Below is my 300w or so reflecting on last week’s reading and discussion. The class was based around our reading of the SSC’s ‘about‘ page and the ICA’s ‘Co-operative identity, values and principles‘ statement.
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It’s been a while since I have read through the general statement about the SSC (FAQ), a document I helped author over three years ago. It was written both as a response to changes in HE at the time (and that continue), as well as setting out in an aspirational way, something we wanted to create. We wrote it in a style that suggested it was already happening, that it was real, when it was in fact only real in our imaginations. In that sense, it was utopian and from the responses we’ve had from people over the years, I think it helped them imagine something different, too. With that in mind, I was pleased to read the current version of the statement 1 and to see how close we have come to realising that utopia. We are not entirely there yet, and over the years, through praxis, we have redefined our objectives, or rather, the emphasis of those objectives has shifted at times, while remaining clear about our motivation and purpose. I still aspire to what we set out in that statement and may always be striving to realise it fully, but the process is as important as the goal and I realise now, after three years, that the SSC is part of me. I cannot imagine not working towards this utopia.
Last week’s class and in fact the whole SSI course this term is intended to regenerate and revitalise this critical, utopian process and project, creating critical space to reflect on, discuss and question our utopian, revolutionary idea of what higher education might be. Could be.
The ICA statement was chosen to help initiate this critical, dialogical process. It is a carefully worded statement that unites millions of people around the world in the co-operative movement. We have to read it as such and draw out the key terms and ideas that are embedded in this historical text. It is a set of guidelines, rather than a legal definition. It is a compass, rather than a prison we are bound to. What can we learn from it? How can the themes of autonomy, democracy, solidarity, equality, common ownership, and sustainability, etc. become critical tools that help us reflect on ourselves and our own utopian ideas for co-operative higher education?
CW MILLS met NIGEL WINN on May 26th 2006 at home by his hospital bed, which was on loan.
CW MILLS SAID: I heard that you hated work, you never made any money, you laid bricks most of your life, you left school with no qualifications, you were constantly trying to reinvent yourself and now you are dying of cancer at 56. The world has failed you.
NIGEL WINN SAID: I married my childhood love. I wrote poetry and a book no-one ever saw. I had children and friends. I danced naked in the garden with my love on the summer Solstice. I had little money and didn’t need much either. I went to University aged 50, got a 1st in English and became a lecturer aged 54. The cancer will take me quick. I’ve said goodbye. I am having visions of my mother and Queen Victoria and the flowers outside look so beautiful. Tomorrow I will die with dignity among people I love and who love me.
NIGEL WINN died the next day after drowning himself with a glass of water. His wife and children watched until the last breath.
THE CONSEQUENCES WERE: NIGEL WINN’s sons dug his grave and buried him. People grieved. There was silence. Dignity. A prize in his name. Despite it all.
If you are interested in discussing, researching, keeping up-to-date and even creating a co-operative university, there is a mailing list you can join.
The list was first set up by a group of us who attended the Co-operative Education Against the Crises conference earlier in the year. Since Dan Cook published his report and the Institute of Education hosted a seminar, people have been in touch via this blog, Twitter and email, asking me how to stay involved.
Please join the mailing list and introduce yourself. As I write this post (17th Dec 2013), it has a membership of 14 people.
The mailing list is hosted by Mayfirst/People Link, a politically progressive member-run collective of technologists.
The Ciné-Tracts [1968] project was undertaken by a number of French directors as a means of taking direct revolutionary action during and after the events of May 1968. Contributions were made by Godard, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais and others during this period. Each of the Ciné-Tracts consists of 100 feet of 16mm black and white silent film shot at 24 FPS, equalling a projection-time of 2 minutes and 50 seconds. The films were made available for purchase at the production cost, which at the time was fifty francs.
As part of the prescription for the making of the films, the director was to self-produce, self-edit, be the cinematographer, ensuring that each film was shot in one day. Godard had undergone a series of encounters on the barricades during the ‘Langlois Affair’ in February of 1968, and during May was seen actively involved in labour marches, photographing the riots in the Latin Quarter. He also took time to shoot some material at the University of Paris campus at Nanterre.
I first learned of the Cinétracts through Abé Mark Nornes, whose class I attended during my time in Ann Arbor. On his course, Nornes discussed the documentaries of Ogawa Shinsuke (and later wrote the only book in English about him) and I spent hours watching those superb films about Ogawa’s film collective living and working in rural Japan. I really wish they were available on DVD. Nornes also put me on to Chris Marker and said that Marker, Godard and other French filmmakers had made a series of ‘Cinétracts’ which they distributed to Ogawa in Japan and in return Ogawa sent them his films of the student-worker struggle against the development of Narita airport during the same period of the late 1960s. I think I have that story right.
At any rate, the Japanese film class with Nornes, which was not directly related to the rest of my degree in Buddhism (the wonder of the liberal arts model), had me watching bootleg copies of Ogawa and Marker for much of my last summer in the USA. I left to go to live in rural Japan for three years, where, in my spare time, I would run my own small Cinematheque.
Some of Godard’s Cinétracts are in the British Film Institute’s archive, where I later worked as a film archivist (and met my wife), and I see that someone has done us all a favour and uploaded a compilation to YouTube.
This is revolutionary filmmaking, not just its content, but also its scale and form. Godard used still images to compose his Cinétract. Six years earlier, Marker had used this technique in La Jetée.
A free seminar on the potential for co-operative approaches in higher education will take place on Thursday 12 December in Room 804 of the Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL, from 5.30pm-7.30pm.
Recent years have seen the dramatic growth of ‘co-operative schools’, which have adopted and adapted co-operative values and principles in working with key stakeholder groups such as learners, staff, parents and community. Co-operative and mutual models have also been developed across other areas of civil society including health, leisure and care. Given the dramatic transformation of higher education in recent years, the potential for universities to be remodelled along co-operative lines is being assessed. This approach offers a new take on debates over privatisation, marketisation and the defence of the ‘public university’. Our three speakers will examine these contested claims and outline ideas for a co-operative university, drawing upon historical and international perspectives.
Speakers at the seminar will include:
Professor Stephen Yeo (formerly of Ruskin College): The Co-operative University: Problems and Opportunities, some experience and ideas
Mervyn Wilson (Principal and Chief Executive, Co-operative College): From Schools to Universities – Co-operative Solutions?
Higher Education (HE) has become a massive global industry. On one hand HE now attracts significant public and private investment and the interest of policymakers in expanding the benefits it offers. On the other hand, casualisation of the workforce, spiralling fees and managerialism threaten to undermine traditional vocational and educational values. The co-operative movement’s commitment to education is a deep and long-standing one, yet co-operatives have only a minimal formal presence in the higher education sector. What are the factors acting as barriers and enablers to increasing co-operative presence in the Higher Education Sector? Focusing on the UK, Dan will examine the legal, financial and cultural factors that bear on co-operative presence in the Higher Education Sector. Dan will also explore some of the implications of his investigations for an increased co-operative presence in UK Higher Education, and indicate the future direction for inquiry.
For more information please see flier below. To reserve a place contact Tom Woodin at t.woodin@ioe.ac.uk.
This has been my favourite film since first watching it in 1997. It’s influence on me has been long lasting. Read more here and here. Read the script here.
Here, I maintain a bibliography of articles, reports, presentations and book chapters that discuss the idea of a ‘co-operative university’, with a specific focus on co-operative ownership and co-operative governance of higher education institutions. If you know of any other research, please leave a comment or email me. Thank you.
Cunningham. (1874). Higher Education on Co-operative Principles. In Co-operative Congress Proceedings (pp. 54–55 & 89–90). Presented at the Co-operative Congress, Halifax: The Co-operative College.
Neary, Mike and Joss Winn (2019) The co-operative university now! In: Learning for a Co-operative World: Education, social change and the Co-operative College. UCL Institute of Education Press, London, pp. 169-186.
Noble, Malcolm (2022) ‘Co-operation not competition: on the queer potential of co-operative higher education’, in Churnjeet Mahn, Yvette Taylor, and Matt Brim (eds), Queer Sharing in the Marketized University (Routledge, 2022), pp.44-62.
Somerville, P. (2014) Towards co-operative higher education. Presentation at the Department of Politics and Public Policy, De Montfort University, May 7th.
Woodin, Tom (2018) Co-operative Approaches to Leading and Learning: Ideas for Democratic Innovation from the UK and Beyond. In: Gornall, Thomas and Steetman (Eds.) Exploring Consensual Leadership in Higher Education, London: Bloomsbury.
In 2011, I helped set up a co-operative for higher education. It began as an idea that my colleague, Mike Neary, and I had been discussing the previous summer, and was partly influenced by the network of social centres that exist across the UK and elsewhere. In May this year, the co-operative had its second AGM and we are currently running a Social Science Imagination course for the second year, two arts-based community projects, as well as regular public talks. You can read more about the Social Science Centre (SSC) in a recent article published in Radical Philosophy. The SSC remains an experiment – on our own terms a successful one – that has allowed its members to not only teach and learn at the level of higher education, but also, reflect on, discuss and critique alternative and utopian forms of higher education. In academia, we might formally describe the SSC as an ‘action research‘ project:
Action research is simply a form of self-reflective enquiry undertaken by participants in social situations in order to improve the rationality and justice of their own practices, their understanding of these practices, and the situations in which the practices are carried out (Carr and Kemmis 1986: 162).
I shall return to this in a moment.
Free software, free society?
Since 2007, I have worked at my local university where I focus on the role of technology in higher education. My work is a mixture of technical, theoretical and historical research, as well as some teaching and supporting staff and students in their use of technology. For many years, I have been interested in and an advocate for free and open source software and consequently, in 2008, I established and continue to run a large WordPress network at the university, too. Despite my advocacy for free and open source software, I am also quite critical of the technological determinism, cyber-utopianism and rampant liberalism that often characterises the discourse in this area. Nevertheless, the practice of collectively producing, owning and controlling the means of production remains a very important objective for me and any criticism I have of the free and open source software movement(s) and free culture movement in general, are so as to develop the purpose and practice of common ownership andcollective production, and help defend it from being subsumed by the dominant mode of production i.e. capitalism: a highly productive form of social coercion for the private accumulation of value.
The WordPress network that I maintain at my university appears to be an example of the means of production being collectively produced, owned and controlled. It is used freely by staff and students across the university for publishing and communicating their work and providing services to other people. WordPress is ‘free software’ developed and shared under the General Public License (GPL). It has a large number of people from around the world contributing to the development of the software who mutually recognise the ‘copyleft’ terms and conditions of the license. As such, we can say that it is collectively produced and having installed WordPress at the university without the need for recurrent license agreements, we can say that my university owns the software that we run. The software runs on university servers and a small number of people at the university, including me, control our WordPress installation on behalf of all other users. Using this example of WordPress, we might say that the university reproduces, owns and controls a means of production (i.e., web publishing).
This is the aspiration for many free and open source advocates: to campaign for and promote the use of free and open source software among their friends, family, in public services and in their workplace. Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, campaigns for schools and universities to use free software. I think this is both necessary and good.
However, my aspirations go beyond the installation of free software in my workplace. Through my work and my involvement with the Social Science Centre, I have come to see that freedom in the use, study of, re-use, and distribution of technologies can co-exist with institutional, political and social structures that do not guarantee control over the means of production. In other words, a university might run nothing but free and open source software, but ownership and control over the means of knowledge production can remain unaffected. Committee structures, hierarchies among staff and students, ownership of the university’s capital, sources of funding, and institutional governance, can all function the same regardless of whether free and open source software is in widespread use. Free software does not necessarily lead to a free society or a free university. It is in this sense, that we can observe that technology does not determine society, but that society shapes technology. The ‘freedoms’ offered by free software are clearly limited (only the wildest techno-utopian would disagree) and as Lawrence Lessig notes in his introduction to Stallman’s book, Free Software, Free Society, free software is as much an attempt to preserve existing freedoms, as it is to extend them: ““Free software” would assure that the world governed by code is as “free” as our tradition that built the world before code.” According to this statement, the free software movement aims to preserve the liberal status quo established before the early 1980s when “free software” emerged.
By contrast, as I’ve noted before, Christopher Kelty’s idea of a ‘recursive public’, appeals to me because it acknowledges that by defending something that we might value, such as free and open source software, we often find ourselves ‘recursively’ campaigning for underlying freedoms, such as open standards, open hardware, etc. and campaigning against that which threatens these objectives such as SOPA and PRISM. In this way, free software may actually, recursively, lead to a free society in that it politicises people who otherwise might not have questioned broader social and political forces. The contingent nature of this is important. Perhaps this is free software’s revolutionary potential. My point is though, that without more fundamental freedoms in society, free software does not offer freedom. Social, political and institutional structures can remain the same.
A co-operatively owned and governed university
This brings me back to the Social Science Centre and the idea of a ‘co-operative university’.
Thought of as an ‘action research project’, some members, including myself, are looking to take the next step in Lewin’s research cycle.
While not wishing to disrupt the continuation of the Social Science Centre in Lincoln, some of us are embarking on a second phase of research and action focusing on the idea of a ‘co-operative university’. The SSC is not a university but rather a co-operative model of free, higher education. It is a free association of people who come together to collectively produce knowledge. It is also a political project. We always intended that the SSC remains small and sustainable in recognition of our existing commitments of work and family, etc. However, the ideas and ambitions that our work on the SSC has produced are now more ambitious and have led to discussions among some of us around the idea of a ‘co-operative university’. We spoke with people about this at the ‘Co-operative Education Against the Crisis‘ conference organised with the Co-operative College in May and, as time allows, we have been reading and writing about the idea (e.g. here and here).
We are not the only people considering this. In August, the Times Higher Education magazine published a feature article about co-operative universities, focusing on Mondragon in Spain (and acknowledging the SSC). They ran a leading article about the idea, too. They referenced a field trip by Wright, S. et al (2011), who also visited Mondragon to study the university.
Unfortunately, there does not appear to have been very much written about co-operative universities over the years. Yesterday, I spent some time doing cross-catalogue and Google Scholar searches but it didn’t turn up very much (<< I will publish references I find via that link). There is, of course, a great deal of research into various forms of co-operatives, co-operative governance, co-operative history, education within the co-operative movement, etc. There was a special issue of the Journal for Co-operative Studies (2011, 44:3) which focused on co-operative education, though mostly schooling. A number of articles have been written about co-operative education in the state school system. Most recently, this reflects the growth of co-operative schooling as a real alternative to academy schools in the UK. A number of articles have also been written about ‘co-operative learning’, but do not appear to touch upon co-operative ownership and governance of higher education institutions, which I consider key to the idea of a co-operative university. Pedagogy based on the idea of co-operation is not enough. In my view, a co-operative university must encompass (1) co-operative ownership of the institution’s capital in common; (2) co-operative, flat and fully democratic governance; as well as (3) co-operative practices in research, teaching and learning.
My past work on ‘openness’ in higher education relates directly to collaborative (though not specifically co-operative) practices in research, teaching and learning, but as I have explained above, my interest is now shifting (recursively??) to academic labour and its role in co-operative ownership and governance within higher education. I see this as a direct and natural outcome of my work on the role of technology in higher education as we cannot fully critique and develop the role of technology without understanding the dialectical role of labour. I am certain that this will become more apparent to advocates of open education and open science as we all reflect on the affordances of open technologies and open practices in contrast to the limitations and constraints of existing institutional and organisational models, themselves expressions of embedded social relations and political economy.
This was my reason for critiquing the work of Egan and Jossa, and, despite my reservations of Jossa in particular, I still regard a focus on co-operative production (i.e. ‘worker co-operatives’), to be the best way to “attack the groundwork” of the present political and economic system that higher education is part of.
If you are also working in this area or are interested in working with us on this project, please do get in touch. Co-operation cannot occur in isolation!
