The leniency clause may introduce a risk of running into the effects of Hofstadter’s Law:

“It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”

Definitely applies in the case of our old homework assignments!

It might be safer to make the final deadline firm and specific. For example, there could be a deadline where you must cease all work on your research studies and a later deadline where you cease all work on your thesis writing and anything related besides the defense itself. The defense could come after these deadlines. Also, for the assessment, there could be a criterion like “Thesis is 50% typed up.”

When it comes to students, it is mostly a matter of admiting only those students who are more interested in learning than in getting a job. This would probably be somewhat automatic until the academy gained a reputation on par with a normal university, since the academy’s degrees wouldn’t be helpful for getting a job until then. After that stage, you would have to be more careful about cases like bspice pointed out where students claim to prefer learning, but actually just want to get into the academy for financial reasons. One solution is to not grant any degrees or issue any publicly accessible grades. Then employers would not be able to use the academy to screen employees. (On a side note, what do you think should be done about grades anyway?)

As for professors, again the solution is to setup the proper incentive structure, perhaps along the lines of the one I laid out in my article on Academic Incentive Structures. In short, professors have to pay for their own research or collect donations themselves, and they are paid according to their performance on course reviews by students. In this way, each professor basically runs their own pedagogy business and the university simply acts as a framework in which many businesses are supported. I would suspect that the attitude toward research under these conditions would make it seem more like a hobby or an aid to pedagogy. A professor who cared more about research and neglected his students wouldn’t make much money and would probably feel ostracized by the department.

I think this sounds like a sustainable environment as long as the financing works out. But that may be an issue if there is no financial incentive behind it. People’s parents aren’t going to shell out huge tuition fees for an academy that won’t directly help their child get a job. I still think there would be a market for it, but probably a relatively small one. I can see it being successful for night and weekend classes, basically as a form of entertainment. The problem is that the market is going to encourage it toward more simple topics and then it will end up being like a community college.

It is really tough to fight the market, which is basically what we are trying to do. That is why I think it is going to be hard to make this work the way we want it to until we make a lot of money by other means and use it to support these goals (the “Getty Center method”).

In response to cspice, I think entrance exams could still be somewhat necessary too. If you are truly enthusiastic about learning something, you will know some of it. People will claim to want to learn things without really wanting to.