Category: Blog

The university as a worker co-operative: Labour, property and pedagogy

Abstract of a paper accepted for the ‘Governing Academic Life‘ conference.

UPDATE 16th June 2014: My paper for this conference is available here.

We are witnessing an “assault” on universities (Bailey and Freedman, 2011) and the future of higher education and its institutions is being “gambled.” (McGettigan, 2013) For many years now, we have been warned that our institutions are in “ruins” (Readings, 1997). We campaign for the “public university” (Holmwood, 2011) but in the knowledge that we work for private corporations, where academic labour is increasingly subject to the regulation of performative technologies (Ball, 2003) and where the means of knowledge production is being consolidated under the control of an executive. We want the cops off our campus but lack a form of institutional governance that gives teachers and students a right to the university. (Bhandar, 2013)

Outside the university, there is an institutional form that attempts to address issues of ownership and control over the means of production and constitute a radical form of democracy among those involved. Worker co-operatives are a form of ‘producer co-operative’ constituted on the values of autonomy, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity (Co-operatives UK, nd). In most cases the assets (the means of production) of the co-operative are held under ‘common ownership’, a social form of property that goes beyond the distinction between private and public (Footprint and Seeds for Change, 2012)

In this talk, I will begin by discussing recent work by academics and activists to identify the advantages and issues relating to co-operative forms of higher education. I will then focus in particular on the ‘worker co-operative’ organisational form and question its applicability and suitability to the governance of and practices within higher educational institutions. Finally, I will align the values and principles of worker co-ops with the critical pedagogic theory of Student as Producer (Neary, 2009, 2010a, 2010b)

References

Bailey, Michael and Freedman, Des (2011) The Assault on Universities: A Manifesto for Resistance, Pluto Press.

Ball, Stephen J. (2003) The teacher’s soul and the terror of performativity, Journal of Education Policy, Vol. 18:2, pp.215-228.

Bhandar, Brenna (2013) A Right to the University, London Review of Books blog, Retrieved 17th February 2014. http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2013/12/10/brenna-bhandar/a-right-to-the-university/

Co-operatives UK (nd) The worker co-operative code, Retrieved 17th February 2014. http://www.uk.coop/workercode

Footprint and Seeds of Change (2012) How to set up a Workers’ Co-op, Radical Routes. Retrieved 17th February 2014. http://www.uk.coop/workercode

Holmwood, John (2011) A Manifesto for the Public University, Bloomsbury Academic.

McGettigan, Andrew (2013) The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets and the Future of Higher Education, Pluto Press.

Neary, Mike and Winn, Joss (2009) The student as producer: reinventing the student experience in higher education. In: The future of higher education: policy, pedagogy and the student experience . Continuum.

Neary, Mike (2010a) Student as producer: a pedagogy for the avant-garde?,  Learning Exchange, 1 (1).

Neary, Mike and Hagyard, Andy (2010b Pedagogy of excess: an alternative political economy of student life. In: The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student as Consumer. Routledge, Abingdon.

For a co-operative university?

In April, I am running a workshop with Richard Hall at the Discourse, Power and Resistance 14 conference. Details below.

This discussion takes as its premises the following:

  1. The University is being restructured through a neoliberal politics as part of a global pedagogical project.
  2. This project is aimed at the dispossession of free space/time so that all of life becomes productive and available for the extraction of surplus value.
  3. This pedagogic project is recalibrating and enclosing the roles of teachers and students as entrepreneurial subjects. In part it is also creating a surplus academic population, consisting of the academic unemployed, the precariat, the outsourced, and so on.
  4. If this project is to be resisted then the premises that underpin the economic utility of higher education as a positional good need to be revealed.
  5. If this project is to be resisted then the idea of academic labour that underpins employment in the increasingly digitised and stratified universities of the global North needs to be critiqued.
  6. If this project is to be resisted then the marketised organising principles that underpin the idea of the University need to be challenged.
  7. If this project is to be resisted then educators need to define structures and practices that reinforce the sociability of everyday life, in order to realise new opportunities for pedagogic co-operation.
  8. If this project is to be resisted then histories and cultures of co-operative education need to be revealed and critiqued.

The session will briefly position these headline statements about the idea of the University, and of academic labour, in the UK. The session will then ask participants to uncover stories of how and where pedagogy/educational institutions might be used for co-operation rather than competition. The session will ask participants to discuss what a co-operative University might look like.

Love is…

Yesterday, I attended the funeral of a close friend of my family. As part of the service, a shortened version of the following was read out, which I found especially moving.

“Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don’t blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being “in love” which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.”

From Captain Corelli’s Mandolin

Social Science Imagination: Co-operation and education / week one reflections

I am a member of the Social Science Centre, Lincoln, and in this term’s Social Science Imagination course, we are focusing on ‘co-operation and education‘. Gary Saunders and I wrote up an account of last week’s class, which we facilitated. Each week, SSC scholars are asked to produce a reflective piece of work (just 300w or so, or a poem, drawing, whatever) so as to think about what they got out of the previous week and then bring it to class to discuss.

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?

Consequences

My contribution to a game of Consequences, part of the Social Science Imagination course. In memory of my Dad.

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.

Co-operative universities mailing list

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.

https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/listinfo/co-op-universities

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.

Cinétracts. Revolutionary filmmaking

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.

Source: Cinétracts

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.

The Song

Two continents – two sons,

Leaves a father here contemplating

How time runs

Off and away with everything

We ever call our own

 

The time and tide that ebbs away

Taking the uncertainty of youth

To return one day,

With new grown men who stand and gaze,

Politely bemused, at figures once tall but now diminished

Since their being away.

 

And parents having to let go, yet still holding on,

To little boys they shaped and moulded

In days long gone,

Don’t always through their eyes

See the face the shape they recognise.

But sometimes with eyes closed, sons and parents both,

Recognise the song.

by Nigel Winn (1950-2006). Dated October 20th 1996.

Co-operative university seminar

Reposted from the Co-operative College website:

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?
  • Dan Cook (University of Bristol): Realising the Co-operative University?

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.