transcript detailing their academic and intellectual achievements’. The plan is to begin advertising the centre’s offer in the spring.
Public spaces Rootedness and the need to create real, public spaces in local communities – while at the same time fully engaging with the world and wanting to change it – is a theme that runs through the alternative university movement. Opening up such spaces, in places designed perhaps more with work and shopping in mind than learning and connection, is critical, organisers believe, and can open up interior spaces in which to think, dream and imagine – for many, what the university should be all about. The idea of space is at the heart of the Really Open University, a project, based in Leeds, which styles itself as ‘an ongoing process of transformation by those with a desire to challenge the higher education system and its role in society’. Committed to ‘the creation of a free and empowering education system where creative and critical thought is fostered’, it aims to change people’s perceptions of higher education in order to create an ‘institution that works in the interests of all people in common’. As well as organising public talks and other events, the group has developed the Space Project, a response to the problem of where, other than on campus, to take their learning. The idea is to create a space where ‘meetings of thought, of practice, of people, of ideas’ can take place, and where different groups can collaborate and develop projects together. The Really Open University would act as a general facilitator and ‘matchmaker’ of projects. The Free University of Liverpool is another project committed to reimagining higher education as ‘a right for all not a privilege for the few’. Although it is framed as a protest against the increase in tuition fees, it is also a response to a longer-standing dissatisfaction with the structure of higher education. The university, founded by a group of artists, activists and educators who refer to themselves collectively as ‘The Committee’, promises a free education, in the creative arts, to any student wanting to study with them. Everyone involved is offering their time for free. Its first course, a six-month foundation studies degree, began last October. A three-year BA in Cultural Praxis will be launched in October 2012. The Social Science Centre will welcome its first in-take of students this autumn, in subjects central to the social sciences, such as sociology, politics and philosophy. It is holding an open day for those interested in studying and teaching at the centre in April. Mike Neary is understandably reluctant to speculate about who the students will be, but he is convinced there will be interest. ‘It’s kind of the moment, and the time and people’s commitment to doing something is making it work. We couldn’t have imagined it 10 years ago but now it seems like absolutely the right time to be doing something. I think history is important, timing. It’s a moment. People in this country and elsewhere are organising themselves and, I think, politicising the process as well – and the occupations and the student movement are all part of that. Educators are looking for ways to connect with the movement but we have to be the movement, we are the movement – it’s not a movement to be connected to or to explain things to – we are part of the movement. It’s a sort of academic activism, bringing the two things together. People talk about them as though they are different things or they work against each other but I like to think of them as if they are the same thing – academic activism.’
Something bigger Katherine Stanley also locates the Tent City University initiative, and the other educational work of the Occupy movement, as part of something bigger, one of many alternative education movements currently springing up. It is, in part, a reaction against the current environment in education but it is also about something more positive which has grown up as part of the protest and now seems likely to outlive it, or at least its current incarnation. The process of understanding what it is that is unfolding and what it relates to is difficult, she says, because, by its nature, the movement ‘is about creating as many questions as it is about getting answers’. The example is catching on, Neary thinks, but not in an easy-to-predict way. ‘We are a model people can take up and use, but in a different way, hopefully. The last thing we want people to do is clone what we do here. That’s the problem with a lot of initiatives, they get cloned and the really interesting thing gets taken out of them. There are new forms emerging ... It’s very obvious that the marketised model of social development is collapsing. We want to be part of the process of building something that is progressive, and education has a key role to play in that. In the face of a crisis of everything, everywhere you look, the university has to have a role, not simply in going with the flow but in being the critical voice – that is the essence of everything we do.’
26 ADULTS LEARNING SPRING 2012
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