well-being of private nonprofit institutions. Unlike Moody’s Investors Service and its likeminded ilk, Forbes remains “woke” enough to the point of publishing a second list about a source of financing that will remedy the precarious economic conditions for U.S. higher education: American billionaires. In 2016, we proposed bringing together the nation’s distraught high education institutions and its billionaires to broker a beautiful exchange of fortunes.

Despite a decade of neglect from the public, “A Modest Proposal” is as necessary and as urgent today as never before. Forbes released its 2025 lists of “weakest” colleges and American billionaires, revealing that the number of colleges in America decreased while the number of billionaires in America increased in the past ten years. We must act now to bring these two groups together – the nation’s colleges and billionaires – to provide affordable higher education to all young Americans before another private college closes. Our modest proposal requires only that the titans of innovation and visionaries of the future actualize a most profound solution to end the scourge of tuition dependency at U.S. colleges and universities — forever!

A Modest Proposal​

For preventing higher education institutions in America, from being burdened by tuition-dependency and “small” endowments, and for making higher education beneficial to its students.​

In November, 2015, Moody’s Investors Service released its latest melancholy forecast for tuition-dependent, private non-profit colleges and universities: “It’s going to be another year of lackluster tuition revenue growth for universities, as the pipeline of students heading to college slows and families remain sensitive to prices, Moody’s Investors Service said in a report Thursday.” We noted over a decade ago [originally published in 2015; now on Substack] how the dour annual reports may have a deleterious effect on decision-making at colleges and universities. We emphasized the potential for institutions to scale back tuition discounting without regard for optimization of revenues or expenditures per student. We could have just as easily focused on fundraising and “large” endowments.

If an institution does not rank among one of the two dozen institutions serving 5% of the U.S. student population, its endowment likely matters very little to its operations. Nonetheless, the holy grail of the “large” endowment to wean colleges and universities off tuition-dependency is dangled in front of college presidents and board members annually. Moody’s Investors Service recommends, “Schools with stellar bond ratings can finance discounts through philanthropic gifts and endowment income while maintaining strong net tuition revenue growth.” Across the nation, many institutions now dedicate their presidents and their alumni operations largely to the task of fundraising. Even deans and academic leaders apparently “practice patience and enjoy the journey” of fundraising rather than focus their attention on academic programming and student success.

Do the fundraising campaigns, which have become part and parcel of the daily administration of private colleges and universities, transform budgetary conditions and reduce tuition-dependency as billed? Or, are the proponents of “large” endowments grossly mistaken in their calculations?

For argument’s sake, consider a non-profit, private and tuition-dependent institution of $100,000,000 in revenue and expenditures per year. Imagine if every employee and creditor of this institution, in an act of inestimable generosity, decided to forego their salaries and billings for an entire year provided the institution dumped its revenues into its endowment to be used for student tuition discounts in future years. In other words, instead of $100,000,000 in expenditures, the institution banked $100,000,000 for its endowment with no overhead or costs for fundraising (even the fundraisers work for free!). How transformative would be the $100,000,000 endowment for student tuition discounting at the institution?

Following the guidance from the American Council of Education, the new funds will likely be untapped for several years due to the endowment strategies and spending rules in place in higher education. Likely, a “‘smoothing’ rule determines spending based on the multi-year value of an endowment” so the $100,000,000 gift of employees and creditors will impact endowment spending incrementally. Assuming a four-year smoothing rule, four years must pass before the endowment may be used fully to discount student tuition. Then, again according to endowment strategy and spending rules, most institutions “spend endowment earnings each year equal to about 4 to 5 percent of the value of their endowment.” Thus, after four years, the $100,000,000 endowment will yield approximately $4 million to $5 million in revenue to the college and university, clearly an impressive sum.

Nonetheless, in the four years following the sacrifices of the employees and creditors, the institution’s operations continue as usual. Expenditures increase at the average rate of 2% to 3% per year and the net price of attendance increases at the average rate of 4% per year for private nonprofit institutions. Overall, before the new endowment money matures, the annual expenditures of the college grow to more than $110 million dollars. Student net cost of attendance will have increased by nearly 17%, or $17 million dollars, if the institution’s revenue is 100% dependent on tuition and auxiliary services to students (room and board, etc.). In other words, the “large” $100,000,000 endowment covers two years of subsequent inflation for salary and services at the institution or only one year of subsequent inflation for students’ net cost of attendance at the institution.

Clearly, the institution will not be transformed by its enlarged endowment. Likewise, an entire sector of higher education will never be able to raise the funds necessary to dispel the melancholia of Moody’s Investors Service.

Nonetheless, the multi-year $100+ million fundraising campaign has become a staple of tuition-dependent college and university administration. Unlike our imaginary scenario, however, institutions shell out millions of dollars annually for fundraising and marketing services to fulfill endowment campaigns. If goals are met and the endowment yields $4 to $5 million per year in spending benefits to the college, after factoring in the costs of managing a fundraising campaign of that size, it likely takes ten or more years to break even after the start of a campaign. By then, we can project, the institution likely launches its latest $100 million fundraising campaign and the cycle begins anew. Between fundraising campaigns, as colleges increase tuition to offset the inflationary costs of operation, the student loan debt at graduation will continue to balloon, and soon exceed the current average of $30,000 per graduate.

We suggest that data science and artificial intelligence (AI) now offer a new hope for college administrators: contract external vendors of analytics and cloud infrastructure in order to continuously improve strategic planning and institutional effectiveness in higher education. The returns on investment for more efficient operations (e.g., unit cost savings) and greater student success (e.g., freshman retention) hold the promise of padding the institution’s bottom line the same year in which the contractors are engaged. Sustained improvements accrue more and more benefits (and revenue!) to the institution as students complete their college experience over four or five years.

College leadership must be mindful, nonetheless, that tuition-dependent, private non-profit colleges and universities must reasonably satisfy the expectations of credit and bond rating agencies. As we wish not to be liable to the least objection to credit rating agencies in our advocacy for data science and AI, we offer the following humble proposal to fund private, non-profit college and university endowments and put a permanent end to the blight of tuition-dependency in higher education.

A non-profit institution of higher education with a $100,000,000 annual budget requires a restricted endowment approaching $2.5 billion to operate in the black annually (at a conservative 4% spending rate). Very few institutions, public or private, have an endowment as large as is necessary to build a system of higher education free from the tyranny of tuition. To the contrary, the American Council of Education, in its report linked above, reports 54% of private, non-profit colleges and universities have endowments of $10 million or less — one-tenth of our imaginary scenario. Forbes magazine goes a step further and grades the financial fitness [original 2015 list] of 925 private non-profit institutions, assigning more than half (nearly 550) grades of C or D. In order to wipe out the scourge of tuition-dependency in the private, non-profit sector of higher education, several hundred institutions require $1 billion or more added to their endowments immediately.

A daunting task, to be sure, but not an impossible one. Forbes magazine also kindly provides [the original 2015 article] a list of billionaires in the United States. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (2014 fiscal year), private and public institutions of higher education likely had a total estimated $500 billion in endowed assets in 2015. On the other hand, the nation’s multibillionaires, the 348 individuals with $2 billion or more, had nearly $3 trillion ($3,000,000,000,000) of wealth to their names in 2015.

Why do endowment fundraisers pick the pockets of college graduates who earn an average salary of $120,000 per year when trillions of dollars can be had from a few hundred individuals on the Forbes billionaire list?

Two trillion dollars of endowed assets (a mere 67% of multibillionaires’ current wealth!) in 4% interest-bearing treasuries will yield $80 billion dollars ($80,000,000,000) per year in tuition discounts to undergraduates attending private, non-profit colleges and universities — enough to fund 800 colleges with $100,000,000 in expenditures! With federal and state grants in support, a private college education may be made free or, at least, loan-free for millions of American college students with those monies. Putting the woebegone, private non-profit institutions and the august members of the Forbes billionaire list in the same room is a matter of institutional effectiveness for higher education in America – pure and simple.

We by no means suggest the Forbes billionaire list should have their wealth forcibly redistributed to colleges and universities to advance the civic, technological and financial interests of the nation. We propose, rather, every year for the next six years, to hold an auction to sell naming rights and a seat on the Board of Trustees to every private, nonprofit institution on the Forbes list of financially unfit colleges and universities. The minimum bid for each institution will be $1,000,000,000 in fungible endowed assets restricted for student tuition. The billionaires will be able to outbid each other for the rights to add their name and take a seat on the board of the most prestigious institutions, thus ensuring that the institutions with the best names and most need receive the proper value for the board seats—as well as permanent association with a multibillionaire.

As we do not wish to cause undue hardship on the nation’s billionaires, no person ranking below Jerry Yang, #949 at $2 billion, will be accepted into the auction. For the 348 Americans whose wealth ranks at or above #949, $2 billion, attendance at the auction will be expected and a minimum charitable donation of $1 billion mandatory. Multibillionaires who are more thrifty or have their wealth locked in non-fungible assets, may flee the annual auctions by a petition of exemption to his or her peers and in a statement to the nation explaining his or her destitution. In the first year, the auctions will begin with the 348 institutions with the lowest financial fitness as calculated by Forbes in an effort to salvage very worthy institutions and reveal the true lovers of higher education reform in the United States.

In subsequent years, only those multibillionaires whose wealth remains above $2 billion will be re-invited. Thus, in year two, the 224 individuals ranking at or above Oprah Winfrey’s position at #603, $3 billion, will attend an auction of the next 224 financially unfit institutions on the Forbes list. In year three, the 143 individuals ranking at or above #418, $4 billion will attend, and so on. In the sixth year of the auctions, the 67 individuals who rank at or above Ralph Lauren, #193 or $7 billion, will bring the total number of possible auctions to approximately 975. Adjustments may be necessary each year to account for changes in the Forbes list of multibillionaires, but six rounds of auctions should prove sufficient to endow fully the 925 institutions on the Forbes list of financially unfit institutions. Over six years, an estimated $1.5 trillion will be re-allocated from a few hundred individuals to nearly 1,000 private, non-profit institutions that provide postsecondary education to three million of our nation’s young men and women.

An entire sector of nonprofit higher education will become tuition-independent, well-endowed and free to its students before our nation runs out of multibillionaires. In return, the nation’s multibillionaires will be able to secure their legacies for philanthropy by buying naming rights to the colleges and endowments of their choice (a free market principle!).

For instance, what college-bound child would not consider applying to Bill Gates’s Sacred Heart University (#405) or Michael Bloomberg’s Crown College (#819). The Savannah College of Art and Design (#846) Directed by George Lucas, or David Geffen Presents the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design (#757), will attract and educate promising young film directors and producers. A few multibillionaires may use the opportunity to polish their reputations, such as the Donald Sterling’s Sterling College (#703) or, to show bygones-are-bygones among loved ones, like Warren Buffett’s Holy Family University (#737). Still others may want to double down on their provincialism, Robert Kraft’s New England College (#805) or Paul Allen’s Seattle University (#665). The pairings of multibillionaires to tuition-dependent private, nonprofit institutions are literally almost limitless and afford the multibillionaires the market freedom to endow the higher education institution best-suited to their vanity.

In addition, to break the high drama of philanthropy during the auction, we imagine there will be some lighter, comical moments of entertainment. Imagine H. Ross Perot, Sr.’s face when Pat Choate leans over to inform him Notre Dame College (#876) [sadly, now dissolved] is not this Notre Dame college. Other multibillionaires will snicker after Carl Icahn acquires the rights to D’Youville College (#91) — Carl, I-Canned-You-Ville College — or after the emcee announces Phil Knight Rider University (#817). Credit and bond rating agencies will debate whether Peter Thiel’s Benedictine University (#449) or Charles Koch’s Roosevelt University (#771) prove to be workable matches. On the other hand, Rupert Murdoch Our Lady of the Lake University (#433) may bring pleasure to the mind’s eye. Lastly, we can picture the look on Meg Whitman’s face when she is stuck with Urbana University (#925), the worst ranking college on the Forbes list, as if Hewlett-Packard Enterprises does not give her migraines already.

It is quite possible, after the private nonprofit sector has been freed from the bondage of tuition dependency, the fifty or so multibillionaires with $9 billion of wealth and more will have enough remaining to endow the fifty public university systems as well. A poor sap like Eric Schmidt (#137, $9 billion) of course will have to accept a token state like Idaho or Wyoming. On the other hand, the two Larrys, Ellison (33, $72.7 billion) and Page (#19, $29.7 billion) might well get into a bidding war over the naming rights to the pearl of U.S. higher education, the University of California System. The Oracle of Omaha (#2, $72.7 billion) could easily acquire the naming rights to the University of Nebraska System and have enough wealth left over to poach the University of Oklahoma system from his neighbor, Harold Hamm. Not to be outdone by his fellow Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg (#16, $33.4 billion), the world’s richest man, Bill Gates, may well want to gain the naming rights in Massachusetts to honor of his wife: The University of Melinda System.

In any case, after the private nonprofit sector auctions are completed, an additional $500 billion in endowment funds may be available for allocations from the wealthiest fifty or so Americans to the endowments of the public university systems. By the end of the auctions, around fifty multibillionaires will be able to notch a handful of private institutions and a public university system on their philanthropic bedposts, securing their own personal sandbox for disruptive innovation and learning analytics.

But, we have too long digressed and must return to our subject. The advantages of this proposal are obvious and many, as well as of the highest importance.

First, as we observed, the scourge of tuition dependency at private, nonprofit higher education institutions will be ended in the United States. No longer will the nation be overrun with the literature and advertisements of tuition-dependent colleges and universities fishing for first-time, full-time freshmen every fall.

Secondly, an undergraduate education from the nation’s premier private, nonprofit colleges and universities will be free or nearly free.

Thirdly, the deep gratitude felt by young Americans for a free college education will end the recent unrest on college campuses. Moreover, as students will not be treated as customers anymore, colleges and universities will no longer be responsive to student demands as if their college budgets depended on it.

Fourthly, the student loan crisis will gradually subside as college education becomes more affordable for those who demonstrate college preparedness. The six-year implementation plan astutely allows the financial industry to deliberately redirect its loan programs from lifelong debt peonage for college graduates to more worthy loan practices like home ownership and small business startup loans for college graduates.

Fifthly, and here we speculate a little, the U.S. higher education system will be inextricably bound to Wall Street interests and the capitalist financial system. Colleges will have a deep financial interest in the learning outcomes of their graduates whose productivity and entrepreneurialism (rather than taxes) will keep college endowments and budgets growing ever larger.

Sixthly, we would be remiss if we did not note the erosion of wealth inequality in the United States through the scheme of college endowment auctions to multibillionaires. The practice of college endowment auctions may continue in future years to guarantee that the nation’s wealth is continually re-invested in the college education of the nation’s best and brightest citizens who have a lifetime of opportunity and inventiveness ahead of them.

Many other advantages we might enumerate if time permitted. On the other hand, we can think of not one objection.

We profess, in the sincerity of our hearts, we have not the least financial interest in endeavoring to promote this necessary work other than to afford college administrators the free time to focus on academic programming and institutional effectiveness, as opposed to fundraising. Having no further motive other than the public good of our country, we submit our proposal to advance private nonprofit higher education institutions in America, to provide for a free college education to our young citizens, to relieve disadvantaged students of the burden of life-long college loan debt, and to give some pleasure to our nation’s multibillionaires.

***

Note: The original post from Feb. 6, 2016 is here and other anniversary posts here. The above has been edited with new links and other text to update broken links or clarity. The original links from 2016 are retained or reestablished when possible.

His influential revolutionary pamphlet, Common Sense, recently reached the 250th anniversary of its first publication. As an article in the New York Times makes evident, Paine as a political thinker remains obscure, while his frequent detractors from John Adams (1819) to Bernard Bailyn (1990) have enjoyed the last laugh in respectable circles.2 Worst of all, the populist conservative right has embraced Paine more so than any other faction in current American politics—despite their evident lack of “republican virtue.”

American historians once celebrated the Founding Fathers for their intellectual contributions to state and federal constitutions. These written constitutions, however, have proven to be feeble defenses against the ideologies of original intent and the unitary executive currently resurrecting monarchy in the American states. The former, original intent, is an affront to the rights of future generations while the latter, unitary executive, is an insult to the people as the “first moving power” of a republic.

Below, I tried to argue that Thomas Paine accomplished a far more significant outcome than a state or federal constitution: he wrote the constitution of the revolutionary American people. John Adams long ago noted that no one had as much influence on the culture and thought of Americans in the first decades of the American republic—the other Founding Fathers were merely interlopers in the “Age of Paine.” One hopes, the Age of Paine endures as long as long as Americans remain true to their revolutionary constitution rooted in the pages of Common Sense.

The Age of Paine, Part I

“Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia, and Africa, have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O, [America]! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.” Thomas Paine, 1776.3

“I know not whether any Man in the World has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty years than Tom Paine. There can be no severer Satyr on the Age... Call it then the Age of Paine.” John Adams, 1805.4

“Time makes more converts than reason.” Thomas Paine, 1776.5

Mourned in person by “only a handful” of Americans at his passing in 1809, Thomas Paine’s legacy dimmed soon after his death and he became a neglected founding father.6 Political and literary obscurity enveloped Paine beginning in the early 1800s, first eclipsed by the witty counter-revolutionary subversions of John Adams and his ilk, thereafter perpetuated by highbrow contempt for the “plebeian pamphleteer.” The revolutionary father who founded an age barely registers in the prodigious annual production of biographies on the Founding Fathers of the United States. As a result, U.S. historians and political theorists largely have left unexamined the character and longevity of the Age of Paine.

The spirit of an age perpetuates itself in the reproduction of ideological offspring – and no founding father of the American Revolution seeded as many intellectual and cultural progeny as Thomas Paine. His pamphlets and books were the most widely read works in America, Great Britain, and Ireland, second only to the Bible in early modern readership at the end of the eighteenth century.7 To obtain a true measure for the significance of Paine as a founding father, historians must read the constitution of the American people – not the constitution of the American government – to chart the course of the Age of Paine, or to rediscover the timelessness of his clarion call for an age that has yet to reach the height of its ascendancy.

Absent in His Own Age

Respect for the revolutionary Paine – the author of Common Sense and The American Crisis, the diplomat who secured French funds for the American Revolution, the first intellectual architect of thirteen independent and united colonies – paled in comparison to the founding fathers who later aspired to be the first statesmen of his Age. As comparison, the aristocratic John Adams, whose antipathy for Paine is well-known, crested for much of the nineteenth century, advanced in part by his own prodigious ambition and publications, then sustained by those of his descendants.8 While interest in all founding fathers generally increased in U.S. history, particularly after the Centennial International Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia, the canon of America’s founding fathers rarely features Thomas Paine.9

Figure 1 | References to the Founding Fathers in American Literature, 1776-2020

The relative significance of Thomas Paine was unequaled by most founding fathers in the first thirty years of the American republic, 1790 and 1820. Subsequently, references to Thomas Paine in American literature reached a nadir in the early 1980s, when English-language publications mentioned him half as often as the next closest founding father, Alexander Hamilton, the short-lived foreign-born Secretary of the Treasury whose portrait graces the ten dollar bill. Time may have been favorable to the satyr of revolutionary events at the end of the Enlightenment, but Memory relegated the man to brief passages in works on eighteenth-century transatlantic history.

The enduring obscurity of Thomas Paine the Founding Father surely contributes to the security of those invested in prejudices and prepossessions expressed by John Adams in 1805. Foremost among those prejudices is the weight afforded to the framing of state constitutions. While not a drafter, Paine cast his support to the most democratic, but ill-fated, unicameral government of the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776. Adams, on the other hand, crafted the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 that established a bicameral legislature, an executive branch, and an independent judicial court - a model for the U.S. Constitution. John Adams, an advocate of monarchy and hereditary officeholders, ironically became the more revered American revolutionary father in the Age of Paine.10

During the mid-1980s intellectuals and academics re-discovered the writings and thought of Thomas Paine, to an extent. Inaugurated by the publication of Eric Foner’s Thomas Paine and Revolutionary America (1976), Paine re-emerged in studies of the relationship “between a particular individual and his times” (iii). Similarly focused on Paine’s influence on his own time, scholars subsequently analyzed his writings for their linguistic or rhetorical flourishes in “the common style,” with “commonalities,” by “the sharpened quill,” or for their posture as “our” common sense.11

Sean Wilentz’s review from nearly two decades ago exemplifies how historians welcomed Paine back into the pantheon of Founding Fathers, retaining Adams’ wary regard for the populist implications of his radical ideology: “a conservative revolutionary – a foe of high taxes and lavish government expenditures, and a prophet of unfettered American free enterprise, his anti-Christian religious writings either forgiven or forgotten.”12 In short, Paine regained his citizenship in U.S. History as a man of his revolutionary time, but not his stature as the agitator of a new, eponymous Age.

The Constitution of an American People

The constitution of a government, however, is derivative of the people constituting said government. In a manner of speaking, then, we are not free to escape, or forget, the ideology of common sense that gave birth to the constitutions of the American states. The pamphleteer who published Common Sense in January, 1776, produced an indelible sensibility for liberty that framed the discourse and habitus of American freedom codified in its state and federal governments.13 The Age of Paine originates in four short chapters, each erecting a republican pillar in the mind of nearly every literate American adult in the thirteen colonies, to form “a single simple line” to the spirit of the Revolution—and a revolutionary age.

The first chapter of Common Sense is easily misread as a discourse on the origin and design of government and the formation of the English constitution, as the title heading suggests.14 To the contrary, Paine offers concise remarks on the origin and design of society that engendered the constitution of an American people. In that endeavor, he stands alone as an Enlightenment philosopher who identified the frontier as a composite space, or intermediate stage, between the severity of Nature and the restraining civility of government. Against European writers who “confounded society and government,” he defines frontier society as the origin and the basis for human freedom and security.15

In the British colonies, Paine discovered, Nature provides no support to individual liberty. The “noble savage,” who so enamored the imagination of Europeans, would find himself “unequal to his wants, and his mind so unfitted for perpetual solitude...” that he is soon driven from his communion with Nature. Robinson Crusoe, rather than rebuilding his cruel society of distinctions anew, “might labour out of the common period of life without accomplishing anything...[while] every different want would call him a different way.” Nature was no idyllic paradise in which the fecundity of the land or beasts offered assistance and comfort to “one man,” but an intolerable “wilderness” in which disease and misfortune would likely “reduce him to a state in which he might rather be said to perish than to die.” Nature, a festering chaos, sequestered humankind in destitution.

No wonder, then, as Paine sardonically asserts, “In this state of natural liberty, society will be [the] first thought” of a small band of persons “unconnected with the rest” of the world. The nascent community, “produced by [its] wants,” unites in mutualism to provide “assistance and relief of [one] another,” gathers under stately trees “to deliberate on public matters,” and establishes “regulations... enforced by no other penalty than public disesteem.” The frontier society’s distinguishing characteristics are the satisfaction of wants, the promotion of happiness, the unification of affections, and the encouragement of social and economic intercourse: conditions colonial Americans had come to understand as their natural rights.

Paine, however, rejected utopian notions of a stateless, anarchic civil society governed by altruistic assemblies. The “impulses of conscience” are not “clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed,” nor does “moral virtue... govern the world.” Society does not originate in our right judgments or social contracts; society is the first production of our wants and the most ancient instrument to array our desires. As the frontier society succeeds in mastering the difficulties that first united solitary individuals in “common cause,” as the size of the colony increases in population and complexity, and as distance separates community members from one another, the frontier society adopts an elected and well-devised government to represent the interests of the electors and “the constitution of the people,” to which all members owe their freedom and security.

Government, however, as “a necessary evil,” contains an inherent threat: the interests of the elected or the constitution of the government may corrupt the nation and sustain itself under false “pride and prejudice.” The elected in government are susceptible to corruption and the power that “has the most weight” ultimately governs: “the first moving power will at last have its way, and what it wants in speed is supplied by time.” Thus, while society “encourages intercourse” that leads to the formation of government, government may become an instrument to “createst distinctions” for the elected.

Chapter two, then, embarks on an examination of the means by which to secure the electors, “the people,” as the first moving power of a republican (small r!), or a self-governing, form of government. The title of the chapter, of course, suggests an entirely different agenda: “Of Monarchy and Hereditary Succession.” What unfolds, notably, is the first study of political hegemony to set forth a framework to “engross the commons” in the formation of an American republic. Paine suggest three basic criteria for an elected government to remain affixed to the “people” as its first moving power, that: 1) the concept of equality harbor no distinction between the electors and the elected; 2) no systems of sinecures, luxury, taxation, or favoritism be established to despoil social and economic intercourse, or the common cause, of the people; and 3) the right of election and the power of self-governance is held by future generations no less than past generations.

“[Hu]mankind being originally equals in the order of creation,”“ Paine asserts to begin his disquisition on republican hegemony, “”the equality could only be destroyed by some subsequent circumstance.”“ The circumstance, surprisingly, is not riches or oppression, “often the consequence” of inequality. The equality of humankind is subverted by the negotiated consent of the governed, that is, by recognition of a formal distinction between the elected and the electors, such as “kings and subjects.” In reference to monarchy, the people must “ask a king” to become judge and military leader of its people from an interest to become “like all the nations.” To remain free of tyranny, then, a republican people wholly owe their constitution to the recognition that no artificial distinction, no inequality, arise among governors and governed.

While a kingship is formed in the asking, Paine demonstrates that an elaborate system of distinctions and monopoly perpetuates undemocratic rule in consent. In an extended biblical reference to the story of Samuel in the Old Testament, Paine outlines how a political order of distinction debauches the common cause and manufactures the consent of subjects. The alternative, to remain a republic, the people must refuse the impressment of their sons in military service and the enlistment of their daughters in the “confectionaries” of luxury. The people hold title to “even the best” of their fields and their seed without threat of seizure but, in return, they must reject even the smallest sinecure, bribery, corruption, and favoritism of a government. In short, the constitution of a republic rests in the will of its people to sustain intercourse without distinction and without monopolies formed by government.

Lastly, despite appearances, the foundation of freedom is not set in the biblical past; the promise of liberty is properly found in future generations. The hereditary distinction between kings and subjects originates in only one of three ways: “by lot, by election, or by usurpation.” Paine dismisses usurpation as a barbarism that establishes no precedent of right for the governors, for “no man will be so hardy as to defend it.” A distinction between king and subjects established by lot secures only the right of lot to determine who rules. Likewise, election merely endorses the precedent of the right of election for future generations. In a republic, the civic future is ever pregnant with the frontier past.

The constitution of a government, Paine suggests throughout his meditation on monarchy and hereditary succession, rests entirely in the ability of its people to remain ever equal, individuals united in common cause and intercourse: virtuous. A republican people falter to the extent that each surrenders the right to self-governance and common cause, or that each seeks others to judge or to fight battles, or that each seeks to abridge the rights of future generations. Conversely, future generations succumb to the vice of their ancestors to the extent that any accept honorific titles of distinction or inheritance, or that any submit to involuntary military service or the manufacture of luxuriant objects, or that any concede the freedom of the past to be superior to the freedom in the future. Without equality, there is no common cause; without common cause, there is no intercourse; without intercourse, there is no individuality; “when republican virtue fails, slavery ensues.”

Paine then challenges the American people to reconstitute themselves as a free people with a pointed question: “Why is the constitution of England sickly, but because monarchy hath poisoned the republic, the crown hath engrossed the commons?”

End of Part I...

Start at Part 1 here.

Part 2 continues below.

Epilogue | The Inequality of Honors | Part 2

The Evils Sought to Be Remedied Are Inherent in These Organs, and Intrinsic to Their Functioning

At first blush, the preceding description of Middle Atlantic University may seem like a gross oversimplification that fails to capture the realities of higher education administration, financing, and instruction. The analysis, however, reflects the historic transformation of higher education finance since 1976. The tuition discount rate for entering freshmen at private nonprofit institutions has incrementally grown to fifty percent over the past forty years. At the same time, the federally-guaranteed student loans have become the single largest source of financial aid for college students. The thought experiment in effect represents how the moral philosophy of institutional autonomy exploits the “mixed” system of higher education finance to create synergies between institutional tuition discounting, honors curriculum, freshman attrition, federally-guaranteed student loans, and academic freedom that favor the provision of a free higher education for future members of America’s ruling class.

On the one hand, none of this is possible without a federal system of grants and student loans for “needy” and nonhonors students who must have the funds to pay the list price of tuition, or a substantial percentage of it, in order to create a “higher education market.” One of the truisms of American higher education is that colleges are recession-proof—meaning that they don’t suffer enrollment downturns during contractions in the national economy as a whole. What is true of college enrollments is equally true of tuition revenue—and the student loan system that makes the higher education market possible. As seen in Figure 18 below, the annual borrowing by college students and their parents (PLUS loans) peaked in the years following the Great Recession from 2007 to 2009. The slow recovery in the economy encouraged students to enroll, and borrow money, for college credits and degree programs. Only recently has the total annual federal loans come down to levels not seen since the middle of the most recent U.S. recession.

Figure 18 | Annual Federal Loans Borrowed by Academic Year (2018 Constant Dollars)

Consequently, as seen in the data tracked by the Board of Governors of the U.S. Federal Reserve System (Figure 19 below), the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009 (shaded area) does not register as an economic event for the accumulation of college student loan debt by Americans. The trendline for outstanding college student loans increased more or less linearly—recession proof—over the past 13 years. The fact that college attendance is recession proof makes it a lucrative capital market given the federal government’s guarantee and subsidy program. When other capital markets like real estate, stocks, etc., are suffering from an economic downturn, the college student loan market functions as a federal public subsidy to both the financial industry and higher education institutions. And, yet, all of this college student debt—over $1.6 trillion dollars in 2019—does not measure the cost of higher education directly provided to the borrowers during their years of attendance. It measures the tuition subsidies that “needy” college students are required to pay out of their future incomes so that the institutions are able to sustain elite functions that offer full scholarships and free higher education to the “academically prepared” students that the colleges want to enroll each year. In short, it is a system of regressive taxation to make higher education free for those that the autonomous colleges and their faculties deem worthy of the elite functions of higher education designed to shape the mind and character of the American ruling class—as Martin Trow described the purpose of institutional autonomy.

Figure 19 | Outstanding Student Loans Owned and Securitized by Quarter, 2006 to 2019

On the other hand, free education for the elites requires that trustees, administrators and faculty at the individual institutions amicably coexist at least to the extent that federal funds collected on behalf of “needy” students can be reallocated to the instructional expenditures for honors students, on full-tuition scholarships, designated for initiation into the American ruling class. One study recently found that sixty percent of the nonprofit public and private undergraduate institutions in the country offer an honors curriculum through a program or a college: “honors curricula campus-wide is now pervasive in American higher education.”[i] To the extent that these honors programs and colleges are funded without external resources (e.g., endowments), the system plays a shell game with the tuition revenue collected by institutions on behalf of “needy” students in order to invest in the instructional costs for students who “merit” steep tuition discounts to attend elite programs or honors colleges. It is, as Veblen warned, an instrumentalization of higher education for “the breeding of a commercial aristocracy” for the culture of business enterprise in the United States.

Remarkably, the inequity of honors programs is an open secret on the websites and federal data reported by America’s higher education institutions that easily may be uncovered by students and stakeholders. For instance, in our imaginary example, Middle Atlantic University’s own marketing pamphlets and website betray the evident difference in enthusiasm with which the college greets an honors student in comparison to a nonhonors student based on nothing more than the presumption of academic preparedness and eligibility (1300 on the SAT or 25 on the ACT).

Middle Atlantic University promotes its annual full-tuition scholarship for an honors-eligible student who designates Middle Atlantic University as his or her first choice institution on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. The scholarship recipients are welcomed to the honors and merit fellowship program which offers intimate classes of twenty or fewer students taught by faculty who lead thoughtful discussions to expand students’ academic horizons. The honors student also is afforded a study abroad opportunity and a faculty mentor for undergraduate research for a thesis paper in a major—a significant accomplishment for graduate school consideration. The extra-curricular benefits of the fellowship include visits to local cultural events and destinations, capped with an annual Middle Atlantic University honors conference at which the student may meet notable academics and luminaries. Academically and socially, the honors program immerses its students in a unique intellectual community that promises ample opportunities for personal growth.

In contrast, Middle Atlantic University also educates the nonhonors, or marginal, student whose family earns $0-$30,000 but somehow scrapes together the $24,000 to cover the net price of attendance at Middle Atlantic University.[ii] At that cost, the nonhonors student will likely be greeted by a few of the 400 adjunct or part-time faculty members since many of the 250 full-time professors dedicate time to honors, upper-division and graduate degree courses. In lieu of a full-time professor fostering a unique intellectual community, Middle Atlantic University provides the nonhonors student a success coach assigned to the student for their entire academic career. This versatile success coach provides the nonhonors student whatever is needed—academic counseling, career counseling, the campus calendar of events, or financial aid advising. In addition, if the nonhonors student enrolls in the optional first year seminar, he or she will be mentored by faculty and library personnel who foster student learning—“an imperfect substitute” for a stimulating intellectual community.

Middle Atlantic University’s marketing materials by themselves reveal that its honors students receive coveted annual full-tuition scholarships and pay $0 per credit hour for their college education. At the same time, the federal data reveal that the nonhonors students pay nearly $800 per credit hour ($24,000 divided by 30 credits) to attend college. Whereas Middle Atlantic University provides a complete financial plan and the funds for the honors student to attend college for free, the nonhonors student is met with a success coach to help the student construct a financial plan to fund education—after enrollment. How, then, does Middle Atlantic University pay the per credit hour costs for the honors student’s education? In the most recent finance report to the federal government, Middle Atlantic University also reported that almost 99% of its scholarships are unfunded ($50 million), while only 1% are funded ($500,000). This means that the scholarships provided to honors students are not paid by a college endowment; most likely they come directly out of the annual operating budget. Since Middle Atlantic University, like other tuition-dependent institutions, derives most of its revenue from tuition, the tuition revenue collected from nonhonors students must cover most of the costs for the academic and nonacademic services delivered to both the honors students and the nonhonors students.

One of the more blatant flaws in the economic models for the private benefits from higher education mistakenly presumes that individual students receive a quantity of higher learning that increases future earnings equivalent to the tuition paid to a college or university. Firstly, economic theorists like Michael Tierney naively equated the higher costs associated with the premier private colleges with higher quality education, as if there is a direct relationship between tuition and quality. Secondly, he and his colleagues similarly assumed that each student pays tuition in a market exchange that delivers an equivalent value in higher education. Thirdly, the higher education scholars and economists claim that the private benefits of college are measurable by the average income earned by a college graduate as compared to a high school graduate. As Andre Daniere acknowledged, economists have no means of measuring a quantum of higher learning in order to fully grasp the economic relationship between tuition paid and expected earnings that is supposed to be the basis for a rational calculus about higher education attainment. In fact, there is no direct relationship between the net price of attendance for an individual student and the quality of higher education that a student receives.

Presumably, public colleges and universities will not disband their institutes of higher education any sooner than private institutions will abolish their boards of trustees in order to build a new American system of higher education from the ground up. Therefore, the college students—and their families—who find themselves forced to take out federal student loans or accept federal grants to pay for college tuition, must seek more accountability from the individual institutions they attend as American citizens and taxpayers. As Thomas R. McConnell wrote, the autonomy of colleges and universities “is by no means absolute.” The social injustice inherent to elite programs of higher education, and intrinsic to their autonomous functioning, may be exposed by accountability. To this end, every college student who receives federal grant and student loan aid should receive a verifiable accounting from the institution on how those tuition dollars were spent directly on his or her own higher education—not an aggregate or average summary of instructional expenditures for the institution, but a student-record level accounting of revenue generated per credit hour enrolled from each student and student-record level accounting of academic and non-academic expenditures per credit hour enrolled for each student.

If the institution has an honors program or college, student governments or student officials may request that the institution publicly account for the annual tuition revenue (less discounts) collected from its honors students and the annual institutional expenditures for recruitment and instruction in the honors program. Alternatively, where no honors program exists, every institution may be asked to account for the distribution of institutional aid to students, including the number of students attending on full scholarships and whether those scholarships are funded by endowments or with general funds (or tuition revenue). Academic programs, honors or otherwise, that have a high density of students with substantial tuition discounts may also be asked to account for how they financially cover academic expenditures—from revenue reallocated from the tuition-paying students, research grants, or from auxiliary enterprises.

These and other measures of accountability will bring to light the misconceptions in the neoliberal model of higher education administration and financing in America. It may also subject higher education executives and faculty to greater public scrutiny regarding the decisions they have made to reallocate tuition revenue collected from federal student loans, state grants, and direct payments from students to the subsidization of an institution’s elite functions to shape the mind and character of future members of the ruling class of the United States. Only then, perhaps, it may become possible to hope that state and federal legislators will reconsider the economic injustice done by market principles based on the moral philosophy of institutional autonomy and will restructure the “mixed” system of finance for college-goers to address the social inequality perpetuated by the American system of higher education.

[i] Richard I. Scott, Patricia J. Smith, and Andrew J. Cognard-Black, “Demography of Honors: The Census of U.S. Honors Programs and Colleges,” Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council (2017), Online Archive, 548, available at htttp://digitalcommons.unl.edu/nchcjournal/548.

[ii] The net price of attendance includes tuition and fees, costs of books and supplies, room and board, and other expenses while attending a college.

“An erudite historical study and analysis, ‘Honors of Inequality: How Colleges Work for Some’ is enhanced for academia with the inclusion of illustrations, an informative Prologue (Autonomy Is By No Means Absolute), an Epilogue (The Inequality of Honors), twenty-six pages of endnotes, an eight page Select Bibliography, and a four page Index. A meticulously presented work of impressively original scholarship, ‘Honors of Inequality: How Colleges Work for Some’ is an extraordinary and unreservedly recommended addition to college and university library Education History collections and supplemental curriculum lists.” (Midwest Book Review, May 2020)

The book as a whole exposes how conservative ideology became a hegemonic force in the national discourse on higher education from the 1960s to the 1990s. Following the Truman Commission and systematization of higher education up to 1960 (i.e., the California Master Plan), a group of higher education scholars mobilized to reassert the priority of the elite function (paradigm) over the popular function (democratic) of higher education in America.

Surprisingly, the revolution in higher education administrative culture and financing goes largely unrecognized or unacknowledged by its most vocal critics. Far too many romanticize higher education as an engine of “social and economic mobility” without taking into account how the federal and state funding of higher education is allocated to perpetuate inequality between “prepared”and “unprepared” college students.

Epilogue | The Inequality of Honors | Part 1

“As will be seen from the above explication of details and circumstances, such practicable measures as have hitherto been offered as a corrective to this sterilization of the universities by business principles, amount to a surrender by these institutions to the enemies of learning, and a proposal to replace them with an imperfect substitute. That it should so be necessary to relinquish the universities, as a means to the pursuit of knowledge, and to replace them with a second-best, is due…to the course of policy (necessarily) pursued by the executive officers placed in control of academic affairs; and the character of policy so pursued follows unavoidably from the dependence of the executive on a businesslike governing board, backed by a businesslike popular clamor, on the one hand, from his being (necessarily) vested, in effect, with arbitrary power of use and abuse within the academic community, on the other hand. It follows, therefore, also that no remedy or corrective can be contrived that will have anything more than a transient palliative effect, so long as these conditions that create the difficulty are allowed to remain in force…All that is required is the abolition of the academic executive and of the governing board. Anything short of this heroic remedy is bound to fail, because the evils sought to be remedied are inherent in these organs, and intrinsic to their functioning.” | Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America (1917), 201–02

Thorstein Veblen was unequivocal in his denunciation of governing boards of trustees and the academic executives that administer institutions of higher learning like business enterprises. He characterized the boards and executive offices as “organs” with “intrinsic” functions anathema to the host university and its pursuit of knowledge. He cautioned that there was no meaningful way to mollify or remedy the pernicious influence of commonsense business principles on the traditional functions of a university. Veblen therefore asserted that the only solution to the natural antagonisms between business enterprise and higher learning was “the abolition of the academic executive and of the governing board” that constituted the arbitrary power “within the academic community.” Additionally, the extracurricular collegial activities, vocational and professional schools, and the undergraduate colleges had to be excised from the universities (i.e., graduate colleges) to further defend higher learning from practical and popular uses of the university.

By contrast, the foundational texts of contemporary higher education scholarship celebrate boards of trustees as the linchpins of a uniquely American system of higher education rooted in the moral philosophy of institutional autonomy. Against external agencies, the boards and their handpicked executives assume near total responsibility for the college or university to protect the institutions from the deleterious outcomes originating in system coordination and state control. The board of trustees and their administrative executives assume substantive and procedural autonomy for the mission and management of the institutions and, in return, they guarantee that the academic community will demonstrate some level of accountability to external stakeholders in the larger society. Internally, (wise) boards of trustees cede control to the faculty and recognize accountability as a formal performance of meaning-making to meet the popular expectations of a democratic state. The institutional autonomy rooted to the role of the boards thus lends local administration and faculty the opportunity to determine to what degree the elite functions yield to mass and universal functions of higher education at each particular college and university.

A key difference underlying the judgment for or against boards of trustees in American higher education boils down to the concept of the elite functions of universities. For Veblen, the elite functions of universities are higher learning and the pursuit of knowledge. The graduate colleges must be isolated from the practical, professional, and popular functions of higher education in order to maintain the mission of pure research. Institutions of higher learning must then sink or swim based on their native ability to attract funding and students to sustain their research programs. In contrast, for higher education scholars, the elite functions of higher education are the preparation and reproduction of the American ruling class—including the tenured faculty. This concept of elite functions encompasses the cultivation of societal business and political leaders who subsequently make up a majority of seats on college and university boards of trustees. By recruiting the “academically prepared” students who qualify for the “meritocracy,” elite functions hold priority over mass and universal principles at the institutional level. To this end, the trustees, administrative executives and faculty jointly exercise the academic power (i.e., “shared governance”) to designate a small group of applicants for initiation into the elite functions that “shape the mind and character of the ruling class,” while sorting the rest of the applicants into different categories of training for entry into the professional, technical, and pliable workforces serviceable to the ruling class.

Sterilization of the Universities by Business Principles

Much of what Americans and American policymakers think they know about higher education and its administration is rooted in the anti-intellectual tradition in American life. Since the late 1950s, opponents of state-coordinated higher education have adopted the arguments of neoliberal theorists who proposed that public higher education must be administered by the same commonsense principles in private higher education. Funded by corporate and conservative (or anti-New Deal) think tanks, scholars of higher education advanced the partisan arguments of anti-intellectualism and institutional autonomy (“free enterprise”) to undermine the advances made by statewide institutional research and coordination during the 1950s. These early works on the public administration of public colleges and universities became the seminal texts for the institutes of higher education that have defined higher education as a field of study and as a graduate discipline.

The transposed spirit of anti-intellectualism gave birth to the moral philosophy of institutional autonomy—a significant historical marker for the hegemonic culture of business enterprise in higher education. The moral philosophy of institutional autonomy sets down prescriptive tenets that define what is possible for the administration of higher education in American society and, more broadly, democratic societies in general. A featured priority of this ideology is that each and every institution is unique and incommensurable with every other college in the universe of higher education. As such, this branch of neoliberalism became the prevailing paradigm in higher education scholarship that undermined the progressive articulation of a social science of higher education for democratic societies.

As is readily apparent from even a cursory reading of the original texts on the autonomy of public institutions, higher education scholarship has been “an imperfect substitute” for the kind of higher learning that routinely takes place in the traditional disciplines. This line of scholarship became the leading purveyor for the principles embodied by business enterprise, the boards of trustees, and academic administration. Dependent on research funding from the Rockefeller Brothers, Esso Foundation, Ford Foundation, and Carnegie Corporation for Higher Education, the first institutes of higher education at the nation’s public flagship universities produced scholarship rooted in reactionary politics designed to thwart New Deal-style government programs that sought to make higher education more serviceable to American democracy as envisioned by the Truman Commission. This is to say, the “enemies” (to use Veblen’s term) of higher learning enlisted the schoolmasters in the vocational schools—specifically, the education colleges—to chart a course for state and national policies that girded the arbitrary authority of local officials at American colleges and universities against the public interest of the states and nation.

Fundamentally, higher education scholarship offers a paralyzing regard for the immense complexity of higher education. Its “worldly wisdom” states that higher education must be administered by none other than the local executives who best know each college’s history and mission. This emphasis on cybernetic power, or local control, has corrupted the traditional notion of academic freedom as an organizing principle for higher learning into a partisan defense of the corporate privilege of the faculty. Most importantly, college students have suffered the brunt of the consequences arising from the neoliberal intervention into higher education—a neutralization of students’ academic freedom, a rejection of reforms to higher education for American democracy, and ultimately a burden to America’s youth who must accept a lifetime of student loan debt in exchange for a college degree.

As the putative source of expertise and research on national, state, and institutional policies, it is not hyperbole to say that scholars of high education have had a more pernicious influence on the direction of the American system of higher education during the past sixty years than all the boards of trustees at private and public colleges combined. Whereas the boards and academic executives have lasting and irreversible impacts on particular institutions, the “propagandist intrigue” (Veblen) of policy analysis informs (or creates, per Birnbaum) the cultural, political, economic and academic environments in which local executives administer higher education institutions. The institutes of higher education are purveyors of an intellectually bankrupt ideology rooted in the principles of business enterprise operative under the guise of a moral philosophy of institutional autonomy. Moreover, as the foregoing has shown, higher education scholars have violated the public trust and the sanctity of higher learning at publicly-supported colleges and universities in the United States—they have deflected national efforts to transform higher education for American democracy and deferred scientific studies about why colleges work for some students, but not others, in our national system of colleges and universities.

Regrettably, any reform aside from a scientific revolution—that is, the adoption of a scientific paradigm for higher education scholarship—will have a “transient palliative effect” on the course of American higher education. Possibly, as Veblen once said of college boards of trustees, any action short of the “heroic remedy” to disband the institutes of higher education and furlough scholars of higher education at the flagship public institutions—University of California, Berkeley, University of Georgia, Pennsylvania State University, University of Michigan, and Indiana University, to start—will fail to eradicate the propagandist intrigue inherent to these “second-best” enterprises. No industry (or public administration) can be entrusted with the responsibility to study its optimal regulatory environment and dictate its accountability regime to the American people and their democratic governments. This is no less true for higher education than in other industries or for other functions of public administration.

Of course, a romantic call to abolish the institutes of higher education and to furlough tenured faculty rightly will be decried as an affront to academic freedom, by any definition, and resisted with the utmost fervor. It goes without saying, any effort to disband the institutes of higher education is no less fantastical, and no more possible of happening, than the proposal that colleges abolish their boards of trustees and academic executives, as Veblen recommended, or that radical academic faculty and students purge administrators from higher education, as Paul Goodman advocated in the early 1960s. In fact, this kind of nonsensical call to action for transcendence (apropos twentieth-century higher education scholars) deflects from a more pertinent question at hand: how can former, current, and future college-goers hope to redress the gross inequities produced by the American system of higher education and its federal financial aid system?

The Course of Policy Pursued by the Executive Officers Placed in Control of Academic Affairs

My work endeavored to bring to light several key ideological principles of twentieth-century scholarship that has crippled policymaking and fostered social injustice in the American system of the higher education over the past sixty years. The “mixed” system of higher education in America has been distorted in a way that exploits its mass and universal functions to financially subsidize the elite functions that conservative faculty, the academic executives, and the boards of trustees regard as the pith and prestige of their institutions. To wit: The policy analysis and literature produced by the institutes and think tanks of higher education have resulted in a system of public financing for American higher education that is nothing less than a regressive system of taxation on less wealthy citizens to support the selection and preparation of more wealthy citizens for integration into the ruling class of the nation.

In addition to the foregoing historical analysis of higher education scholarship in the late twentieth century, I have reached this conclusion as an institutional researcher who had access to both academic and financial records at public and private colleges in order to compile the quantitative data necessary for academic program reviews. Unlike the vast majority of higher education scholars who base their analyses on aggregate data at the national, state or institutional level, institutional researchers have the opportunity to analyze institutional revenue and expenditures at the student level of an institution. That is, institutional researchers compile data that records how much revenue a student generates for an institution as well as how much the institution directly spends on that student for a semester of higher education. These student-record level data sets are the primary sources for the information submitted to the rankings, state agencies, and federal government. The federal government, publications, and policy analysts typically receive or analyze data aggregated at the institutional level for their annual college profiles, rankings, and scholarship—there is no direct evidence for what works at the student level.

For the most part, the student-record level detail about an institution is a closely held secret that the vast majority of academic leaders and faculty regard as damaging, or damning, information about how colleges work. And they are right. In its series on “Evolving Higher Education Business Models,” the American Council on Education (ACE), an organization representing the nation’s college presidents, describes college expenditures as a “‘black box’ of institution spending decisions.” Although the ACE calls for “greater transparency” on the costs and contributions of institutional activities “toward student success,” the report notes that such a goal runs counter to the presidents’ and colleges’ “traditional view that internal data should be held closely in order to avoid criticism and second-guessing.” Substantively, activity-based costing would advance the fiduciary responsibility of college presidents, but also the ability to link expenditures to student success, transparently, that would invite more rigorous research and knowledge about how colleges work for some and not others by design: the “decision making.”

The operations of most colleges and universities—the private institutions in particular, but more and more so the public institutions—could not withstand public scrutiny or substantive accountability to the individual student who pays college tuition with non-institutional grant aid and student loans. A student-level record of academic and non-academic resource allocations will show substantial inequities for the support and services offered to each student at the institution—that is, the quantifiable discrepancies between what a student pays in tuition and what he or she receives from academic programming and support services. For this reason, and other federal restrictions designed to foster a “higher education market,” institutional researchers are not at liberty to speak directly about the inner workings of any one institution. A description of how colleges work (for some) must proceed by means of generalizations and abstractions to demonstrate that student-level data often exposes the profound inequities produced by the American system of higher education.

As a basic step to an understanding what is happening in the black box of higher education expenditures, consider this thought experiment about the organizational culture and history of a tuition-dependent private, nonprofit institution—Middle Atlantic University—which enrolls only two entering freshmen each year. It costs approximately $10,000 per year to educate a college student and Middle Atlantic University charges $10,000 per year for tuition initially. The university requires students to pay tuition with non-institutional funds—in other words, without institutional or external grant aid. As a nonprofit private institution, the college collects exactly the amount of revenue it needs for expenditures to educate the entire student body attending the college. For the sake of simplicity, assume the cost of higher education does not increase for sophomores, juniors and seniors, so a student body of eight full-time students requires $80,000 of revenue and expenditures each year (i.e., four cohorts of two students at $10,000 tuition each with no attrition).

Of course, no two students are exactly alike and the students have different outcomes in terms of academic excellence (i.e., they are “unique”). Imagine, then, that the faculty comes to the judgment that there are different types of students attending the college with different levels of commitment to the academic curriculum. The college henceforth divides the entering first-year students into two categories of attendees, academic and collegial, to signify which particular students the faculty regards as most academically prepared for higher learning. With only two entering freshmen each year, the college sometimes fails to recruit academic students and instead registers two collegial students. Among the whole student body, only two of every eight students appear to be academically-oriented students. Although faculty deems the academic students most serious about higher learning and most worthy for entry into the ruling class, the majority of faculty are working with collegial students engaged in extra-curricular activities or vocational studies for a professional or technical occupation.

In time, the faculty begin to measure the prestige of private, nonprofit colleges across the nation in terms of the number of academic students graduating from elite programs (or functions). Subsequently, the administration and trustees learn to equate the prestige of the college they oversee in similar terms, either directly through faculty or indirectly through media rankings based on surveyed perceptions. Eventually, a consensus builds among trustees, administration, and faculty at Middle Atlantic University that the college must recruit more academic students in order to improve its prestige in the nation. The rationale for doing so internally is to recruit and retain the best faculty, but trustees in general desire to be associated with one of the “best ranked” colleges in the nation. A strategic goal emerges stating that the college aims to double the number of academic students it recruits and graduates—or, one academic student for every two students enrolled.

Economic research shows that a private, nonprofit college may go about recruiting the students it wants to educate by selectively discounting its tuition for targeted enrollees. For the sake of the argument, assume that the college does not take an incremental approach to competition for academic students; Middle Atlantic University creates an “honors” program that offers a full-tuition grant to the first academic-caliber freshman who commits to the college each year. Rather than having hit-or-miss years, the strategy effectively enables the college to recruit at least one academically-prepared honors student, every year. Within four years, then, one-in-two students at every class level will be an honors student who seeks the kind of higher learning that the faculty regards as the core mission of its elite functions.

Whereas the tuition discounting strategy empowers the institution to recruit the students it desires, the cost of a higher education remains $10,000 per student. As the strategic plan to double the number of academically-prepared honors students comes to fruition, a smaller and smaller percentage of the students are paying tuition. In the first year, one freshman honors student results in a budget shortfall of $10,000. In the second year, one freshman honors student and one sophomore honors student results in a budget shortfall of $20,000. So on and so on, until by the fourth year when four of the eight students attending Middle Atlantic University are in the free-tuition honors program, resulting in a $40,000 shortfall in revenue for an anticipated $80,000 in expenditures for the college.

Again, since no other source of funding exists in this initial model, Middle Atlantic University must make up these shortfalls with tuition revenue to maintain its “quality” (expenditures of $10,000 per student per year) of higher education. This means that the list price of tuition, charged to the collegial (or now nonhonors) students, must be increased if the college hopes to maintain its expenditure levels for all students. In the first year of the free-ride honors program, tuition is increased to almost $11,500, a fifteen percent increase, for the seven tuition-paying students. In the second year, the list price of tuition must be increased to a little more than $13,333 in order to fund two honors students with six tuition-paying students. In the third year of competition for honors students, the list price of tuition jumps to $16,000. By the fourth year, and every year thereafter, the list price of tuition at Middle Atlantic University is $20,000—a 100% increase over the original tuition and the cost of delivering a higher education before tuition discounting became an annual competitive practice. While only nonhonors students pay the list price to attend the private college in the fourth year and thereafter, the tuition revenue generates enough to pay for the higher education of both nonhonors and honors students.

At this point, the model of higher education financing only takes into account an institution’s strategic discounting and the list price of tuition necessary to fund its aspirational goal to become more prestigious by educating more academically-prepared honors students. So-called nonhonors students, however, are now paying twice as much for a higher education than previously paid by all students. Unsurprisingly, the list price of tuition for higher education becomes an economic impediment to degree completion for some nonhonors students. As a result, Middle Atlantic University must now account for retention and attrition in its recruitment and budgeting plans. For example, if one of the four nonhonors students paying full tuition leaves the college before graduation, the university faces the prospect of increasing the list price of its tuition to over $26,666 in order to generate enough revenue from three nonhonors students to pay for a total of seven students’ higher education.

As the more palatable alternative, the college chooses to accept two nonhonors students in the next incoming freshman class. In fact, Middle Atlantic University by chance discovers that attrition is a net benefit to the financial conditions of the college. Each year, the college accepts two nonhonors student for every honors student with the expectation that one of the two nonhonors students will drop out within the first two years of attendance. Typically, the college now has five nonhonors students to fund the higher education of nine students on an annual basis and the list price of tuition does not exceed $18,000 per year (or $90,000 split among five full-tuition students). Although the institution’s freshman graduation rate falls to 67%, or two out of three incoming freshmen, Middle Atlantic University has little concern for quantitative metrics because its elite “honors” program is fully funded and fully enrolled year after year. In this respect, attrition among the nonhonors students is a boondoggle since it affords the institution the additional revenue needed to provide a higher education to the students the faculty designates for initiation into the ruling class without pricing the college out of the higher education market.

Over time, then, Middle Atlantic University comes to regard its expenditures on the higher education of nonhonors students as inefficient and wasteful. One-in-two nonhonors students are likely to discontinue their studies within the first year or two of college, resulting in little benefit to the university from the $10,000 spent on a nonhonors student’s freshman year. In addition, the tenured faculty prefer not to waste their time on incoming nonhonors freshmen, half of whom leave the college before reaching upper division coursework. The academic administration then turns to a transient teaching workforce—adjunct faculty—which fortuitously reduces by half (or to $5,000 per year) the expenditures needed to teach English, math and core curriculum courses to the transient nonhonors freshman student body.

A contingent labor force of adjunct faculty thus frees up another $10,000 per year for the financial planning at the institution. The cost reductions may be used to reduce the list price of tuition to $16,000 ($80,000 split among five full-tuition students). The tenured faculty, however, are a fixed cost and many no longer teach a full course load because they do not engage with the incoming nonhonors freshmen. The academic leadership therefore proposes enhancements to the honors program that incorporate high impact educational practices such as team teaching, undergraduate research courses, and study abroad. Thus, after reducing the expenditures for the higher education of nonhonors students, Middle Atlantic University has found additional funds to sweeten the appeal of its elite program by increasing annual expenditures to $12,500 per year per honors student. In this decision-making pattern of organized anarchy, the prestige of the college grows not only due to the number of honors students graduated each year but also by the quality of the education they have received as measured by academic expenditures per student.

At this point, the inequality inherent in a division of students into two groups, honors and nonhonors—or academically prepared and not academically prepared—is fully evident. The honors students pay no tuition to Middle Atlantic University during their college career while receiving $12,500 in higher education every year for four years. In contrast, the nonhonors freshmen dole out $18,000 in tuition for college but receive only $5,000 in higher education in their first year. Although nonhonors students are not directly informed of the discrepancy in the price of tuition and the cost to deliver nonhonors coursework, half struggle to meet their potential given the subpar quality of instruction budgeted for adjunct faculty by the college. Those that persist into their sophomore year subsequently receive $10,000 in higher education instruction, while still paying the full cost of tuition at $18,000 per year. Generally, institutional tuition discounting for honors students has increased the cost of higher education by 60% to 100% for nonhonors students, while also reallocating instructional expenditures from incoming nonhonors freshmen to honors students.

Under these financial terms, more and more students choose not to attend a private college or forego higher education entirely. That is, the equality of choice between the private and public sectors of higher education diminishes for nonhonors students as the tuition discounts to honors students increase. At this point, the availability of state and federal financial aid for “needy” nonhonors students becomes the primary objective of trustees, administrators, and faculty at Middle Atlantic University and similar institutions competing with our hypothetical college. Economists specializing in higher education financing have shown that a system of federal student loans will render the private sector of higher education more attractive to incoming freshmen, especially when private colleges are able to maintain or demonstrate their prestige to nonhonors students—by virtue of the noteworthy accomplishments of honors graduates and as reflected in the above average price of attendance. Despite the absence of a democratic rationale, a political coalition forms among higher education scholars, private college executives, the financial industry, and legislators who abhor “government handouts” to students (but not to private institutions). The coalition moves forward a robust and liberal system of guaranteed student loans from the federal government in order to create a market for higher education that fosters an equality of choice between private and public colleges for high school graduates who apply to both.

While the existence of the federal student loan system is not the cause or driver of tuition inflation at Middle Atlantic University, the business model behind institutional autonomy and the preparation of the ruling class is not sustainable without the revenue collected on behalf of (and directly from) “needy” nonhonors students. Some nonhonors students incur debt before leaving college disillusioned with the experience or unhappy with the quality of higher education delivered at the actual price of tuition paid. Other “resilient” nonhonors students will persist until graduation—perhaps, predominantly, they enrolled for the “collegiate” experience or for the income promised by a vocational or professional degree. Whatever the reason, since tuition is eighty percent higher ($18,000/$10,000) than it was under equitable conditions—that is, before the private sector had the autonomy to decide who attends college for free in America—nonhonors students must now come up with approximately $8,000 more per year to attend, or $32,000 total, for a college degree. With no viable alternatives, more and more students at Middle Atlantic University take advantage of the “generous” federal student loan program “to pay for their education,” without realizing that institutions use their tuition to subsidize “elite” functions to service a small group of students designated for initiation into the ruling class.

[End of Part I]

Continue to Part II…

Oh dear, oh my, how we modern consumers have ascended our high-mindedness that we lost sight of the profound wisdom of Shakespeare and his earthly king. Today, we are buffeted from all sides to “be yourself,” “do your homework,” “think of the consequences,” “weigh the pros and cons,” “stick to what you know,” and “take the best course of action.” Each of these harmful sayings in one way or another traces its existence to the ocean of ink spilled to imprison the human mind in the limitations of rational choice theory – or, more concisely, rational action.

[Confused by this opening? Read Part I here.]

As The Free Encyclopedia – which is to say the worthless encyclopedia – indoctrinates its readers, “The rational agent is assumed to take account of available information, probabilities of events, and potential costs and benefits in determining preferences, and to act consistently in choosing the self-determined best choice of action.” Theorizing has never given birth to a more destructive, heinous notion for humankind than that of rational action. To this day, the rational action crowd wishes to keep from us the dirty little secret, however, that the unquenchable need for more goods reflects our innate and noble ambition to perform selfless acts of self-gifting.

Cultural historians working during the past few decades, to our good fortune, have exposed and turned back the pernicious influence of rational decisions in the everyday life of consumers. Their research on the “consumer revolution” of the past two centuries has uncovered the unspoken truth of humankind: we are all prostitutes and consumers of prostitution. Every man jack of us is a perpetual engine of insatiable desires moved to action by the unattainable goal of self-gratification. Every product we purchase and consume alienates us from the rudimentary, base nature of our species – our lizard brain akin to the animals. Each act of consumption we perform as individuals communicates social meaning to those around us, brings us closer together as a culture, and empowers all of us to discover the inborn, insatiable desire to buy and consume the next best or next new thing. In short, the most selfless action one can take is to buy a gift for oneself – to enjoy our self-annihilation and rebirth - and, in so doing, save world civilization.

Caveat emptor - then buy yourself another spiked eggnog, hot toddy, and Irish coffee. Historia|Research presents the second part of its invaluable buyer’s guide for the upcoming holiday season - and, we dare predict, the only holiday buyer’s guide you will need for every holiday to come. The Holiday Buyer’s Guide for the Methodological Individualist, Part II, will unleash you from the bondage of rational action and lead you in a bacchic dance to the orgy of civilization advanced by the humble spirit of giving gifts to yourself!

The Selfless Act of Purchasing Gifts for Oneself | The Curative for the Altruist

One may ask, why is it that so many people around the world fail to recognize the simple act of giving a gift to oneself is the most selfless act a person can take? The answer lies with the mind of the philosopher who first discovered the potential for self-gifting. A little-read, widely-despised political economist of the 19^th-century first stumbled upon the extraordinary liberating power of acquiring a much desired object or service in exchange for a few coins. Unfortunately, this author compulsively obsessed over the so-called “mode of production” and wrote volumes of tedious, turgid, and incomprehensible books to make manifest his delusion of “dialectical materialism” - the progression of history toward an inevitable future of human bondage to hand production. Buried deep in his atrocious writings about a global conspiracy to stoke a revolution to permanently enslave humankind to a life of hand labor, this thinker stumbled across the most liberating force humankind has ever encountered: the purchase of a gift for oneself.

To our misfortune, as the Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said, “Asses prefer rubbish over gold,” and this ass loved his filth. Nonetheless, Karl Marx must be credited with first theorizing the selfless act of purchasing products for ourselves. His discovery, like many of his ideas, takes form like a crustacean – a pearl wrapped in a slimy, simple life-form enclosed by a callous, scabrous shell. Thus, like a mollusk we must work ourselves from outside-in to extract the valuable insight from the prison-house of language that characterizes his writings.[1]

According to Karl, in the original mode of human consumption, a product is initially “a very trivial thing,” easily grasped upon first consideration. To primitive humans, the product retains its trivial nature as bound to its use, “whether we consider [the product] from the point of view that by its properties [the product] is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those properties are the product of human labour.” In his typical style, Karl hints at the correspondence of uses, wants (desire), and labor in the trivial production of objects to consume. In a nutshell, the “properties” that may satisfy “human wants” are the selfsame “properties” produced by human labor. While this circuit of properties in labor and desire remains unbroken, products manifest their uses as “articles of utility.” Or, to oyster knife Karl’s dense terminology, a person knows only to desire what one makes with one’s own hands.

Having passed through the shell, we then discover Karl’s sleazy rendering of modern consumer life. Here, the initial transparency of a product is not sustainable and the product appears as “a very queer thing.” The product is now enigmatic, “a mysterious thing,” bearing a “social character” and an “objective” stamp to express value. Products in modern consumer culture exist immersed in our social lives, forming a kind of “religious world” in which the products “appear as independent beings endowed with life...” Products possess “absolutely no connexion with their physical properties and with the material relations” of hand production. In this respect, the products we buy cease to bear any relation to “articles of utility” and come into existence solely as “articles of value.” As a consequence, consumer culture forces a rupture between utility and value, and liberates desire from the products made by one’s own hands. As Karl notes, “This division of a product into a useful thing and value becomes practically important, only when exchange has acquired such an extension that useful articles are produced for the purpose of being exchanged, and their character as values has therefore to be taken into account, beforehand, during production.”

My apologies, let me rephrase – humans no longer have to desire what they make, humans now may make what they desire! Here we discover a pearl of wisdom clutched from the inscrutable mollusk of dialectical materialism: To describe the human transformation between primitive and modern life, Karl introduces the notion that modern consumer life entails alienation from our selves.

Um, well, from human’s base nature. A community of ants will grasp a cube of sugar as an “article of utility” after lugging it granule-by-granule from the kitchen counter to their ant hole. An ape with a stick to lure ants from their ant hole understands the ants as “articles of utility” as it eats the tasty treats. But neither creature understands the value of a sugar cube or a chocolate covered ant as a life-renewing talisman of social status as humans now do. If not for his obtuse commitment to the dictatorship of the proletariat – the primitive life of endless hand labor to produce articles of utility – Karl may have been recognized as one of the foremost authorities on the history of global capitalism and the man who first recognized that the simple act of purchasing a product for one’s self is the most selfless and self-effacing act one makes in everyday life.

Instead, he wrote endlessly about the primitive promise of hand-made articles of utility.

Ape Using Hand-Made Tool After the Proletarian Revolution

In the final analysis, is not alienation a most wondrous thing when it distances us from our evolutionary brethren? We must credit Karl with first stumbling upon the idea that the more products and services we buy for ourselves, the more selfless and more divine we humans become. Moreover, the selflessness of giving a gift to oneself proves to be the best curative for the selfishness of Altruists. But wait, my mercenary friends! Do not run to the department store, the temple of desire, just yet. In our advanced consumer culture, not just any purchase produces the highest-quality alienation from our base selves that money can buy. I urge readers first to learn how “values” communicate one’s selfless acts and what the products one purchases mean to others – as described by the greatest American economist to ever bless our minds with thoughts of personal consumption.

Giving Gifts to Oneself Announces to the World One’s Selflessness | The Curative for the Booster

Karl first suggested the process in which values displace utilities as the conversion of each product “into a social hieroglyphic…” This transformation of product to hieroglyphic has its analogy in language, “for to stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as language.” Ever the diligent worker at the machinery of production, Karl nevertheless failed to take the time to decipher the code of social consumption.

That accomplishment fell to the American economist and sociologist, Thorstein Veblen, who rightfully claims to be the first Egyptologist of modern consumer culture.[2] What was the key to decipher and unleash the great power of buying gifts for oneself:

If, as is sometimes assumed, the incentive to accumulation were the want of subsistence or of physical comfort, then the aggregate economic wants of a community might conceivably be satisfied at some point in the advance of industrial efficiency; but since the struggle is substantially a race for reputability on the basis of an invidious comparison, no approach to a definitive attainment is possible.

In other words, the absence of utility renders moot the practices of rational action in the selfish consumption of goods and elevates the purpose of consumption to the infinite, progressive revelation of how much more there is to consume than what we have right now – or, the revelation of our innate and selfless capacity for insatiable desire.

A critic of the economic theory of rational choice and preferences in the early twentieth century, Thorstein Veblen brought focus to the “conspicuous” nature of insatiable desire in consumer societies. His approach to understanding consumption emphasized the social performance and the acquisition of reputation or distinction in a proper act of buying gifts for oneself. While everyday modern life grew to include casual and anonymous contact with larger populations, as city life demanded, “the serviceability of consumption as a means of repute, as well as the insistence on it as an element of decency” increased its effectiveness and made gifts to oneself the truly revolutionary force of the time. As he brilliantly suggests, “possessions [have] come to be valued...as evidence of the prepotence of the possessor of these goods over other individuals within the community.” In short, the gift one gives oneself prefigures and communicates the gifts one deserves from others.

The force of conspicuous consumption, nevertheless, would not be possible without the human motive of emulation – the insatiable desire to have one better thing than others have. The edifying compulsion for emulation insures that consumer practices take shape as the adoption of customary standards of living and that a canon of consumption forms as a “coherent structure of propensities and habits” - that is, a language of self-gifting. Each selfless act of giving gifts to oneself serves to show those around us the lower- and higher-order preferences of insatiable desire and stanches the risk that any one standard of living will become given or fixed. As Veblen cautions, a standard of living must not become “the average, ordinary expenditure already achieved: it [must be] an ideal of consumption that lies just beyond reach...” Every selfless act of purchasing gifts for ourselves serves to validate the standard of living just beyond the rational reach of our own income and wealth. At the same time, the gifts we give ourselves push our economic peers and subordinates to recognize new modes of consumption that enlarge their own insatiable desires.

When Veblen wrote, the rites of conspicuous consumption held sway at specific events such as the holy days when worshipful church-goers “dressed to the nines” or among the “leisure class” who possessed enough wealth to acquire products without working with the hands at any time. Urban spaces, however, quickened the pace of conspicuous consumption and accelerated improvements to the standard of living for all classes. In “the society of the spectacle,” as Guy Debord named it, everyday is a holy day, everyone is a foppish consumer, and every purchase to defer our insatiable desire is a divine intervention in the course of self-annihilation for human civilization.[3]

Two germinal inventions transformed the limited and leisure class social practices surrounding insatiable desire into the democratic ideals of today. William Leach, in his Land of Desire, affirms the Veblenian insights in his study of the advent of department stores and retail fashion in the United States during the late nineteenth century. Whether as “an insatiable, desiring machine or as an animal governed by an infinity of desires” (385), he wrote, every American flocked to the new department stores as a logistical solution for the stimulation of insatiable desire for articles of clothing and the temporal gratification of clothing consumption: “Fashion pressed people to buy, dispose of, and buy again.” Roland Marchand, in Advertising the American Dream, then explains how advertising mitigated the difficult questions about who to emulate on the street and conscientiously offered beautiful models and movie stars as the most eminently qualified for Americans to emulate for purchases from any industry. In print copy, on radio and on screen, the advertisers “championed new against the old, the modern against the old-fashioned,” and the famous against the streetwise.[4]

Cutting off the hands that shackled desire to labor, the department stores promised the world to carry whatever anyone desired, and the advertisers freed humankind to desire uncontrollably for whatever the media broadcast to the public. The democratic ideal of giving gifts to oneself – regardless of the ability to pay – was thereby secured.

A Shopper Enthuses over the Advancement of World Civilization

Notably, Boosters are best treated with an ample helping of self-gifting until the selflessness to buy and consume the next best thing breaks their habitual urge to trade worthless and unwanted items stored around their homes. The selflessness to buy for oneself the one thing that none of his or her friends possess, in order to engender jealousy and emulation, gradually brings the Booster into the fold of conspicuous consumption and recruits another shopper into the inevitable advancement of civilization one self-gift at a time.

The Gratification of Giving Gifts to Oneself During the Holiday Season | The Curative for the Miser

In modern times, everyday is a holiday on which you deserve to give yourself a gift, nonetheless, a gift to oneself during the holiday season accords a certain extra touch of gratification. No doubt, several of our over eager readers selfishly ran to the store after finishing the last section to buy something they wanted recently but had ignorantly denied themselves the pleasure of acquiring at the time. These poor individuals will rue their impatience when they return to learn there is more to giving gifts to oneself than the mere act of purchasing: what gift one consumes is equally as important.

The whirling-dervish of insatiable desire first appears in the history of conspicuous consumption during the Old Regime in France. During the pre-revolutionary era, Jennifer Jones finds that Parisians imagined a male consumer and female merchant in the “act of retail buying.” Rather than a game of shrewd bartering between merchant and buyer, the French held courtship as a model for shopping – “a decidedly heterosexual encounter between carefree but self-interested shop girls and desirous male customers.” Female store-owners, marchandes de modes, hired grisettes, or shop girls, specifically to meet the courtship paradigm of merchandising. In late 18th-century France, modern methods of retailing originated as a role-playing game between shop girls and male shoppers to imitate the trade of prostitution. More to the point, insatiable desire for self-gratification in the act of giving oneself a gift originally mirrored the exchange more commonly known today as “turning a trick.”

By the early 19^th-century a new conception of femininity “naturalized” female consumers’ personal fascination with the novelty and frivolity of self-gifting, Jones notes, eroding the traditional courtship paradigm in retailing during the century. Grisettes learned the practice of self-gifting a small brooch or other item of flair in order to stimulate the male retail suitors and goad them into buying more than they “needed.” In short order, grisettes began to gratify themselves with gifts more frequently and the threat of insatiable desire among the shop girls cast a pall over France. Critics of the emergent forms of modern consumerism among young women – those men who feared that their stable of self-interested young grisettes may find untold freedoms of their own in the selfless gratification of insatiable desires – decried the potential for young women to become “freed from the twin pillars of male reason and aristocratic refinement…” The female marchandes de modes became targets of social critics as provacateurs who “imperiled their female workers and shop girls… [and] indulged and corrupted [grisettes] unrestrained frenzy for fashions.”[5]

The liberation from rational action progressed nonetheless and insatiable desire empowered women of all classes and ambitions to pursue the benevolence of self-gifting. One could say, the grisettes learned to role-play as both ersatz prostitute and spurious consumer of prostitution in a singular act of metamorphosis. The secret happiness of the holiday season lies in its tacit invitation to humankind to advance the whole of civilization by selflessly turning as many tricks as we can afford for ourselves or can elicit from others.

Unfortunately, men who worked with their hands or feared the wantonness of insatiable desire in the feminine youth initially found the new retail world modeled on prostitution incredibly distasteful and unseemly. In response, these men consciously started a war -- that still rages today -- on the holiday season and against the working women in history who made self-gifting the engine of world civilization. The rational choice theorists and economists of the 19th-century, like Jean Baptiste Say, saw the link between “consumption and sexuality explicitly.” Rational action advocates asserted that impulsive increases in wages or standards of living could overstimulate desire and potentially “’set in motion a disordering of [the] passions.’” A popular solution proffered by political economists sought to re-establish the role of fathers as a means of financially tamping women’s propensity for insatiable desire and enforcing a regulatory decorum to affect the “repression of desire – the desire to live beyond one’s means and the desire for sexual indulgence…” The misguided writings of the rational choice theorists won the day among neoclassical economists and other stodgy ivory-tower types.[6]

Among working men, the “great masculine renunciation” of fashion signified a return to the cultural “values of industry and economy” – or the desire of things only made with hands. Men’s clothing emphasized “the fashion of non-fashion” (jeans, t-shirts, blue collars, etc.) as the “masculinist language of industry and frugality.” Men articulated their legitimacy as custodians of desire by hand production, a generic style expressing deep unease with giving gifts to oneself that others found desirable. Ultimately, as the obsession with labor rights and unionization during the 19^th and 20^th century symbolizes, male fashion signified a connection to the world of hand production while also securing the prerogative to give oneself a pret-a-porter gift from the new palaces of retail prostitution – department stores – that reserved oneself from circulation as an ersatz prostitute of the desirable.

As a consequence, men then became and still remain only half the consumers that women are today – that is to say, a mostly grotesque and afflicted species of Misers filled with resentment for what others have acquired.[7]

The advancement of human civilization thus fell to the young working women who set for themselves the task of selflessly studying insatiable desire and mastering the gratifying power of giving gifts to oneself, while passing on their knowledge from generation to generation with nothing more than oral traditions in consciousness-raising groups. The resulting gendered asymmetry in the exercise and mastery of giving gifts to oneself produced the iconic image of consumerism that Ann K. Clark calls, “The Girl.”[8] In “The Girl: A Rhetoric of Desire,” Clark contends that “The Girl” is a representation of women that offers itself as a “picture of human nature” – an image of unbound and insatiable desire – that is innate to both men and women.

Clark then adds a penetrating complement to Karl’s theory for how (monetary) value replaces utility in consumer culture: “As money is to the social economy, so also The Girl is to the desire that must motivate a consumer society.” In that respect, The Girl “transmutes every need into an attribute [of insatiable desire] which she can supply.” Over two hundred years removed from the intriguing, role-playing game of prostitution in French shops, the modern consumer more or less continues to engage in the “social hieroglyphic” of prostitution in his or her everyday purchases.

Clark continues by stating The Girl is “the badge of potency that we all are to want,” filling in for Veblen why one seeks “evidence of the prepotence of the possessor.” In this respect, as an “abstract consumable,” The Girl signifies what is desirable through her proximity to a product such as a brand of car or bottle of wine. At the same time, as “abstract consumer,” The Girl educates buyers on how to obtain the evidence of their own prepotence for more and more luxuriant gifts from oneself and others. One always gives oneself the gift of becoming The Girl or the gift of getting The Girl: “either immediately (she’ll be mine with the car) or mediately (with the car she will be me).”

Men Propositioning The Girl with a New Car

The life of The Girl sets down the terms for becoming desirable by possessing what is desirable and sets the rules that define how one expresses their own sense of belonging and desirableness. For, as circumstance has it, only one thing temporarily gratifies insatiable desires: a gift that makes one become The Girl or a gift that enables one to get The Girl. As history attests, a self-gift without the aura of The Girl fails to engender a sense of prepotence or an air of deservedness from others in the community.

Here, then, we encounter the plight of, if not an antidote to, the Misers. Misers purchase without regard for evidencing their prepotence for becoming or getting The Girl - aflutter with their proletarian grasp of social media tools to hawk “articles of utility” like hats, jeans, t-shirts, shorts and tank tops. Misers consume as if embarrassed to share the same insatiable desire for prostituting oneself that animates and drives others to heighten human civilization. Living pitifully, Misers often give themselves gifts that may not be conspicuously consumed at public events or dinner parties. Misers are symptoms of the disease of rational action in the acquisition of gifts during the holiday season and the vanguard of the rational-choice-theory traitors who seek to destroy the womb of world civilization. Misers only find salvation from their impotency - if saved they may be - with the most obscene, un-affordable self-gifts and debasing acts of irrational gift-hustling that most Misers prove loath to perform in the presence of others.

“I Buy Myself This Gift Not for Me But to Show Proudly My Love for Humankind and the Betterment of World Civilization”

The Girl stands at the head of world civilization singing of its blessings as the manifest destiny and divine calling of humankind. She asks no more of us than that we buy gifts for ourselves to signify to others our personal prepotence to share in her likeness or her company. She makes her request without a hint of selfishness and demands that her suitors set aside their own. She offers the guarantee on every gift that one purchases for oneself that it shall be indulged and enjoyed in selflessness.

She broadcasts her vision for the advancement of human civilization and guides her paramours on the journey to horizons unimaginable. She remains unbound, the avatar of insatiable desire, no matter how far she extends her domain, no matter how much she accumulates, and no matter how many suitors she chooses to seduce. The Girl makes every day a holy day, the muse of world civilization who sings aloud: “I buy myself this gift not for me but to show proudly my love for humankind and the betterment of world civilization.”

The Girl Leading World Civilization to an Unimaginable Horizon of Insatiable Desire

Go now, my heroic readers! Go, go buy a gift for yourself – one you can ill-afford – and sing to The Girl: extol the selfless act of giving oneself a gift as the beating heart of human civilization!

[[1]]Selections from Karl Marx, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed., Robert C. Tucker (New York: 1978).[[1]]

[[2]]Selections from Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: 1994 [original 1899]).[[2]]

[[3]]Guy Debord, La société du spectacle (France: 1967).[[3]]

[[4]]William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York, 1993); Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley: 1986).[[4]]

[[5]]Selections from Jennifer Jones, “Coquettes and Grisettes: Women Buying and Selling in Ancien Regime Paris,” in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, ed. by Victoria de Grazia (ed.), with Ellen Furlough (Berkeley: 1996), 25-53.[[5]]

[[6]]From Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: 1988).[[6]]

[[7]]Selections from David Kuchta, “The Making of the Self-Made Man: Class, Clothing, and English Masculinity 1688-1832,“ in Ancien Regime Paris,” in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, ed. by Victoria de Grazia (ed.), with Ellen Furlough (Berkeley: 1996), 54-78.[[7]]

[[8]]All quotes regarding The Girl derived from the incisive, eight-page article by Ann K. Clark, “The Girl: A Rhetoric of Desire,” Cultural Studies 1.2 (1987): 195-203.[[8]]

A college’s aggregate tuition discount rate (total $ value of tuition discounts divided by total $ value of tuition without discounts) is the subject of many, angst-y publications each year because private colleges and universities are foolish enough to submit their proprietary data to the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO). In the decade since I first wrote the two following posts on “the poverty of revenue maximization” in 2015, the tuition discount rates for first-time first-year (i.e., freshman) college students increased from 48% to 56% (Inside Higher Education [June 2025]).

Parts I and II of “The Poverty of Revenue Maximization” are admittedly Pollyannaish. At the time, I worked for an organization struggling with the psychological toll on the executives and board members should the tuition discount rate exceeded 50%. I participated in discussions led by admission and marketing consultants that never failed to claim they could keep the tuition discount rate below 50% and meet enrollment SAT quality and enrollment volume goals. Technically, 50% is an arbitrary number that does not reflect the tuition discount rate that achieves revenue maximization and portends a loss of potential revenue due to excessive discounting for new students (on the other hand, 55% as in the graph above is getting much closer!).

The discount percentage, which is an aggregate percentage per the NACUBO methodology — again, not an average of discounts to each individual student, but the aggregate discount to all students as a whole — covers up the problem inherent to tuition discounting. In short, private, nonprofit colleges and universities are attracting students offered full or near-full tuition discounts at increased frequencies while attracting students at the full or near-tuition list price at decreased frequencies. The steepest tuition discounts are targeted (mostly) at the 15% of students with SAT scores of 1300+ (the 86th percentile per College Board). Without “large endowments,” private nonprofit colleges and universities pay for those tuition discounts with the tuition paid (or collected) from the 85% of students below 1300 SAT scores.

Much of that revenue collected from the 85% of students with SAT scores below 1300 is federal student aid from Pell grants and guaranteed student loans determined by “need.” None of the money sent to private, nonprofit institutions to cover the tuition of “needy” students is necessarily required to pay for the education of said “needy” students. Every year, private nonprofit colleges and universities admit swaths of students from the 85% with no expectation to persist for one year (much less four years) in order to collect enough federal revenue to educate the 15% given a free or near-free college education based on algorithms created by admissions and marketing consultants. The American higher education system for private nonprofit institutions has thrived under this federal funding scheme since the 1980s.

I am guessing that tuition discounting is now collapsing under the weight of the social and economic inequity it seeks to bolster. If 85% of students elect (wisely) to attend community or public colleges rather than attend private nonprofit colleges that require them to pay for the 15% of students who are free riders at the (same) institution, the whole point of tuition discounting as a model of revenue maximization is uprooted. I am okay with that!

Part I

A Practical Discovery about Tuition Discount Rates

Among the many bytes of data driving decision making in institutions of higher education, the tuition discount rate, or “tuition discounting,” invites some of the most voluminous and discomfiting commentary in the public space. As the Google Ngram Chart below shows, tuition discounting registered the attention of education and policy authors beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s, then steadily mounted until the mid-2000 decade. One of the first publications from this era, by the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO), notes that tuition discounting should not “be feared or abandoned.” The benefits of tuition discounting can be measured in the promotion of educational access, student diversity, and “increases in the marginal revenue of the institution.”

The author [also] cautioned that revenue maximization failed to justify tuition discounting if “the price of education rises above the payment capability of increasing portions of the population,” but did so in the context of providing a model to understand and monitor tuition discounting to improve the management of higher education institutions.^[1] In later years, NACUBO has sponsored its Tuition Discounting Survey to track the college and university trends in tuition discounting. The association continues to provide measured analysis of the tuition discounting practices by private, nonprofit four-year colleges and universities. In its most recent public release, the association notes that enrollment factors pressured institutions to become “more strategic with their aid packages,” but that “80.4% of [institutional] grant dollars… met students’ financial need in 2012-13.”

Figure 1 | Google Ngram for Incidence of “Tuition Discounting” from 1980 to 2008

On the other hand, financial institutions have increased scrutiny for tuition discounting by colleges and universities and sounded an alarm for the sustainability of the private, nonprofit sector in higher education. Moody’s Investor Service fuels the annual news cycle with its releases about what it characterizes as a distressed higher education market.^[2] “Weakened pricing power and difficulty in growing enrollment are impeding revenue growth,” Moody’s announced in early 2013. “Net tuition revenue growth [revenue from tuition after discounts] for US nonprofit colleges and universities in fiscal 2015 will be the weakest in a decade,” according to its November 2014 release. In the release, Moody’s notes, “We project private universities will have 2.7% net tuition revenue growth…. ‘despite overall stable enrollment.’”

News agency for the higher education sector then broadcast the prognostications to a larger audience. “Economic and demographic shifts are undermining the ability of all but the most prominent colleges and universities to profit off high tuition prices,” begins an article in Insider Higer Ed, covering a recent release by Moody’s. The Hechinger Report asserts, citing the analysis and projections of the November 2014 release by Moody’s Investor Service, that many institutions “will see their revenues fall behind the 2 percent inflation rate…. because private universities are being forced to give higher and higher discounts to keep students coming.” Positioning revenue growth and tuition discounting as antagonistic elements, purveyors of financial outlooks for the private, nonprofit sector of higher education imagine a pall hanging over most institutions.

In putting the question of tuition discounting in these terms, the dour public discourse on tuition discount rates and revenue forecasts for private, nonprofit institutions from the financial and news industries produce very real and potentially detrimental outcomes on decision-making at private, nonprofit colleges and universities at the institutional level. I recently consulted a private, nonprofit 4-year institution regarding the strategic tuition discount rate for its college. I learned that the internal dialog at the college revealed a reluctance to consider any tuition discount rate in excess of 49% for its first-time, full-time freshman class. Moody’s Investor Service had recently released an announcement in which it called out an increase, from 5% in 2004 to 12% in 2014, in the proportion of institutions that offered tuition discounts over 50% to first-time full-time freshmen.

Whether from direct input from a Moody’s representative or the tenor of the reporting for tuition discounting by higher education news outlets, this institution previously had set for itself an upper bound limit of 49% for its tuition discount to incoming freshmen. Trend analysis from the college’s institutional research and planning office, however, suggested that the local market competition in an “overall stable enrollment” environment (to use Moody’s words) required that the college consider no less than 50% as its tuition discount rate for admitted first-time students. For the president, the decision to discount below or above 50% presented immense difficulties either way – risk being flagged by the financial or news industry as a “tuition-dependent” institution on the edge of collapse because it was “forced” to provide a discount rate above 50% or risk offering an insufficient discount rate that failed to yield the targeted number of new freshman to sustain the normal operations and planned growth of the college.

Fortunately, through a different vendor, the college had a predictive enrollment model for tuition discounting based on a theory similar to the Laffer curve in taxation, as illustrated in Figure 2. The tuition discount rate, as suggested in the model from NACUBO over 20 years ago, will increase the net tuition revenue of a college to a point, but then results in a loss of tuition revenue when the cost of discounting for all enrollments exceeds the revenue from one additional enrollment – the point of revenue maximization as seen in the graph. In private discussion with the president, we both realized that the college had not received from its vendor the exact tuition discount rate that maximized its tuition revenue and we initiated the analysis through his enrollment management office.^[3]

What we learned was that the college’s discount rate to maximize revenue from entering freshman was well beyond the arbitrary and normative figure of the 50% discount rate favored by financial and news industry experts. Applying our findings, the college was able to consider a wider spectrum of scenarios for discount rates, enrollment headcounts, and tuition revenue than it otherwise would have considered if the 49% limit on the tuition discount rate had prevailed. As a result of the perspicacity and leadership of the president, the most recent incoming freshman class received the most generous institutional packages ever offered by the college while also maximizing the available financial resources of the institution to provide those incoming students its highest quality education.

The authentically data-driven decision of this one college runs counter to the consensus narrative about the “limits” of tuition discounting, and credit rating organizations’ receptivity for of its decision remains to be seen. The complications created by the free submission of “data” to financial entities with no discernible expertise in higher education research, nonetheless, stands as an important marker in my knowledge of revenue growth and tuition discounting. The analysis illustrated in Figure 2 reveals the proper narrative about tuition discounting by private, nonprofit institutions over the past 25 years.

Although each institution has its own “revenue maximizing point,” the college in my anecdote fits the norm for most of the nation’s private, nonprofit institutions. As such, perhaps, private nonprofit colleges and universities have successfully pursued tuition discounting strategies to maximize the available resources for their students during the past decade and that the current “stagnation” can be accorded to other market factors unrelated to tuition discount rates. Rather than characterize tuition discounting as decline, then, have we not witnessed an era in which tuition discounting by private, non profit educational institutions should be celebrated as an era of revenue maximization and administrative efficiency that served to increase access and diversity in higher education?^[4]

I do not doubt that the era of increasing tuition discount rates in the private, nonprofit sector of higher education has neared a new phase and that many institutions have approached or reached their optimal rate for revenue maximization. The derision for the practice of tuition discounting in general, unfortunately, neglects to consider that many educational leaders in the private sector of higher education during this era should be lauded for their measured and intelligent responses to the declining U.S. high school graduate population, an increasingly diverse and first-generation college population, and a more technologically-demanding labor market. Price-conscious education consumers generally have not “forced” tuition discounting on private, nonprofit higher education institutions; U.S. institutions have deployed tuition discounting to serve the unique missions and concrete market conditions of their private, nonprofit missions in order to expand access, improve diversity, and optimize expenditures for higher education in general.

In effect, the arbitrary and normative limits for tuition discounting set by financial entities and news organizations rely on data freely given (if not misguidedly submitted) by private, nonprofit institutions, but nonetheless fail to provide a reliable or valid measures of the effectiveness and efficiency of revenue maximization for said institutions over the past 25 years. The colleges and universities that succumb to the desideratum of credit ratings and news agencies that counsel the reduction of tuition discount rates based on arbitrary and unscientific thresholds may likely, I suspect, be the first to fold in the current higher education market conditions – and bequeath to posterity the condemnable prognostications of their would-be financial advisers.

Part I Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

1. Loren Loomis Hubbell, Tuition Discounting: The Impact of Institutionally Funded Financial Aid (Washington, D.C.: National Association of College and University Business Officers, 1992), 15-16. Available through ERIC at

http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED356731

1. .↵

2. Moody’s began surveying its rated US universities on tuition and enrollment expectations approximately five years ago per its January 10, 2013 release.↵

3. Anecdotally, I was told that the vendor had not been asked to do such an analysis before and the institution was breaking new ground, so to speak.↵

4. Public institutions, highly cited for increasing tuition and tuition discounts as well, may also provide the same benefits to low-income, minority, and freshman students: Nicholas W. Hillman, “Who Benefits from Tuition Discounts at Public Universities?” Journal of Student Financial Aid, Vol. 40, no. 1 (2010).↵

Part II

The Fundamental Nature of Tuition-Dependent Institutions

“Colleges and universities, whether public or private,” Gabriel E. Kaplan stresses, “are embedded within market and political environments that place certain [external] demands and expectations” on higher education executives and internal constituents.^[1] In that respect, the fundamental nature of tuition-dependent colleges and universities reflects the political economy of higher education in the nation, while the recent discourse regarding tuition dependency and tuition discounting perhaps embodies the “demands and expectations” of particular market and political factions outside of the higher education sector. What, we must ask, has changed in the political economy of higher education to spur the severe outlook regarding private, nonprofit institutions in recent years?

From the political environment, the negative connotations assigned to “tuition dependency” and “tuition discounting” in part capture sentiments of a by-gone national era in which the states and federal government in the United States more directly funded public institutions of higher education. In the modern 20th-century revenue model, state and federal taxes funded public higher education institutions that in turn utilized admission practices to target the best and brightest, to be generous, of the nation. The college applicants, and their families, who were denied admission to their flagship public colleges and universities, nevertheless, paid their state taxes to support those among their states who earned entry into the nation’s selective public institutions. The civic revenue model for higher education suited a society that regarded the civic support of the “natural aristocracy” as the benefit of all.^[2]

The applicant rejected by his or her local public university who subsequently chose to work in a department store or local factory ultimately paid taxes to support those who had been accepted and enrolled in the state colleges and universities. The applicants’ family heads, moreover, paid state taxation during the course of their entire lifetime, to educate other people’s children without the promise of a direct benefit to their own children who may or may not be admitted to the flagship public colleges and universities. The system, however, never operated entirely on principles of academic or social merit. The enactment of civil rights laws in higher education trace their origin to the correction of discriminatory practices in state higher education institutions in the United States as recently as 50 years ago (recently, in a properly historical perspective).

In the system that solidified subsequently, nearly every high school graduate or GED recipient is allotted a minimum sum of grant and loan dollars to cover the cost of a college education depending on his or her expected family contribution. The minimum sum differs for each student based on financial need as measured by the Pell Grant Program, Perkins Loans Program, subsidized and subsidized loan programs, and a myriad of state and other federal aid programs that offer every young American an opportunity for a college or technical education. In its application at the level of the individual student or citizen, the recent revenue model for higher education may accurately be regarded as an economically liberal model that diminishes direct infusions of tax revenues to selective public universities, but also, with measurable outcomes, seeks to gird a socially liberal model of college access that corresponds to the expansion of civil rights in the nation.

Private, nonprofit institutions stood to benefit from the new college funding model in that state and federal dollars followed the enrolled student. Institutional tuition discounting, on top of the state and federal aid afforded to most American high school graduates, provided an additional logic to financial aid packaging that enabled private institutions to attract the student body that best adheres to its mission and institutional effectiveness, while potentially maximizing revenue (as charted in Part I) to grow expenditures per FTE student. In sum, the political environment enhanced access to private nonprofit institutions without compromising the value of the education.

In the economic environment, however, corresponding to what Moody’s calls a period of “overall stable enrollment,” U.S. higher education has only nominally recovered from the second substantial decrease in the traditional 18-24 year old college age population during the past twenty years. In 2002, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) projected a decrease in the secondary school population beginning in 2007, similar to the decline in the millenial generation that came of age in the mid-1990s to early 2000s.^[3] More recently, the NCES released projections to 2022 affirming that the high school graduate population peaked in 2009-10 and would not again reach similar headcounts through 2022-23 at the earliest. The total number of high school graduates declines by 2% across the nation between 2009-10 and 2016-17, effecting the northeast (-8.8%) and midwest (-7.6%) most dramatically.

While the volume of graduates stabilizes in 2014-15, the demographics of the American high school graduates will transform the college-aged population. The “white” high school graduate population reached its largest total in 2007-08 (1.9 million) and will fall thereafter through 2022-23 (1.6 million, or 16% fewer), while the nonwhite population will grow to be 50% of the American high school graduate population in the next 7-10 years. During the same era, in contrast, the federal government projects total enrollments in 4-year institutions and conferrals of bachelor degree to incrementally increase through 2022-23.^[4] In order for these two projections to be realized, 4-year colleges and universities need to enroll a growing a number of the traditionally underrepresented student populations in higher education: minorities, first generation, and low income students. In light of the current high school graduate and 18-24 year old demographics trends, the 2.7% revenue growth recently projected for 4-year private, nonprofit institutions by Moody’s Investor Service perhaps may be regarded as an accomplishment in light of the U.S. national projections for the baccalaureate-aged population and its demographics.

Recently, the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) suggested the false premise that increasing tuition discount rates during the 2000s eroded the value of the higher education offered. Claiming that higher discount rates “limited” net tuition revenue in recent years, NACBUO claimed that “over the last 13 years, institutions have had flat net tuition revenue (0.4%), demonstrating that increased gross tuition and fee revenue has been given back to students in the form of aid, rather than put back into the institution.” The National Center for Education Statistics, which directly tracks total expenditures by higher education institutions in constant dollars, provides evidence to the contrary.

As illustrated in Figure 3 above, private nonprofit institutions increased the core student expenditures^[5] per full-time equivalent (FTE) student in every year between 2000-01 to 2008-09 — at which time the most recent recession and the most recent decline in the college-aged population simultaneously occurred. In the four years following the recession, expenditures per FTE student in the academic functions have been flat, but more has been allocated to student service expenditures per FTE student in every year since 2000-01. The decline or stagnation in instructional, research, and academic support expenditures, in part, reveals the flexibility for higher education institutions to hire part-time employees in recessionary periods when the commitment to full-time employees is risky, as Inside Higher Ed jobs services recently reported (see “Finding” on page 7). Generally, then, the assertion that tuition discounting in the 2000s came at the expense of investments in educational resources at private, nonprofit institutions is not evidenced by the real expenditures of such colleges and universities.

In the revenue curve illustrated in Figure 2 (part I of the brief), the section of the curve prior to the revenue maximization point (in the brown oval) flattens to the point where the additional revenue per FTE student falls far short of the standard expenditures per FTE student. If private, nonprofit 4-year colleges and universities recklessly discounted tuition to prioritize revenue growth without regard for investment in their institutions, the expenditures per FTE student illustrated in Figure 3 would show a fall in constant dollars over the twelve year period. What we see, rather, is that the private, nonprofit sector managed to grow the quality of higher education – as measured by expenditures per FTE student – in the years prior to the onset of the most recent recession.

Subsequently, during the environmental storm forecast in the declining high school graduate population and compounded by an unexpectedly deep recession conditions in the economy of the nation, the private nonprofit colleges maintained the expenditures per FTE student. Rather than decline or crisis, the trends suggest, the private nonprofit higher education sector has merely realized an end to a period of transformation in the 2000s spurred by a shift in how the nation funds colleges and an era of growth driven by sophisticated tuition discounting practices.

What explains the end of this era? The stagnation of family income in the United States is the more likely culprit than the tuition discount rate of higher education institutions. The College Board’s Trends in College Pricing 2014 notes, “With a deep recession followed by a recovery characterized by very slow increases in income, average income was lower in inflation-adjusted dollars in 2013 than it had been in 2003 for all but the highest-income families.” In light of family income conditions, Figure 4 illustrates that private nonprofit colleges and universities have held down tuition increases in real dollars in the years around the recent recession. A student starting college as a freshman in 2006-07 paid nearly the same (+4%) average net price of attendance as a student starting college as a freshman in 2010-11, as measured in constant dollars.^[6]

Affirming the limitations placed on tuition increases by the decline in median family income in the U.S., the National Center of Education Statistics shows that the out-of-pocket net price paid by full-time students in private, nonprofit 4-year institutions has increased more slowly than other higher education sectors. In constant dollars, out-of-pocket costs increased from $17,500 in 2003 to $18,100 2011-12, only 3.4% more than the real out-of-pocket costs a decade earlier.^[7] In the absence of increased funding from a key revenue source, U.S. family incomes, the private nonprofit sector in higher education relied on tuition pricing strategies and efficiencies to grow and maintain expenditures per FTE student over a dozen years.

The political economy of higher education favors a college funding model that improves access and diversity to college by funding and empowering individual student choice at a time when the social diversity and economic disparity of the college-going population is increasing. As the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities shows in its 9 Myths about Private Nonprofit Higher Education, the private nonprofit sector of higher education embraced the “demands and expectations” of the current market and political environment. Tuition dependency and tuition discounting, far from impoverishing private nonprofit institutions, fostered inclusion and opportunity for underrepresented and low income applicants, while affording the private higher education sector the resources to increase and then sustain core educational expenditures for its enrolled students.

In doing so, private colleges and universities largely weathered the recent decline in the high school graduate population and prepared themselves for the projected growth in college enrollments among underrepresented populations for the next ten years. If the efficiencies from tuition discounting and revenue maximization have plateaued, however, rather than redirect institutional priorities to the demands and expectations for “revenue growth” and “profits” with arbitrary decreases in tuition discounts, the next substantive challenge for the private nonprofit and mission-driven sector is to meet the demands and expectations for inclusive campus climates that foster broad success for the economically and socially diverse college students of the nation.

Part II Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

1. Gabriel E. Kaplan, “Institutions of Academic Governance and Institutional Theory: A Framework for Further Research,” in Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, Vol. XXI, J.C. Smart (ed.), (Spring, 2006), p. 213.↵

2. William G. Bowen, et al., Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2005); the work by Bowen et. al notes that, “Thomas Jefferson once stated that the foremost goal of American education must be to nurture the ‘natural aristocracy of talent and virtue.’” For a study of the educational mission of a private institution in response to public institutions that practiced racial discrimination during the 20th century, see Zachery R. Williams, In Search of the Talented Tenth: Howard University Public Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Race, 1926-1970 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009).↵

3. Debra E. Gerald and William J. Hussar, “Projections of Education Statistics to 2012,” Education Statistics Quarterly, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Fall 2002), 144-46. See Figure 4 (p. 7), Figure 11 (p. 11), and Table 1 (p. 12).↵

4. William J. Hussar and Tabitha M. Bailey, Projections of Education Statistics to 2022, Forty-First Edition (Feburary 2014), U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, NCES 2014-051, Table 12, 13, and 15. Available at http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2014/2014051.pdf.↵

5. Instruction, research, academic support, and student services.↵

6. Scott Ginder and Andrea Sykes, College Costs — A Decade of Change: 2002-03 to 2011-12, U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, NCES 2013-170. See Table 4b, average net price of attendance (in constant 2011-12 dollars) and percentage change for full-time, first-time undergraduate students receiving any grant or scholarship aid at Title IV institutions, by control and level of institution, and year: United States, academic years 2006-07 to 2010-11. At http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/2013170.pdf.↵

7. Laura Horn and Jonathan Paslov, Out-of-Pocket Net Price for College, U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, NCES 2014-902 (April 2014). At http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2014/2014902.pdf.↵

Given these challenges from disruptive conser-vators (the contrarians of disruptive inno-vators!), now is a great time to rethink the whole grant scheme in the United States. Why are Americans investing in proven solutions to social challenges in a piecemeal fashion designed to pit our localities and states against each other?

The Department of Labor Pathway Home program for reentry populations has a specific formula for minimum participants per total expenditure for awards. Ten thousand dollars ($10,000) per returning citizen:

The figure ($10,000 per head) is not pulled out of the thin blue air — the minimum establishes an expectation on the costs per parolee (per year) for reentry services. If we (the United States) already know the cost to reintegrate a person who has been incarcerated in our county or state penal systems, why are we not allocating dollars to the localities in the country most in need of funds to reduce recidivism…rather than awarding funds to the “best” grant applications (without context)?

Could we not tackle the problem from most severe conditions to least severe conditions (need), not the most well-written grant application to the least well-written grant application? In fact, in my time working in grant making, the Statement of Need has become less and less important in the selection / scoring criteria for federal grants. The areas or regions of the country most in need of funding to address national challenges are the least likely to receive grant funding designated by the U.S. Congress and Senate due to the implementation of the legislation by the executive branch — in the past and present. Below is an example (from July 2023):

Achieving Funding Equity for Chicago’s Underserved Communities in the Competitions for Grants

| Securing Funding for Chicago’s Residents |

In March 2023, Historia Research LLC started a monthly digest of grant opportunities and news for Illinois. One of the main objectives for the news digest is to support an equitable distribution of funding from grants of significant size (award ceiling) and competitiveness (multiple awards) to broadly benefit non-profit and social enterprise organizations around the state and, in particular, Chicago. Of course, no implication of funding bias is presumed — on a grant-by-grant basis, a public record of the number and quality of applications from Chicago or Illinois to federal, state or private sources does not exist.*

Thus, funding equity for Illinois and Chicago depends foremost on the agency of nonprofits, social activists, community organizers, grant writers, and elected officials. One first step is to disseminate far and wide the competitive grant opportunities available from federal, state, and philanthropic sources. A second step is to foster a collaborative culture to forge partnerships and maximize funding to support multi-faceted, efficacious project design proposals with sustainable outcomes. A third step is for grant writers and professionals to elevate the quality of applications to ensure that Chicago and Illinois have a fair chance to be awarded competitive grant funding.

Our monthly grant opportunity and news digests endeavor to contribute in a small way to these three goals: building grant awareness; fostering grant partnerships; and, improving grant applications from Chicago and Illinois.

Statement of Need | A Case Study in Reentry Program Funding

Beginning in 2020, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) has funded the Pathway Homes program annually: PH1 (2020), PH2 (2021), PH3 (2022), and PH4 (2023). DOL’s Pathway Homes program provides “the resources needed to improve employability outcomes for adults during the reentry process from incarceration.” Based on a pilot program that ended in 2018, Pathway Home grants fund evidence based practices with the “potential for breaking the cycle of recidivism by linking participants to an employment case manager while still in jail—and then continuing with the same case manager post-release.” The federal grant program is a highly structured request for applications with numerous required activities that circumscribe project design proposals based on the Linking Employment Activities Pre-Release (LEAP) pilot study from 2018.

While grants applications are inherently competitive, DOL more or less seeks grantees from across the nation that have the financial, professional, humane, and aspirational resources to execute new programs that adhere to the 2018 pilot study. The organizational capacity to execute a new program based on the pilot program likely outweighs novel and experimental project designs to address obdurate social and economic challenges for the reentry population. If a critical mass of Chicago and Illinois applicants stepped forward for funding from the Pathway Home grant, one reasonably may expect that Illinois would receive an equitable share of the federal allocations for DOL’s Pathway Home reentry programs.

Table 1 | DOL Pathway Home Grant Awards by Year and State

In the past four years, the DOL has awarded $225 million in grant funds for Pathway Home programs in 33 states plus the District of Columbia. Notably, not one organization in seventeen states received funding during the past four years ($0). Most notably, no organizations in Texas, the state with the nation’s largest prison population (over 133,000), received Pathway Home funding in the past four years. In contrast, New York organizations received nearly $20 million (30,000+ prisoners),** Florida organizations received $17.5 million (80,000+ prisoners), Ohio organizations took in just shy of $16 million (45,000+ prisoners), and Wisconsin organizations were awarded nearly $13 million (20,000+ prisoners). In addition, Wyoming organizations, serving only 2,000+ prisoners in total, received nearly $4 million in funding — almost $2,000 per prisoner in the state (U.S. DOJ, 2022). While none of these figures indicate inequity in the allocation of Pathway Home grant funds, the allocations do suggest that competitive grant funds for programs to serve incarcerated and reentry populations do not necessarily flow proportionately to the states with the largest prison populations or greatest need.

Illinois has the eleventh largest prison population (28,475) in the nation (U.S. DOJ, 2022). One Illinois organization has received Pathway Home funding, albeit the second lowest award ever announced by the DOL ($849,999) and in the fourth year of the program (PH4). In addition — as one of the nuances for tracking the organizations and citizens who benefit from Pathway Home grant funding — New York University won a $4 million award in year 2 (PH2) to collaborate with the Illinois Department of Corrections on a project for 28 counties in the southern most tip of Illinois.** Although credited to the State of New York, the reentry population in southern Illinois is the direct beneficiary of the grant program. As a result, Illinois has nearly $5 million of grant funding from the DOL Pathway Home program. A more generous allotment for the reentry population than one single award to an Illinois organization suggests, but nonetheless only one-third the grant funding allocated to New York’s reentry population following the interstate adjustment.

The City of Chicago and other major diverse cities in Illinois are nonetheless grossly underfunded. As of June 30, 2022, the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) reported a snapshot headcount of 29,245 inmates. Cook County, home to the City of Chicago, represented an estimated 12,474 of the state prisoners (42.7%). Moreover, Cook County inmates in state prisons are primarily Black (73.5%) or Hispanic (17.9%). By comparison, inmates in state prisons from other Illinois counties are 50.7% white. In addition, as of the same snapshot date, Cook County is home to 8,377 (43%) of the state’s 19,466 parolee population. Similarly, the Cook County parolees are 72.1% Black and 16.7% Hispanic, while state parolees in Illinois counties aside from Cook County are 48.1% white (IDOC, 2022). None of the funding flowing through New York University favors the reentry population in Chicago — nor the reentry populations in any of the ten largest cities in Illinois such as Aurora, Rockford, Peoria or Joliet.

Whereas the City of Chicago may now benefit from a Pathway Home 4 grant from 2023, the impact will be nominal for the overall reentry population. The Pathway Home grants anticipate $10,000 of services per prisoner/parolee — $1 million is expected to serve 100 former inmates and $4 million is expected to serve 400 former inmates (minimum requirements, NOFO, page 5). The NYU consortium explicitly states its plan to benefit 400 individuals from the 2,787 incarcerated persons (62% white) from the 28 counties in southern Illinois (PH2). The recent PH4 grant to a Chicago-based organization may benefit 100 of the 12,474 current inmates and 8,377 parolees (90% Black or Hispanic) from Cook County (IDOC, 2022)***. The Chicago-based organization could elect to serve more former inmates than required by the grant (minimum 100 participants for $850,000), but Chicago’s reentry population will then receive on average a lower investment in reentry services per participant than the reentry population in southern Illinois or entire states like Wyoming.

Generally, $225 million in federal funding for reentry populations has been allocated inequitably to Illinois and within Illinois. DOL’s Pathway Home program has underfunded the largest reentry populations from the major counties and cities in Illinois, including Cook County and Chicago. Again, this is not to impugn the competitive grant process managed by the federal government. In short, our intent is to suggest that some federal grants are of size and significance for the City of Chicago and for the State of Illinois to warrant strategic and coordinated efforts to win an equitable share of the federal grant awards.

What Is To Be Done?

The DOL’s Pathway Home grant notice states:

• “The purpose of this program is to provide eligible incarcerated individuals in men’s and women’s state correctional facilities or local or county jails with workforce services prior to release and to continue services after release by transitioning the participants into reentry programs in the communities to which they will return. These grants are job-driven and build connections to local employers that will enable returning citizens to secure employment, while advancing equity for individuals facing significant barriers to labor market reentry, including incarcerated women and communities of color.”

The Diversity and Disparity Project at Brown University, a study of residential segregation across the nation, finds that Chicago is America’s fifth most segregated city for Black residents and the sixth most segregated city for Hispanic and Latinx residents (Logan and Stults, 2021). Most incarcerated individuals from Chicago originate from historically redlined, disinvested, and overpoliced communities of color. The concepts of “transitioning” and “reentry programs” expect former inmates and parolees returning to Chicago to rejoin the structural inequities of racism that limited access to jobs, connections to local employers, and labor markets prior to their incarcerations. Paradoxically, a major federal program to support reentry populations across the nation perpetuates the historical disinvestment from communities of color in Chicago and Illinois, undermining the grant’s priority to mitigate recidivism among former prisoners. In effect, the DOL Pathway Home program fails the vast majority of Chicago’s reentry population from predominantly Black and Hispanic communities, forcing formerly incarcerated individuals to confront social determinants of recidivism and to figure out release, secure employment, and significant barriers to reintegration on their own.

According to the most recent DOL Pathway Home notice of funding opportunity, the organizations eligible to apply include:

• Private or public non-profit organizations…

• Public institutions of higher education…

• Nonprofit post-secondary education institutions with or without 501(c)(3) status…

• State or local governments…

• State and local workforce boards…

• Unions, labor, or labor management organizations; and…

• Non-profit industry organizations.

According to DOL records for Pathway Home funding, only one Illinois public institution or nonprofit organization — from this comprehensive list of eligible applicants — submitted a funding-worthy proposal in the past four years. This fact alone suggests that Chicago and urban centers in Illinois have missed opportunities to reduce recidivism in major urban centers due to a lack of applications, a surfeit of partnerships to support reentry populations, or a deficiency in the quality of applications submitted to support formerly incarcerated individuals.

To wit, first, the Office of the Mayor for the City of Chicago and the Cook County Government apparently did not submit one winning application during the past four years despite being eligible as a state or local government.**** Second, the one Chicago-based organization that won a Pathway Home award requested the minimal amount to serve 100 inmates — perhaps reflecting a lack of partnerships to maximize funding at $4 million in order to serve at least 400 inmates from Cook County and Chicago. Third, aside from the one Chicago awardee, the project narratives submitted by grant writers and professionals presumably did not demonstrate in the statements of need or project designs that their clients have the expertise and capacity to reduce recidivism in Chicago. Lastly, Chicago’s Congressional representatives and its U.S. senators seemingly have neglected to conduct oversight to ensure that Chicago and Cook County are equitably funded by the DOL’s reentry programs to serve former inmates.

It is hard to believe that there are no Illinois-based government institutions or nonprofit organizations — as lead applicants — worthy of maximal funding and capable of reducing recidivism with a DOL Pathway Home grant to support former inmates from the ten largest cities in Illinois. And, preeminently, Chicago. Thus, we hope the monthly grant opportunity and news digests build awareness, foster partnerships, and in the long run improve applications for federal grants designed to benefit underserved communities in Chicago and Illinois. Given these three outcomes under our control, grant professionals from Illinois then may expect that elected officials in Chicago and Illinois do more to ensure that Chicago’s residents receive an equitable share of federal funding from competitive programs designed to support local reentry populations and reduce recidivism.

Notes:

* Historia Research LLC has served as a grant writer for several DOL applications, including Pathway Home.

** As discussed below, PH2 awarded $4 million dollars to New York University to support a program serving southern Illinois.

*** The abstracts for the Pathway Home 4 programs are not available as of this post. The Chicago-based organization may have won an award to serve reentry populations outside of Chicago and Cook County.

**** Cook County and the City of Chicago have dedicated other funds to support reentry populations. In 2021, the City of Chicago organized an Interagency Reentry Council and subsequently published “A Roadmap for a Second Chance City” report to recommend the creation of a “one-stop shop connecting individuals with housing, workforce resources, healthcare, and other tools upon release” (City of Chicago, 2021). In 2023, Cook County announced funding from the American Rescue Plan for “a reentry initiative that will provide rental assistance and wraparound support services to residents returning to Cook County from periods of incarceration” (Cook County, 2023). At $10,000 per returning resident according to the Pathway Home grant funding minimum formulas, Cook County and Chicago require about $80,000,000 to $100,000,000 of funding annually to serve 8,000+ parolees.

I did not intend to uncover the ideological origins of “the crisis” in higher education when I first started to write Honors of Inequality: How Colleges Work for Some. I stumbled upon the crisis as an ancillary outcome of a half-century effort of conservatives to assert control over higher education. I was at first fascinated by the fact that the professional associations of the modern disciplines for historians, economists, sociologists, and other social scientists first organized in the late 1800s, or about 150 years ago. By comparison, the academic study of higher education as an institutional or cultural phenomenon is much more recent, arguably the late 1950s and later. More exactly, the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) formed less than fifty years ago in 1976.

Honors of Inequality delves into the origins and key contributions to the scholarship about American higher education during the last half of the twentieth century. It was no accident that higher education as a field of study emerged in the decade following the professional organization of administrative researchers, the implementation of the California Master Plan, and the student unrest on campuses in the mid-to-late 1960s America.

Clark Kerr, former president of the University of California, once observed that “the essential conservatism of faculty members about their own affairs” dominates the governance of American university campuses. Key facets of that conservatism are evident in the literature on how colleges work that tenured faculty have written. In a critical history of higher education as a field of study, I seek to uncover the ideological, political, social, and cultural commitments that motivated early scholars and to offer significant insights—to college-goers, parents, faculty, administrators, policymakers, legislators, and the many other stakeholders in higher education—into the reason that colleges remain powerful instruments for shaping social and economic inequality in the early twenty-first century.

The power to define what counts and what does not count as scholarship for higher education policymakers created the opportunity for faculty to exercise substantial control over the direction of college and university life after 1970. Most Americans wisely question the premise that industry experts are best qualified to define the policies to self-regulate their industries (oilmen over the energy industry, bankers over the finance industry, etc.) because self-interests outweigh national interests. Yet, Americans rarely question why scholars with faculty tenure are the wisest, best suited persons to define national, state and local policies for postsecondary education.

Scholars of higher education argue that higher education is in a crisis and has always been in a crisis that will only be addressed by self-regulation: institutional autonomy. The following is an afterword from February 2020 about the recurring themes of crisis and institutional autonomy in higher education literature.

Honors of Inequality | An Afterword for Readers

Honors of Inequality: How Colleges Work for Some is a historical narrative with the plot structure of a Tragedy. In the final analysis, it tells a history about the origins of the college student loan debt crisis that currently threatens higher education in the United States of America. Obviously, I count myself squarely in the camp that perceives the accumulation of college student loan debt in America as a crisis that is unsustainable in the long term for our system of higher education.

Clearly, this crisis did not exist sixty years ago, when my history of higher education as a field of study begins, or forty-five years ago, when the Association for the Study of Higher Education organized. A history of a national system of higher education that moves from a time when there was no crisis to a time when the crisis has become evident to many is perfectly suited to a tragic plot structure. The Preface is not explicit on this point. I wanted readers to witness the journey I took from an interest in the history of an obscure profession to the origins of the federal system of student loans for higher education.

My previous work, Outsourcing Student Success: The History of Institutional Research and the Future of Higher Education, is similarly a historical narrative with a plot structure of a Tragedy, albeit one with a rise and decline. It tells the history of a profession that many inside and outside of higher education would not otherwise know about. An original contribution to the literature, I believe, the history shows that the field of institutional research arose from a movement to apply scientific principles to the study of higher education, which then integrated with the movement to democratize higher education (Truman Commission). In this respect, it is a positive and hopeful review of the profession’s beginnings.

Events then took a turn for the worse and the profession has faced numerous challenges during the past fifty years. These challenges originate with the formation of a national association for practitioners and an official document written by two of its earliest presidents who declared: “institutional research should not be expected to produce knowledge of pervasive and lasting significance.” My text does not attack institutional research or institutional researchers in these words; it cites several leaders of the national association who have written such things in the past. Unfortunately, my work has been mischaracterized as “criticism” of the profession and it has had limited exposure to practitioners who may benefit from reading the complete history.

I hope obviously that Honors of Inequality does not suffer the same fate for its intended readers. As I note in the Preface, however, many will find the text or tone “exasperating.” Some will likely become “frustrated” with the narrative’s journey and debark before it reaches its destination. If you reach the end, I wish to explain a few of the bumps and potholes you may have felt along the way.

I begin by saying that “ideas matter” and I use the terms “ideology” and “ideological” repeatedly. I do not intend to suggest that others have ideology whereas I do not. Throughout the work, I reference Hayden White’s Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in 19th-Century History (2014 [1973]) as a method to analyze the ideology operative in higher education as a field of study. His method of analysis works equally well on my ideological proclivities.

White defines four archetypal historical narratives. Both of my histories on aspects of higher education aspire toward one archetype: Tragic (plot), Mechanistic (argument), and Radical (ideological implication) historical narratives (White capitalizes each of these terms). Tragic as explained above, but also Mechanistic: the “moral philosophy of institutional autonomy” articulated with anti-intellectualism, the community-consciousness of scholars, faculty’s class interests, economists’ student loan scheme, and the elite functions of higher education for the ruling class, ultimately, to produce a chain of events that transformed the American system of higher education into an perpetual motion engine of social and economic inequality.

A common critique of the archetypal historical narrative I adopt is that it is reductivist and deterministic, making events appear to be outside of the control of the historical agents. To counter this critique, I cite numerous scholars, mostly dead but some living, to build the narrative because they offered concise, elegant expressions of the ideological origins of higher education as a field of study, including the scholarship on institutional research. Nonetheless, none of these scholars worked alone.

Many of these scholars co-authored the articles I cite. The articles appeared in edited volumes with the approval of still more scholars. Publication committees selected some articles for reprint as the gems of an annual conference’s papers. The directors of the new institutes for the study of higher education or the corporate-funded foundations wrote the prefaces to book-length manuscripts. Association leaders commissioned still other documents to be presented as official doctrine or policy. Literally, hundreds if not thousands of scholars, editors, institute directors, corporate foundation heads, members of publication committees, and association leaders contributed to the direction of higher education as a field of study and the consensus paradigm for institutional research during the past 55 to 60 years.

One way in which I have sought to set up the Radical ideological implication of my two histories is to emulate the discourse of the scholars of higher education as a field of study. For Outsourcing Student Success, I have read and cited several vitriolic texts that denounced institutional research as an ideology to foist a “managerial revolution” on higher education. I read so many of Paul L. Dressel’s (Michigan State University) satirical dismissals of serious scholarship and scientific inquiry that I do not wish such cruelty upon anyone else, even those determined to sift through his materials to refute my argument. Indeed, a colleague once marveled at Dressel’s harsh “rhetoric of academic self-hate” and the “many critical and unpleasant things” he could put into one text.

The endless litany of articles, in the tradition of Cameron Fincher (University of Georgia), that claimed to demonstrate that institutional research is “an art, not a science” strain credulity—at the time and to this day. And, not least of all, the desideratum of the leadership of the national association for fifty years—that institutional research is learned on the job and does not require an academic discipline—recurred over and over in a dozen different forums when practitioners questioned the drift of the profession as defined by scholars’ consensus paradigm.

When I shifted to the study of the origins of higher education as a field of study, I soon encountered a body of literature rife with scurrilous assessments (Francis R. Rourke, John Hopkins University) and ominous denunciations (Merritt M. Chambers, Indiana University) of administration. This time, from my graduate studies, I knew of one origin for the tenor of the literature: Thorstein Veblen. Veblen regarded “the culture of business enterprise,” its managerial ethos, to be anathema to higher learning, the pursuits of knowledge by scholars and students.

I did not expect to find Paul Goodman’s stirring call to action for students and teachers to purge the colleges and universities of the “plague” of administration, but also their own “administrative mentality…the peculiar disease of modern Administration.” At the time of Goodman’s death in 1972, retrospectives emphasized his influence and admiration among the generation of scholars who came of age in the 1960s. The invective is not in the past, it has persisted until the present era in which administrators are accused of engaging in a “shell game” with students’ tuition by advancing “uncaring and unethical policies, which are also bordering on illegal practices” (Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, March 7, 2016).

Although scholars and faculty have stoked the tradition of animosity for trustees, executives, and administration for nearly one hundred years now, they largely try to bury the (comparable) divisiveness that once existed in academic circles.

Veblen made an important distinction between “faculty” and “schoolmasters” in higher education. The former is a type of student committed to “the higher learning,” whereas the latter is a type of teacher beholden to “worldly wisdom.” As Veblen warned one hundred years ago, faculty and the higher learning ran the risk of succumbing to the values and priorities of schoolmasters: “the university man (graduate faculty) is properly, a student, not a schoolmaster.” Later, Goodman questioned the manliness and maturity of the community of scholars: “The scholars are not acting, not being men; and therefore within the communities of scholars, there is very little education or growing up.”

Subsequently, the early scholars of higher education as a field of study betrayed their colleagues of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s when they determined that “institutional research should not be expected to produce knowledge of pervasive and lasting significance.” Lastly, the self-described conservative, Martin Trow (University of California), scribbled diligently to protect the elite, autonomous functions of higher education that “shape the mind and character of the ruling class” against the baneful tide of mass and universal higher education.

I am unable to count the number of times that I came across an article in which an academic scholar proclaimed an impending crisis that threatened to destroy the very nature of higher education during the past sixty years. Crisis and conflict may be the first two memes of the culture of higher education scholarship. In that tradition, my Radical solution to the plight of institutional research is that its practitioners take back control of their association and dedicate their resources to the scientific study of higher learning and its administration; scholars of higher education as a field of study rejected this line of inquiry fifty years ago and it remains open to those who are best positioned to take the initiative.

Likewise, my Radical solutions to the impending student loan debt crisis are completely in line with the tone and urgency of the literature, past and present. In fact, without spoiling the conclusion, I must acknowledge that I borrowed one conceptual solution popularized by Veblen, Goodman, and the scholars who continue to publish articles under the same school of thought: we simply need to go to the organ responsible for the irritation to lop off the source of the current crisis and stop its “propagandist intrigue” in higher education. I certainly am not alone in writing a text about a crisis in higher education, the conflict inherent to the business enterprise of higher education, and the extraordinary means necessary to correct the course of history.

So, who are the intended readers for Honors of Inequality? Despite the subject matter and all of its stylistic consistencies with the scholarship of higher education as a field of study, I do not aspire to reach those scholars comfortably ensconced in their ivory tower.

My hope is that this text finds the faculty, true scholars, who esteem higher learning and social justice above the elitist priority to shape the mind and character of the American ruling class. Or the college students who question the vacuous concept of academic freedom as “a privileged sanctuary for the whole spectrum of ideas,” or “a free market in thought” (Robert O. Berdahl, University of Maryland), that promotes and protects the threatening speeches of white male supremacists on American campuses—without regard for higher learning and at the students’ expense (tuition). Or the college graduates who incur $50,000 or more in federal student loan debt in order to pursue the higher learning in America and to obtain an advanced degree in the field of their own choice without practical regard for the priorities of business competencies or return on investment. Or the administrators who struggle to find enjoyment in their work on behalf of American college students due to the daily onslaught of antipathy for data expertise, centralization, organizational management, statewide planning, institutional effectiveness, “administrative mentality,” “linear thinking,” and intellectualism in college administration.

Hayden White defined four archetypes of ideological implication: Conservative, Anarchist, Liberal, and Radical. As Clark Kerr, former president of the University of California, wrote, “The essential conservatism of faculty members about their own affairs is certainly one reason” that reforms failed in higher education during the late twentieth century. The Anarchist reformers behind the student protests and movements of the 1960s achieved a few lasting reforms to college administration, favorable to the conservatism of faculty, but eventually splintered and fell apart against the inertia of academic culture. The Liberal reformers retreated to the side of Conservatism when “‘the incipient revolt’ of students,” as Kerr called it, retrogressed into violent antiwar protests and campus “shootings” by law-enforcement authorities. By the 1980s, Conservative forces prevailed on America’s college campuses and in Washington, D.C., where the federal student loan system took shape. Not surprisingly, Kerr foresaw that the most likely outcome for the twenty-first century would be more conservatism: “more commitment to the status quo—the status quo is the only solution that cannot be vetoed.”

So, perhaps, it is time to let the Radical ideological implication have a go at higher education reform—there is nothing left to lose but the status quo.

Postscript: I invite all to read Martin Trow’s obituary at the New York Times from 2007. The homage leaves out his repeated statements about the elite and autonomous functions of higher education for the ruling class and his vocal opposition to the organization of the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley in 1969, but is consistent with my characterization of him. Chapters 8 and 9 of Honors of Inequality describe how his self-avowed Conservativism influenced higher education in America during the late twentieth century.

The book primarily examines the records and deeds of Sĭddrah, an untested adventurer from Naxos sent by the Councils of the Provenance to investigate troubling disturbances and mysterious events in the waning decades of the Arcane Age. A meticulous and copious chronicler for her time, Sĭddrah’s papers provide an unequaled window into the motivations and aspirations that animated the enchanting individuals who defined the period. Supported by a small band of extraordinary characters, each drawn to the edge of the empire for a private cause, the eastern cleric and her associates exposed a plot to undermine the Provenance and tear down the first republican government in recorded history.

As I said upon its release, “This work has given me an opportunity to bring together my training as a professional historian and my fascination with the arcane peoples and their classical powers. Scholars largely have neglected the origins of democracy and enlightenment in the Provenance. For many years, this field of historical study has been hamstrung by the notion that the arcane past was a largely primitive and relatively inhuman age favorable to monarchs and despots. Nothing could be further from the truth. No people dedicated themselves to the ideals of self-governance or exemplified the virtues of enlightenment from higher education more so than the cultures of the Arcane Age.”

Read Chapter 4…

FOUR | LIFE ON THE WAYFARERS’ TRAIL

“The High Council chooses to meddle in our affairs by sending us an untested mercenary who lacks the good sense for urgency!”

The first line of Sĭddrah’s preliminary report to the council members of the Provenance quotes the gatekeeper of the Akropolis. The caustic words addressed to Sĭddrah, after nearly six months of travails that began in the city of Naxos, dismissed the journey that carried her to Pallene, Libuwa, and Agrinio before arriving at the fortress located under the shadowy spires of the mountain, Eurynome. The derogatory remark grated on her tattered nerves and stung her pride.

During the final seven weeks, in a caravan with a mix of merchants and settlers out of Agrinio, the trek proved to be particularly harrowing for a young cleric who never before ventured beyond the relatively peaceful districts of the eastern Provenance. A diligent student of the classical powers of healing, who studied under one of the highest ranking members of the High Council, Sĭddrah completed her apprenticeship in arcane philosophy with an impressive mark.[1] Nonetheless, it is likely that no amount of training ever prepared a person for the experiences endured in travel through the Provenance, the settled lands of the Demesne, to the margins of the Limen, the unsettling territory at the horizon of the known world.

In some sense, the unpleasantness of life in arcane history is difficult to explain and, therefore, beyond empathy for the modern reader. In popular culture, two basic stock images of the early peoples of the Demesne dominate our imagination. The common trope for nobles depicts the wealthiest persons as embodiments of a carefree and dissipated culture that foretold the end of the Arcane Age. Bedecked in tights and crinolines, or barely clothed in white sheets and sashes, the so-called nobles of the era earned the reputations of jesters who faced no real hardships other than the caprice of love. For the lower classes, popular prejudices prefer to caricature the peasants as a people so vapid as to warrant the station of their lives or beggars so dishonest as to invite the pestilence of their lot.

Popular film often provides a comical glimpse into the lives of our Arcane Age ancestors. Nobles, even when imperiled by a deadly foe, conduct themselves like the “untouchable few” who relished a duel as a chance to evidence their invincibility and to earn vindication for a life of frivolity. The hapless peasants, alone in the woods, defended only by a roof and a hoe, live as if oblivious to the impending dangers of marauders or magical beasts that lurk just beyond the invisible, unprotected property line of their bucolic homesteads. In short, our ancestors seem to us like children at play, making merry or building quaint little farmsteads without awareness of the gravity of life in a violent, fantastic world.[2]

In fact, the conditions of life in the Demesne during the Arcane Age approached the exact opposite of the two popular stereotypes—“the terror of consciousness,” to quote the clever phrase of Sal J. LeHonre.[3] Picture, first, a world saturated with the howling shadows of hungry, supernatural predators and, second, a life submerged in an unspeakable, grim desperation for survival. Then, imagine a people who were wise enough to recognize the former, yet sturdy enough to hope for the latter. Even this description fails to illustrate sufficiently the harrowing life that commoners and arcanists awoke to each morning on the borders of the Limen.

Coerced, sullen, and dauntless—despite the obvious comfort that the eastern capitals afforded—the citizens of the Provenance sallied forth to resettle the cities of the Demesne lost during the Glorious Revolution. A simple hope motivated most migrants: to reestablish communities along the major arteries of trade in the Demesne and earn for themselves a modest living.

Few dared to travel alone, or even in small groups, without thorough knowledge of the dangerous land between the origin and the destination of the long treks through the wilderness. Thus, on behalf of commoners, the People’s Council of the Provenance demanded, and received, legislation to reorganize the Hekatomononkheire, the Preternatural Age corps of mercenaries that once held the peasantry hostage to the godheads and the land.[4]

The Heks, as they affectionately came to be known in the Arcane Age, accompanied settlers and merchants who delivered messages, proclamations, and supplies from city to city. On the twenty-third day of each month, the cities provided an armed escort, free of charge, to all merchants and wayfarers—including the wingless arcanists—traveling between two cities.

A dutiful apprentice who aspired to political life and membership in the High Council, Sĭddrah’s mentor shocked her with the news of her immediate appointment as an official attaché to the territorial governor—the Dunastês—of the Akropolis. Since her departure from Naxos, she traveled from the east as the official cleric of the Heks that guarded the goods and peoples moving between the western cities of the Provenance. All the while, she concealed the truth behind her assignment with the traveling mercenaries—the reason for her journey to the Akropolis—from her comrades in arms.

Sĭddrah admitted privately in her journal that the rationale behind the High Council’s selection escaped her. “An injustice appointed me to a nominal post in a faraway frontier settlement,” she recorded one harrowing evening during her journey.

Rarely, if ever in her estimation, had the councils sent a young cleric to the outskirts of the Provenance involuntarily. In practice, council liaisons came from members of the guilds who already resided, and often were raised, in the western cities. Citizens of the eastern metropolises knew well that the emotional duress of life along the Limen frequently broke the most promising apprentices, that is, those who excelled in the libraries but knew nothing of the magical beasts that ruled the wilderness. In recognition of these basic facts, the High Council routinely appointed adventurers who went west of their own volition, and only after demonstrating in advance the necessary mettle for an official post.

“If the Dunastês regarded timeliness of the essence, as the gatekeeper suggests,” Sĭddrah later recorded in her journal, “One more reason to have sent druids-in-winged-form[5] with word of an appointment for one of the many clerics already in the Akropolis!”[6]

Sĭddrah’s veiled swipe at the High Council suggests the lingering irritation she held for her appointment to the Akropolis—no less than her initial unease with the frightfulness of the Limen or the demands of combat in the wilderness. In her journey from Naxos, she witnessed “a great winged beast descend from the sky” to snatch a rotund, amiable merchant who fell behind the military contingent while removing a bottle of wine from his satchel. In the dark of night, one mercenary “simply disappeared” before daybreak, “leaving no sign of struggle in his makeshift shelter.” These two events she wrote down during the first, and safest, leg of the journey from Naxos to Pallene.

The Heks moved only as fast as its slowest, that is to say poorest, travelers. Though larger numbers of fellow travelers added additional weeks to the journey, smaller numbers invited mortal peril. Consequently, the wayfarers erred on the side of size and caution. Sĭddrah soon learned that the Heks moved cumbersomely, more often than not, due to “the families, shod in deficient footwear, who led overburdened pack mules on long treks between the cities of the Provenance.” The wealthy wayfarers sometimes made room on their carts for those who lacked adequate mounts or wagons, but the merchants routinely drove carts overladen with merchandise, often causing wheels or axles to break from the wear and tear of the unmaintainable roads of the western Provenance. Two weeks into her nearly half-year journey, Sĭddrah “already grew weary of urbane travelers who risked all to earn a pittance on the borders of the Limen.”

For the trek from Naxos to Pallene—where the great volcanic forges produced the best metals and precious goods in the Provenance—the merchants and their cartels maintained the roads in serviceable condition, far better than the western turnpikes in any case. Aside from the usual trifles described above, no incident slowed the troupe. The first leg of Sĭddrah’s journey took only three weeks to complete, permitting Sĭddrah time to rest in the Ferrous Mountain fortress for seven days before setting out on the next leg of her removal to the Akropolis. Her time in Pallene apparently held little interest for her, one surmises, since the notes in her journal neglected to record any of the events during her stay. Her first report to the High Council carried no news of Pallene, a further indication that the city of forges served as an unexceptional interval in her migration to the west.[7]

Out of Pallene, Sĭddrah again served as the cleric to the Heks that left for the Central Plains guarding “a small community of families who hoped to start a new life in agriculture near Libuwa.”

On this leg of the journey, as the veterans of the Heks predicted, she faced highwaymen for the first time. She also saw firsthand the horrific choices that the Wayfarers’ Trail frequently presented to the commoners. The veteran mercenaries warned that highwaymen often hid in the fields along the road to snatch any child who strayed too far from the escort. In most cases, the criminals threatened to garrote their prisoner on the spot unless the family paid some kind of ransom in exchange for the child’s release. In other instances, the outlaws simply sliced the abducted juvenile’s throat without any demand in order to make real the threat at other opportunities.

“With some form of wickedness,” Sĭddrah later observed, “the brigands seemed to know which families paid and which families favored their pitiful wealth over the life of a child.”

On the first occasion, a band of about a dozen criminals ransomed a young girl still in the first triskaidecade, or thirteen years, of her life. The parents, who “later admitted [to Sĭddrah] that they believe their daughter has potential as a druid,” turned over a small fortune in tableware to secure her return. A few days thereafter, a teenage boy, who in modesty separated from the caravan to urinate in private, fell into the clutches of another band of highway robbers. In this instance, the family claimed they had nothing of worth. After they humbly pleaded for their son’s release for several minutes, the standoff ended when the brigands garroted the boy, and then ran off into nearby woods.[8]

About three weeks out of Pallene, slowed by the harassment of criminals and the wayfarers’ persistent complaints about the pace of the march, a team of oxen that pulled a merchant’s cart startled and broke the tongue—the piece of wood extending between the oxen that hitched the animals to the cart. The merchant, who neglected to bring a spare tongue as required by the law, spent over an hour haggling with another merchant who wished to secure the best price for his spare tongue.

After the lengthy negotiation, that ended when “the captain of our Heks threatened to leave both merchants behind,” a wainwright—a wagon maker and mechanic who apparently traveled with the families moving to Libuwa—discovered that a flaw in the second merchant’s tongue needed to be mended before it secured properly to the first merchant’s oxen. A new round of negotiations ensued as the wainwright bartered with the merchant in compensation for services to be rendered. “The merchant paced with angry strides through our small encampment on the Demesne without regard for the needless delay he caused the caravan,” Sĭddrah noted. Even after the repairs started, the merchant further taxed the patience of the captain, “circling his broken cart and complaining loudly about the craftsmanship of the wainwright.”

After nearly three hours, “as if knowing that the company grew restive and inattentive,” a muscular griffin dropped from the skies above to pounce on the nattering merchant. The force of the flying lioness’s landing crushed “the loud-mouthed, brittle man” into the ground beneath her. “On this day, fate seemed to favor the migrants,” Sĭddrah recorded, since the griffin’s aquiline claws and beak failed to latch firmly into the merchant’s limp carcass. After dragging her prey for several bounds, a shower of cross bolts from the poised mercenaries forced the beast to release her bounty and “to flee back into the blue aether on her eagle-like wings.”

Sĭddrah rushed to the mangled man to discover that the unfortunate merchant continued to breathe, shallowly, if irregularly. Keeping her wits about her, she quickly called on her strongest power of healing to mend the broken bones protruding from the lacerated, bloodied skin of the merchant’s upper torso.

“No matter how often I shall hear it,” Sĭddrah entered in her journal, “I hope never to become accustomed to the sound of a body’s bones being crushed like the twigs of a tree.” She added, in contemplation of her clerical responsibilities to the peoples of the Provenance, “Nor, shall I relish the eerie sight of bones that protrude from flesh receding back into the body to reshape themselves in response to my spellcasting.”[9] In this, Sĭddrah shared with many nonhealers a peculiar apprehensiveness for the supernatural sight of an injury that quickly healed from the classical powers of clerics.

In fact, the incident introduced her to the life of a cleric near the borders of the Limen. Unlike today, the common folk did not strongly identify worship or religious life with the clerics. To be certain, the commoners venerated a great and generous healer and many clerics, as well, believed in the noble divination of their powers as the godheads had once proposed. Few commoners, however, befriended or joined with clerics to form faith communities. To a certain extent, both arcanists and commoners suspected—under their breaths—that clerics communed with death rather than divinity. More than a few naysayers cursed the healing class as necromancers.[10]

In the arcane conditions of life, death always seemed to be as near as the shadow of one’s body. As a result, most people of the Provenance felt no obligation to keep reminders of their fragile mortality closer than necessary. Consequently, when the pioneers from Pallene arrived in Libuwa, five weeks after their departure, the mercenaries and the travelers quickly paid respects to Sĭddrah, and then vanished into the bustle of the agrarian mecca. The merchant, who otherwise would have died from the wounds of the griffin, at the first opportunity slipped out of the caravan without a word of gratitude, aware that “no kindness or coin ever repaid the debt owed to a cleric.”[11]

The slow pace of the wayfarers and the all-too-frequent interruptions on the journey from Pallene forced Sĭddrah to linger in Libuwa. Three weeks passed before the next group of wayfarers left for Agrinio. In contrast to Pallene, Sĭddrah made the most of her stay in the “breadbasket” of the Provenance.

In her journal, she described a city that had become slightly more populous than the eastern capitals and bustled with activity from dawn until midnight. In the latter half of the Arcane Age, many men and women who served in the Heks eventually resettled in Libuwa to farm the plentiful, fertile lands of the Demesne. When the enterprising spirit of the people of the Provenance reorganized their Heks to escort travelers and entrepreneurs on their journeys between cities, the councils promised citizens who joined the forces plots of arable land or unfettered memberships in the cartels of the recovered cities in the west. The volunteers of the Heks needed only one year of service to collect a small pension, but the law permitted mercenaries to serve additional terms in return for larger allotments of land or cartel business.

As Sĭddrah learned, many novice mercenaries made notches in their crossbows to count the thirteen months of their tours, while “the true veterans” carved several years of service into their weapons. Despite the perilous nature of the duties, Sĭddrah found that “nearly two-thirds of my unit served three or more tours in order to collect the ripest fruits of their labors.”

For one year’s service, those fruits included livestock, one moirae of land to plant their seed,[12] and access to the city commons where the municipal mercenaries guarded the citizens’ grazing cattle. For each additional year, not to exceed seven, mercenaries received an additional moirae of land to till. Unsurprisingly, Libuwa teemed with former soldiers who once served the People’s Council since many current and former mercenaries aspired to be simple farmers. Additionally, more than a few fighters fresh out of their apprenticeship rushed from Pallene to Libuwa where the townspeople paid private guards handsomely to defend families working the fields by day or to protect herds in the commons by night.[13] Fighters, the arcanists who had the most in common with the former soldiers of the Heks, shared in the fabulous, if bellicose, stories of daring feats and near escapes from the many perils of the Wayfarers’ Trail.

Despite the benefits, few commoners aspired to a full seven years of service to the Heks. Historians often commit a disservice, to both the commoners who served in the travelers’ militias and to the arcanists who ventured into the Limen, by overstating the advantages that the classical powers granted in hand-to-hand combat: confusion created bedlam, wounds caused anguish, the sight of casualties produced horror, and combat ended in battle fatigue.

In isolation, the common mercenary posed little threat, but when disciplined in the right numbers, the commoners combined into formidable military units. The fifty heads and one hundred hands of the mercenaries of the Heks exercised frequently in order to become one of the most lethal forces in the Demesne. Coordinated as a unit, the mercenaries capably felled fully-grown gorgons who wildly charged wayfarers under their care during the long journeys between cities. Little wonder, even to the modern mind, why intelligent foes like the brigands sought first to divide and alienate the mercenaries of the Heks.

Among arcanists, spellcasters judiciously conserved their classical powers for what they called kairos—“the definitive or opportune moment” that determined the outcome of a contest.[14] All the same, before the kairos presented itself, wizards and druids, like rogues, often found themselves engaged in close combat when an enemy rushed adversaries in hopes of delivering a quick, deadly blow. Such as it was, spellcasters rarely escaped a conflict without damage.

On the other hand, the combat classes, the fighters and rangers in particular, acquired impressive feats to increase their defenses against an enemy’s strike and honed skills to augment the force of their own assaults. Even then, the classical powers provided only marginal returns on the probabilities of victory in battle. The lowliest fighters rushed into the middle of most scrums where the frequency of the attacks negated the advantages of their combat wisdom.

In a word, no one escaped the anguish of injuries or took lightly the wretched, inescapable shadow of mortality.

The Libuwan veterans coped with danger and the horror of personal memories in a manner that the modern world still appreciates. “Most drank heartily in their youth, and drank more heartily thereafter,” Sĭddrah observed. On the other hand, the arcane peoples cherished their freedoms, and their conversations “often preoccupied them in endless debates over the Councils of the Provenance or in the experiment in self-governance that the militia protected so fervently.” Deep into the morning hours, “the streets of Libuwa resounded with the responsibilities of citizenship and the honor of defending our liberties from the abuses and usurpation of domestic and foreign tyrants.” The former Heks soldiers repeated tall tales of combat on the roads between the cities, until the tavern keepers refused to pour “the treasures of Libuwa’s fermented grains” into another emptied stein.[15]

After her departure—a reluctant departure from the city of libations—Sĭddrah experienced for herself the bonds that combat in defense of liberty created in the western Provenance. Her first night on the road to Agrinio, while sitting at the bonfire near the center of the encircled merchants’ carts, a middle-aged dwarf sidled up to Sĭddrah to talk about the long hike before them. Szrah Dehrmick, she introduced herself, a fighter born and raised in Pallene. In the firelight, Sĭddrah noticed that Szrah’s face, neck, and exposed forearms bore an unusual number of scars, presumably from her many battles in the wilderness—nonetheless unusual, Sĭddrah noted, “given that cleric’s spells healed completely without any disfigurement to the skin.”

After several minutes of meaningless banter, the conversation turned to the potential dangers of the forests near the lakes of Agrinian territory. Her right hand firmly rubbing one of the largest, rosiest scars on her left forearm, Szrah warned Sĭddrah about the chaos of battle and counseled the cleric about the duties of healing in the midst of conflict.

Before leaving Naxos, of course, Sĭddrah studied the protocols of triage for the Heks at the library for her guild. “Heal mercenaries, arcanists, and commoners, in that order—and commoners, only, when able to prevent death or permanent injury,” Sĭddrah recalled. Clerics possessed limited powers to heal, especially those who had not yet benefited from frequent conflicts on the Wayfarers’ Trail or in the Limen. Like all clerics, once Sĭddrah exhausted her daily powers, she only provided the comfort that common medical remedies and homeopathic treatment offered, until able to replenish her arcane healing abilities with rest and meditation.

The moment Sĭddrah spoke up about her duties, the dwarf abruptly stood to share her colorful thoughts on the protocols of clerical triage. Szrah sneered at the cleric, “Only a fool heals a common mercenary while a veteran arcanist—a warrior of Pallene—suffers in pitiful agony.” With that parting advice, the fighter rudely excused herself.

Sĭddrah gave little thought to the dwarf at the time, still relatively naïve to the personal dilemmas that the protocols of triage placed on clerics. Eleven days later, far beyond the settled lands of Libuwa, about midway to Agrinio where the narrow road twisted through the thick forests, an assault by an aggressive ring of brigands immersed Sĭddrah in the clamor of battle, initiating her in the moral quandaries that earned clerics their complicated reputations.

Brigands, like most peoples of the Provenance, moved during the day, wisely in fear of the many powerful creatures that owned the night. It suited their needs in any case, because the goods and peoples under the care of the Heks circled their wagons to establish a defensive position at night. On the road at midday, however, the caravans stretched into a makeshift train along the roads, rendering the wayfarers more vulnerable to a well-devised attack.

On that day, scouts at the head of the caravan of merchants and mercenaries failed to spot a massive log ominously floating in the forest canopy about thirty strides from the road. “Secured to sturdy limbs of fir trees by four heavy ropes, two on each side of the road, the log descended like a deadly bob on a massive pendulum,” Sĭddrah recounted to the councils. The unexpected, chilling crack of thick branches high above caused the procession of carts to come to an immediate standstill—perfectly positioning a merchant and her family in the path of the swinging log as it accelerated toward its target. Before its victims had a chance to scream, the improvised weapon ripped through the merchant’s wagon, flinging her and her family into the dark forest, scattering her merchandise to the winds.

After the log began its deadly swing back across the road, effectively dividing the mercenaries and caravan in two, arrows whistled from out of the underbrush of the forest from one side of the road. The captain stumbled backward in the same moment, “pierced by three arrows as another baker’s dozen hit the soft mud all around her.” A hideous battle cry resounded through the forest as the bandits raced from their hiding places in the bushes to engage the startled mercenaries in hand-to-hand combat.

As the assailants rushed from their forest cover, Sĭddrah recalled her first triage event in these terms:

I dashed to the side of my captain who fell supine to the ground audibly wincing in pain. I quickly appraised the severity of the wounds: one arrow entered her shoulder from a gap in the front of the armor and protruded from her back; another arrow passed completely through her leg beneath the kneecap, severing the sinew; a third lodged itself beneath her breastplate. The captain was dying. The protocols required that I heal her, but I dared not until I removed the shafts of the embedded arrows. I snapped the head of the first and pulled the shaft back through the front of her shoulder, allowing blood to flow freely from the wound.

Before I was able to force the third arrow through the ribs and flesh in her back, a bandit surged at me with his short blade. I grasped for my morning star to defend myself, when the bandit’s sword cut into my upper left arm and rendered my favored blade-hand useless. I stumbled and fell back onto the dirt road. The bandit emphatically drew his weapon arm back to deliver the coup de grâce, his face contorted in a scornful scowl of triumph.

Just as I surrendered to the notion of an early death, a throwing axe whizzed through the Aether above me. I watched, stunned, when the axe sunk deep into the brigand’s head. A critical blow. My foe crumpled to the ground before me.

I caught sight of Szrah Dehrmick charging again into the fray, still glaring at me as she did at the end of our discussion the night before. I jumped to my feet with my morning star drawn in my weak hand, spinning round in fear of further assaults from behind. I had no regard for the life of the captain between [my] heart beats.

Only after I regained my composure, I returned to the side of the captain. Kneeling, with my weapon handily by my side, I clumsily removed the breastplate and forced the head of the third arrow out of her back. Lodged deep in the captain’s chest, I failed to snap the head of the arrow off on my first attempt. I did not wish to lose another precious moment, so I grabbed the tip of the arrow to yank the shaft and feathers clean through her chest. The captain hollered with agony.

At last, I cast my spell, determined to ignore the pain in my damaged left arm. In an instance, several splinters from the arrows’ shafts oozed out of the captain’s wounds. The visible holes in her chest, shoulder, and knee healed perfectly. Without a second thought, as if the deadly injuries never happened, our leader sprang to her feet to rally her soldiers.[16]

With the captain restored and the troops reorganized, the brigands melted back into the lush woods with whatever booty they could carry in their arms. Sĭddrah marveled at the efficiency of the thieves who collected the merchandise and coin bags from the demolished merchant’s cart from the forest floor before sprinting back into the woods.[17]

The casualties from the attack were not minimal. Three mercenaries of the Heks and the five members of the merchant’s family, including her husband and children, died in the attack. The mercenaries counted twelve other casualties, with a few suffering from near mortal wounds. Four wayfarers also lie near death. In addition, Szrah writhed on the ground, tormented by a dagger sunk to the hilt into her chest just above her right breast.

Sĭddrah knew immediately that she did not have the resources to heal all of the wounded; at this time, she had only a handful of opportunities to draw on the classical powers each day. Following her training, she healed two mercenaries who appeared to be closest to death. Two others she tended with a less powerful spell that returned them from the brink, but failed to fully eliminate the damage. For the others, including the critically wounded commoners, she attempted to stabilize their conditions with traditional medical aid to provide what comfort she was able.

During the night, Sĭddrah lamented, “We lost one of the commoners…thus have I learned to the fullest extent the limits of my healing powers.”

Despite their conditions, the injured mercenaries and wayfarers pressed on. Sĭddrah fully healed all injured wayfarers only after the fourth day following the aggression. Notably, she mended her own arm last. By that time, “scar tissue already formed.” Many months later, she recorded in her journal, “the recurring ache in my upper arm in cold weather is an unwelcome reminder of my service to the Hekatomononkheire.”

By the protocols of triage, Szrah should not have received the care of the cleric until the last of the Heks had returned to duty. No other healers accompanied the wayfarers and the dwarven warrior, for whatever reason, owned no healing potions of her own. Though her wound proved not to be mortal, the clavicle bone on her right shoulder, in Sĭddrah’s diagnosis, “most assuredly had been broken by the force of the blade.” As the cleric tended her with common herbal medicine on the day of the attack, “the dwarf glowered at me while she rubbed a scar on her forehead, silently cursing the life she saved only minutes earlier.”

That night, however, under the cover of dark, Sĭddrah visited Szrah in her tent. Quietly she called forth a healing power inscribed on a scroll—the first scroll Sĭddrah divined after she earned the title of master cleric, and one she “intended to keep as a memento of the clerical life.” Szrah’s chest wound instantly healed. When Sĭddrah stood to leave, the dwarf grabbed her forearm and nodded her head with appreciation for the cleric’s lapse in protocol.

The next night, when Sĭddrah made rounds to tend the surviving commoners who still agonized from their injuries, she saw Szrah Dehrmick sitting alone near the bonfire. As Sĭddrah approached from behind, she noticed that the fighter had fully removed her breastplate and undershirt. The dwarf seemed to be rubbing the right shoulder where the dagger penetrated during the prior day’s battle. When she came within several strides of the fellow arcanist, to her dismay, the cleric witnessed a gruesome psychosis: Dehrmick was using the point of her battle axe to carve a new lesion in her skin—in exactly the same spot that the brigand sank his dagger.

At that moment, Sĭddrah understood: Szrah suffered from Blade’s Dementia.

Although the classical powers of clerics healed all wounds entirely, nothing erased the memory of excruciating pain. Sometimes, the mental scars never healed. Many persons, immediately after their first experience with the classical powers of healing, believed that the pain of their wounds lingered despite all appearances. Over time, most mercenaries and arcanists, especially those injured in combat often, overcame the phantom of pain projected by the mind. A few, nevertheless, could not grow accustomed to the idea that clerical powers fully restored the body when tended in a timely manner.

In extreme cases, Blade’s Dementia caused its victims to carve new wounds into their skin to visualize what the mind told them lurked beneath the soft tissue. Szrah—the morbid rubbing and carving of scars—represented an acute case of the affliction. Sĭddrah quietly backed away, leaving the fighter by the fireside to murmur to herself about the “pitiful agony.”[18]

These initial travails of her long trek from Naxos[19]—the events, the people, the deaths—“flashed through” Sĭddrah’s mind when the Master of the Gate to the Akropolis—Ôron, she named him—demanded “more urgency” from the councils’ attaché.

She shared her reaction to the gatekeeper in her preliminary report to the High Council: “After many trials and tribulations along the Wayfarers’ Trail, I bristled at the accusation by this mixellên[20] that I both imposed on the affairs of the Akropolis and dithered in the execution of my duties to the Provenance.”

She stumbled over her words briefly, seeking to explain that brigands once again waylaid her caravan, apparently by first “stampeding a herd of gorgons into the train of carts and wagons,” causing so many casualties that the Heks set up camp for a week to heal and recover forces before embarking on the last leg of the trip.

Ôron entertained none of her excuses: “Listen, greenshanks, I don’t care for your troubles with some worthless outlaws. There ain’t a one of us here [at the Akropolis] who hasn’t played a little sport with the local banditry. Yaarh! If you must explain someone, defend the High Council member who saw fit to send a bookish paean [‘common cleric’] with legs that never been stained with the blood of the Limen!”

[1] In the guild papers Sĭddrah brought with her from Naxos, her apprenticeship certificate carried what arcane linguists refer to as the prestigious “omega” mark. The guilds of the classical powers did not assign grades to the abilities or work of apprentices. Grading is, in fact, a relatively modern invention introduced by early modern universities several centuries ago. Instead, symbols like the “omega” mark indicated the esteem for the master with whom an apprentice studied. Guild rules forbade any master to grant completion for an apprenticeship if the student did not meet the master’s standards. In practice, then, apprentices received only a pass or fail grade according to the prestige of the master.

[2] Both depictions largely stem from the early years of the moving pictures industry. The ingenious engineers who invented filmmaking lacked artistic sentiments. Moviemakers largely borrowed costumes from the existing theaters and vaudevilles of the time. As a result, early films adopted the mise-en-scène and wardrobes of the theater, which lacked any pretense to realism, and of vaudeville, which deliberately created burlesque imitations of its subjects—and, henceforth, the invention of film repopulated the past with every sort of harlequin and buffoon imaginable!

[3] See LeHonre’s The Construction of Arcane Reality (New York, 829 GA). LeHonre, later disgraced by substantiated claims that he perpetrated sexual harassment in the academy, may have coined the phrase from his firsthand experience terrorizing the consciousness of his female graduate students.

[4] Not without a rancorous debate in the People’s Council, as reported by Nolos, First Laws of the Provenance, st. 229 to st. 233. Council members in favor of the bill insisted that commoners deserved an equal opportunity to return to their ancestors’ homeland and to establish new lives in the western Provenance. In opposition, many members objected to “standing armies during peace time,” recalling vividly the treachery of the common mercenaries who joined the godheads and the noble arcanists against the commoners during the Glorious Revolution. By way of compromise, the legislation restricted service in the city militias to the commoners, as well as replaced the one-armed purse-bearers with a cleric who tended the sick and wounded during the journey between cities.

[5] Four “druids-in-winged-form” often carried messages between the cities. The practice first began when the godheads supplied two loyal druids to serve as diplomats and messengers in each other’s cities. Both sets flew together to vouch for the accuracy of the communiqués. The arcane historian, Sagius II (Puliuin the Grey), Natural History of the Demesne bk.3 (Naxos, ca. 10|1), indicates that “double druid” messengers served to inspire merchants’ double entry system of bookkeeping in which all transactions are recorded twice, once on the debit side and once on the credit side of an accounting ledger.

[6] Collected Papers of Sĭddrah, Akropolis, ca. 11|7 AA. For posterity, the Councils’ choice to send Sĭddrah to the Akropolis proved serendipitous. Sĭddrah seemed to possess a supernatural knack for recalling verbal exchanges. In her journal, her entry for an entire day often recorded, as if word for word, her most inconsequential conversations. Her official reports to the High Council, duplicated in her journal and daybooks (a kind of narrative ledger she used to record a chronology of events during a day), described peoples and events at the Akropolis in such comprehensive—and even tedious—detail that she often seemed to lose the point of her communications. For scholars, though, the recent recovery of her journal and daybooks provides a fascinating window into the thoughts of a practitioner of the classical powers and the life of the social world of the Provenance. The Tityos archive, held by the Commercial Academy for the Study of the Arcane Powers, LLC, supplies much of the material for Sĭddrah’s role in this history. Further citation of the recorded events and materials provided by Sĭddrah will be omitted unless a discrepancy with other sources must be noted or an additional explanation will benefit the reader.

[7] Unfortunately, it was not her first trip to Pallene, the first and most prized city of the dwarfs. Sĭddrah neglected to add any descriptions or her perspective on the great mountain fortress.

[8] It must be noted that the Heks rarely split into smaller units. As Sĭddrah later learned, highwaymen and bandits often tried to lure the mercenaries into chasing them into the forests so that an entire caravan could be captured and killed. Thus, the mercenaries routinely battled in a defensive posture against foes that directly attacked the convoys. In a situation, as described in the text above, the captain let the family decide the fate of the captured child provided that the parents’ choice did not endanger the entire convoy of wayfarers. Sĭddrah’s entry curses the criminals, for the act effectively decapitated the boy, making it impossible for her to heal what otherwise may have been a nonlethal flesh wound. Interestingly, she also wrote in her journal that the teenager “showed no signs of possessing the classical powers,” perhaps suspecting that the family sacrificed their untalented son rather than surrender their meager wealth to the kidnappers. For more on the age-long conflict between Heks and highwaymen, see Trak R. MacWright, “Travel in the Demesne,” Journal of the Early Provenance 7, no. 3 (907 GA): 359–367.

[9] The apprenticeship required practice in the artistry of healing, but most tests of healing involved minor, self-inflected wounds. Apprentices occasionally found themselves called to the fighters’ guild to mend stress fractures or to the rogues’ guild to stanch the flow of blood from a well-placed shiv, but few situations exposed youthful clerics to the manner in which deadly battle produced a surreal art form from the grotesque maiming and temporary deformity of the body. The frequency of such scenes truly tested the fortitude of any cleric who dared to travel into the Limen.

[10] Incorrectly, that is.

[11] Sĭddrah reflected on the old adage, one of the “koan oaths” that clerics sought to uphold: “When I first learned the saying during my earliest days as an apprentice, I believed it meant that clerics must never charge a coin or ask a favor in return for our services. I sense now it means, we clerics exist on the margins of a world that persists in the trade of exchangeable goods and services.” For an early medical historian’s interpretation of the oaths of the “koan” guild of Naxos, see Cos, On Arcane Medicine (Alexandria, ca. 2539 MA).

[12] A moirae measured a plot that a common person was able to cultivate with only one’s hands. As in many languages, like our modern word, “lot,” for the arcane mercenaries who fulfilled their service to the People’s Council, a moirae meant both an area of land and one’s destiny. Hence, as the mercenaries morbidly joked among themselves, “mercenaries who fail to fulfill service / merely receive a different moirae (‘lot’) for life.” Brewe, Naxian Ethic, 281.

[13] At the time Sĭddrah passed through Libuwa, the city leaders divided the territory surrounding the city walls into commons and tillable plots. The population of farmers grew numerous over time, forcing many farmers to walk nearly a league to reach their plots in the mornings from the first spring thaw to the last fall harvest. Libuwan weather was fair, and the tests of combat rarely overwhelming, so many fighters first whet their appetite for bloodshed in the fields of Libuwa.

[14] This sense of timing encapsulates one of the fantastic differences our modern world has with the arcane world. Kaironology, “the opportunities or pregnancy of the moment,” possessed far greater meaning for the distant past than our chronology, a sequence of moments or a course of events, does today. More concisely, it may be said: for the arcanes, time opens greater possibilities; for we moderns, time endlessly passes probabilities. For a Metal Age account of kairos, see Prichremah, The Kairos of Time (Jerusalem, ca. 2011 MA).

[15] Historian of the early Arcane Age republic, J. William Bragahour, discusses the common roots of alcohol consumption and self-governance in his work, The Alcoholic Social Democracy: A Provenancial Tradition (New York, 727 GA). Sĭddrah, who initially regarded herself as a casual drinker, became quite enamored with the local microbreweries and distilleries of Libuwa during her stay.

[16] Sĭddrah often provides detailed accounts of battles. In most cases, in her daybook, we find a list of battles, wounds suffered by her comrades, and the type of care she provided. Typically, it is possible to piece together the conflicts from the records and her other sources. From this incident, perhaps for obvious reasons, Sĭddrah learned to regard battle accounts as an opportunity to measure arcanists’ mutual benefits to each other and to use such knowledge to augment her leadership skills over time.

[17] The brigands grabbed what they could before fleeing because it was the practice of the Heks to divvy up the goods of lost wayfarers and burn, if necessary, what others had no room for on their carts. As Sĭddrah learned that day, leaving bounty on the ground only served to encourage further attacks from the brigands.

[18] It seems that fighters were particularly susceptible to Blade’s Dementia in the arcane world. As described earlier, the classical powers endowed fighters with better defenses and more powerful attacks, but that class of philosophers had to push the boundaries of their wisdom in hand-to-hand combat. Consequently, fighters endured numerous battle wounds and oftentimes, to quote Szrah Dehrmick’s phrase again, “pitiful agony.” The classical powers certainly made the body something more powerful, something more fantastic, than it naturally was. But the flip side of that coin, perhaps, was that the classical powers also, in a more current sense, “dehumanized” the body. Fighters endured severe traumas to the bone structure and organs of the body with such frequency that it is nearly unfathomable today. More noteworthy, when fighters failed to progress in their classical powers, rarely was it due to the innate limits of their wisdom. Rather, the fighters reached the limits of their tolerance for the inevitable physical afflictions of combat. One arcane adage, passed down to the modern world, captures the plight of the classical power of fighters: “Wise warriors smelt their weapons into plows/ the brutes become clerics’ oft-smitten puppets.” For a more complete historical treatment of the physical abuses of the body during the Arcane Age, see Uma F. Couchillet, La Naissance des pouvoirs classiques: Une Archéologie du regard arcanique [The birth of the classical powers: An archaeology of arcane perception] (Paris, 811 GA).

[19] Unfortunately, about 8 to 10 weeks of Sĭddrah’s travels and contacts are lost. Archeologists failed to discover, among the recovered archival materials, the parchments that recorded her stay in Agrinio and the last leg of her journey to the Akropolis. It seems that the wayfarers from Libuwa made their way to Agrinio in approximately three weeks time. She then spent one week in the city, before what appears to have been a seven week trip from Agrinio to the Akropolis. Her daybook shows one entry during her time in Agrinio: a vague reference to healing an elf. Four weeks later, her event ledger is filled with a list of dead and wounded from another attack, as well as the care and treatment each received. Three weeks thereafter, the parchments of Sĭddrah’s journal renew at the Akropolis.

[20] Mixellên was an arcane term that refers to offspring from two or more cultures of the Demesne. “Half-this, half-that,” in the minds of the people of the Provenance, is the most common translation of the term. In this usage, however, it seems that Sĭddrah questioned the loyalties of the gatekeeper due to his obvious lineage from a Limen culture. See the entry in Koljin’s Vocabulary.

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Between 2015 and 2019, I started a new career as a consultant. Yes, meaning, lean times, plenty of excess capacity to post on social media (a blog) that nobody read and that generated no business. In 2017, I embarked on a new endeavor that I never thought I would consider: self-publishing. In the early 2000s, when it became a more viable optio…

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Welcome to Historia|Research!

What I hope you find here is “a journal of nonfiction and other misconceptions.” The author has a Ph.D. in U.S. History (emphasis: the political economy of labor and capitalism), works as a contract grant writer for (mostly) federal grants requiring academic(-like) narratives, has spent over 20 years in the (pseudo-)professi…

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