What we didn't have time for was any discussion of to three inspiring alternative institutions of higher education which we'd shared information about. Perhaps students will find themselves remembering them in future discussions? For me, reading them again and together was a slightly out of body experience.
The first, a Maori-led institution dating to 1981 and discussed in one of last week's texts (A Third University is Possible), is so compellingly local in its orientation and grounding in the indigenous values and communities of Aotearoa New Zealand that it challenges one to surface the forgotten and perhaps obsolete values and communities undergirding "the University" in the west: a huge task, and important.
The other two came at us as reincarnations of aspects of The New School. One, the 2012-founded Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, takes its name from the Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung with which the New School for Social Research has long been confused, but its project is like the original New School. They aspire to be
an interdisciplinary teaching and research institute that offers critical, community-based education in the humanities and social sciences. Holding courses both online and in person (in partnership with local businesses and cultural organizations), we integrate rigorous but accessible scholarly study with the everyday lives of working adults and re-imagine scholarship for the 21st century.
Like the original New School, BISR doesn't offer degrees or plan to, but rather proposes that college-level education can and should be part of the lifelong learning of engaged citizens. They offer new courses on classic and emergent topics to fit with changing times.
Our third inspirational case is the newest, and also refers to itself as the "New School," though its full name is New School of the Anthropocene. Their words really sing!
The New School was ... founded by an ensemble of experienced academics from the higher educational world alongside artists and practitioners, none of whom regard education as a business and their students as customers.
We recognise the pitiless financialisation of the university world and the dismal situation of the student-consumer, for whom vast debt is a passport for crossing the threshold to adulthood and social participation. We observe the demoralisation of exploited teachers within a casualised workforce whose energies are drained by a technocratic culture of audit and administration. We witness the purposeful and systematic dismantling of adult education, the crude instrumentalisation of learning and a joyless culture of accreditation.
Collectively we can do better. We see that higher educational institutions in their current form are ill-placed to foster the new critical and creative ways of working collaboratively that are necessary for social renewal and ecological recovery.
Among their provocations is an alternative genealogy. While they do offer a diploma, they appeal not to the heritage of "the University" but to a wildly eclectic group of settings for reflection and renewal, including Black Mountain College, caves, Nalanda, Paris 8, Irish hedge schools and a newly founded university in Kurdish Syria.
Taken together, these living alternative visions of "what college is for" might make one wonder whether the sorts of ideals driving The New School founders haven't so much been defeated by the gravitational drag of "the University" as moved on to other edgy, urgent and emergent constellations.
Food for thought! As they gather their thoughts for a final reflection (due Monday), maybe some of our students will realize how exciting these experiments are. And, once you move beyond assuming the answer to questions of higher education's place in society has to be some or other kind of university, how available!
