"What is college for? Higher education in society" took a deep dive today into the most trenchant American critiques of higher education. Intrepid teams of students presented
• Paulo Freire's ideas on how education can entrench oppression by rendering its students objects or humanize them and allow them to discern a future beyod oppression from their own experience
• bell hooks' arguments for the importance of both wholeness - of students and teachers both - and theory in a truly trasnsformative feminist classroom
• Stefano Harney and Fred Moten's rhapsodies on the prophetic work of the community of the university's marginalized "maroon" educators, the "undercommons," and
• la paperson's chastening call for a "third university" undoing the work of the colonial "first" and the self-indulgently utopian "second universities" with their "scrap material"
None of these classics of radical educational thinking is easy to read, and each could sustain much deeper engagement, but I think the class got highlights and, as important, a sense of a tradition: hooks (1994) builds on Freire (1968), Moten and Harney (2003) read hooks and Freire, la paperson (2017) works with the ideas of all these predecessors. And if we didn't get into the subtleties, we could sense an ongoing effort to imagine education as "a practice of freedom" (Friere, hooks), even as we came to understand the ways in which it more naturally protects an unjust status quo from true change.
This was not all! A final team of students shared with us an analysis of the US-specific problem of student debt, and of the ways in which it disproportionately handicaps African American families. And a colleague central to the international "Platform Cooperative" movement told us about a cooperative university he spent time at in the Basque country, inspiring in some ways, a reality check in others.
There are no easy fixes for higher education, but we've made clear why it matters to think beyond what we've got now. In our final session next week (three sessions is so few, but what a lot you can still do in them - especially if the students are game!) we'll look at a handful of experimental alternative universities around the world, and read an article arguing for again understanding higher education as a common good, rather than the privatized individual investment it has become in the US. We'll gather our thoughts on the most pressing challenges, and what hopes we can see for tackling them.
We'll pass this on, our contribution to our school's soul-searching.
