Co-operative higher education

The Co-operative College

I received this newsletter update yesterday from the Co-operative College:

“As you may be aware, the College has operated for several years without core or government funding. Despite everyone’s best efforts over the last 10 years to implement cost saving measures and diversify income generating work streams, the College has been unable to reach financial sustainability. Therefore, the Board have taken the decision to cease all learning delivery as of 1 August 2026, and transition to an unstaffed operating model which will allow us to optimise our remaining funds to continue to meet our charitable objects.”

More information can be found in the attached information pack.

Although I was aware there were financial problems at the College, the announcement that all staff will be made redundant by 31st July and that the continuation of the ‘Co-operative College’ name is uncertain, came as a surprise to me. I’ve not been involved in the College’s work since the centenary book chapter was published. It was a way of consolidating my involvement and moving on, while Mike Neary continued to work with them until he became ill. That was shortly after the College submitted an application to the OFS for degree-awarding powers in 2019.

The detail in the OFS application demonstrates that it was a sincere and serious attempt to re-orient and restructure the College towards a federated model of co-operative higher education. At that moment at least, the College was willing and felt able to put everything it had into the plan, but I understand that the pandemic created too much uncertainty for the College and the application was withdrawn. It would be a useful set of documents to make available for archival research and to enable open discussion about why the plans failed. What can we learn from this? In fact, the rise and fall of the Co-operative College is a PhD waiting to happen.

The new model for the Co-operative College is not the model those of us envisaged a decade ago, but the decent, charitable intentions are still there to create some kind of legacy and I hope the remaining staff at the College are able to move on to less precarious and more hopeful work. The last few years can’t have been easy for anyone.

Fundamentally, the reasons why we felt the need for co-operative higher education and the critique that a co-operative university was meant to institutionalise, have only become more evident and necessary in light of the predictable structural problems in UK higher education. The crises of capitalism continue to intensify and the scenario of ‘dissolution’ that we proposed seems to be happening without any effort, but not towards a more co-operative model of higher education or society as a whole.

Beyond Public and Private

An edited version of our article, Beyond Public and Private: A Framework for Co-operative Higher Education, has been published in a new book: Co-operative Education, Politics, and Art: Creative, Critical, and Community Resistance to Corporate Higher Education, edited by Richard Hudson-Miles and Jackie Goodman. I’d like to thank the editors for their decision to include our work in this important book. It’s very satisfying to see the work we did on co-operative higher education having an influence on art education.

The original, longer version of our article, Beyond Public and Private, was first published in the Open Library of Humanities Journal.

Making a Co-operative University: a new form of knowing – not public but social

Mike Neary and I were invited to write about our work on co-operative higher education for the journal, FORUM. It’s part of a special issue: ‘For a New Public Education in a New Public School’. Here’s our abstract:

Calls to establish public education avoid the fact that public education is provided by the capitalist state whose real purpose is the market-based model of private gain. Public against private education is a false dichotomy; rather, public and private are complementary forms of capitalist regulation. Radical alternatives require a more foundational critique of the structures of capitalist education, grounded in an understanding of the contradictory relationship between capital and labour on which the institutions of capitalist civilisation are based. This article suggests a counter project: not public education but social knowing as the basis for a solidaristic form of social life. Our model for social knowing starts with the idea of a co-operative university.

Download the article from FORUM journal.

The Social Science Centre, Lincoln: the theory and practice of a radical idea

Mike Neary and I were invited to reflect on the Social Science Centre (SSC) for the Italian journal, Roars Transactions. Here’s the abstract.

The Social Science Centre, Lincoln (SSC), is a co-operative organising free higher education in the city of Lincoln, England. It was formed in 2011 by a group of academics and students in response to the massive rise in student fees, from £3000 to £9000, along with other government policies that saw the increasing neo-liberalisation of English universities. In this essay we chart the history of the SSC and what it has been like to be a member of this co-operative; but we also want to express another aspect of the centre which we have not written about: the existence of the SSC as an intellectual idea and how the idea has spread and been developed through written publications by members of the centre and by research on the centre by other non-members: students, academics and journalists. At the end of the essay we will show the most up to date manifestation of the idea, the plans to create a co-operative university with degree awarding powers where those involved, students and academics, can make a living as part of an independent enterprise ran and owned by its members for their benefit and the benefit of their community and society.

Download the essay. Read more about the SSC.