I’ve written before about some of my sense of disconnect from and disagreement with the Edufactory project. I feel like I’m a negative voice on their email list, which is not a position I like to be in, and unfortunately this looks like it will continue. Today I had a thought that I might be able to make a more constructive contribution by writing up something on previous autonomous educational initiatives, predecessors that the Edufactory idea of an autonomous university might draw on. (I mean this here in a narrow sense. In a more expansive sense every mass organization and mass movement is an educational initiative.)
My short list off the top of my head is below. If I think of others I’ll add them here. If anyone has other examples please let me know.
- Work People’s College
- Socialist Sunday School
- Modern School movement
- Consciousness raising groups in the women’s liberation movement
- Highlander Institute, Midwest Academy, Gamaliel Foundation, etc
Thinking about the UK, and to different degrees of autonomy, whatever that means… how about the Worker’s Educational Association), the Open University, or Ruskin College?
Comment by Jon — February 23, 2008 @ 12:44 am
Hey Nate,
First, no way are you a negative voice on the edu-factory list! You’re a voice of needed constructive criticism. Second, this question of the history of autonomous universities is one I just started thinking about too. I haven’t looked into it much yet, but I’ll get back to you when I find anything out. One of the attendees at our upcoming rethinking the U conference is going to present a paper on the history of free universities in the US. I’ll drop her an email soon to ask her for some good sources. (Wikipedia is not helpful - their entry for “autonomous university” goes straight to “private university.”)
Comment by Eli — February 23, 2008 @ 1:42 am
Hey All
I have a weird disorientation when reading edu-factory. It seems ( and correct me if I am wrong) that the dominant understanding of autonomous university is one of some kind of institution that sits next to and on the current structures and one that might have a generally greater freedom of practice and access than the university proper under neo-liberalism does. This is very different from how I though the idea of autonomous university was used: as a signifier for a sort of interface of antagonisms and struggles that cut across and beyond the university in the condition of real subsumption. A sort of accumulation machine of disobedience and creativity Their is something very guildish about the list
communist dreams
Dave
Comment by grumpy cat — February 24, 2008 @ 12:32 am
Hey Nate, Dave and everyone
That sense of ‘autonomous’ as referring to some process emerging from or instituting antagonism and struggle, versus that of an educational institution which simply operates in ways distinct from eg. the neoliberal logic which has increasingly reconstituted every aspect of Australian universities, seems significant even if the distinctions may not always be that clear cut - some of the latter can emerge from quite sharp struggles but exist within or alongside existing institutions, with all the consequences and risks of such forms of institutionalisation…
…whilst ‘educational’ processes, groups, networks, organisations can seem to emerge from and even as moments of struggle and still function as bodies which confer certain forms of cultural capital, and which allow certain forms of networking which become integrated into, to be crude, career-oriented versions of same, as has been visible in the ways in which some people manage to take informal kinds of ‘credential’ from ‘activism’ or, to make it more obviously relevant to this discussion, the organisation of and prominence in ‘activist’ or ‘movement’ conferences, in which apparent fluency in ‘theory’ helps with networking and the integration of sections of academia, ngo-world, union bureaucracy, staffers for Green Party parliamentarians, and activist ‘leaderships’ or anti-leadership quasi-organic intellectuals. The smooth transition of people from the last of these to the former, and the role of forms of cultural/political capital generated in the latter in this process, highlights for me the role that a discourse of autonomy in Australia has in part helped to efface the actual economies at play.
For the second kind of institution, to which Dave refers, the International College of Philosophy comes to mind - no fees, no citizenship criteria for entry, no credentials awarded, and with a conscious project of involving non-academics in various projects and an active pushing at the limits of what gets called ‘inter-disciplinary’. But my knowledge of this institution is limited, so maybe someone else knows more?
Comment by benjamin rosenzweig — February 26, 2008 @ 3:55 am
hey y’all,
Thanks for the comments. Benjamin, your remark about careerism/capitalization is particularly interesting. I’ve basically done a different version of that - not so much the activist conference etc to boost my CV, but using the things I learned in other work - NGO jobs, union jobs, and a lot of unpaid movement work/activism - in my new job at university. Not like the content knowledge but process knowledge - I got relatively good at talking to strangers one on one, in small groups, and in larger groups. The skills involved in facilitating, taking over, or wrecking a political meeting are very close to those involved in the various ways of operating in a classroom as teacher and as student. The skills involved in movement networking to build support from different groups and individuals are similar to those involved in getting to know people in university etc. So I’m relatively good at the social/interpersonal aspects of this sort of work. (Not bragging, and not proud of using movement stuff to make a living, just saying.) I think it’s important for folk to own up to this sort of thing. I’m not totally clear about why, but I do think it’s important.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — February 26, 2008 @ 10:25 am