Democratically controlled, co-operative higher education

Higher education is disintegrating under misguided neo-liberal reforms. Could co-operative universities, member-run and member-led, be the answer?

By Joss Winn 23 April 2015 / Source – https://www.opendemocracy.net/democratically-controlled-cooperative-higher-education

OpenDemocracy is one of several important forums for the critical discussion of UK higher education with a number of articles published here and elsewhere on the impact of neo-liberal reforms. Most recently, Marina Warner and Michael Bailey have each provided incisive commentary referring to the “disfiguring” and “assisted suicide” of UK higher education. However, it was a short blog post for the London Review of Books by Brenna Bhandar that left a lasting impression on me, where she concludes:

It is in all our interests to support students, academic and support staff, outsourced cleaners and others in their struggles to reconfigure the ownership of the university, and seize democratic forms of governance the better to create and distribute the social goods that we produce collectively, in spite of current government policies and management strategies.

Similarly, Andrew McGettigan has concluded in Arena:

I am frequently asked, ‘what then should be done?’ My answer is that unless academics rouse themselves and contest the general democratic deficit from within their own institutions and unless we have more journalists taking up these themes locally and nationally, then very little can be done. We are on the cusp of something more profound than is indicated by debates around the headline fee level; institutions and the sector could make moves that will be difficult, if not impossible, to undo, whether it is negotiated independence for the elite or shedding charitable status the better to access private finance.”

In the last 12 months, I have attended three conferences that have provided academics from all disciplines with the space to talk about these issues: Governing Academic Life at the LSE; Academic Identities at Durham; and Universities in the Knowledge Economy in Auckland. There is no doubt that academics are pissed off. Sometimes the blame is individualised: there are too many managers and administrators! When it’s not individualised, it’s politicised: the problem lies with neo-liberalism, or even ‘extreme neo-liberalism’. The concluding response to “what then should be done?” is often along the lines of a manifesto or collection of essays, a mailing list or web site to continue the conversation, or even to treat the misery of our condition as research data, effectively documenting the decline of our vocation.

Students are more viscerally outspoken about the need for fundamental changes in the governance of their universities. In occupation – most recently at UCLGoldsmithsKCLLSEUAL, and in Amsterdam – they too demand democracy as a basic requisite for a free university.

We can argue against the performativity of the Research Excellence Framework, or the precarity of academic labour; about the withdrawal of funding and the marketisation of higher education. But if we are to have the universities we want to work in we must reconstitute their ownership and governance in a way that will permit democratic decision-making in the first place. One such response is that of member-owned and member-run co-operatives for higher education: Co-operative universities.

Since 2010, academics and individuals within the co-operative movement have been thinking the idea through, partly inspired by the way 800 schools in the UK have recently become co-operatives, but also because there’s a long tradition of education within the co-operative movement which has taken different forms in different places at different times. When the government has depleted yet another part of the welfare state, the co-operative movement has often been there to “seize democratic forms of governance the better to create and distribute the social goods that we produce collectively”….

Continue to Read the Full Article – – https://www.opendemocracy.net/democratically-controlled-cooperative-higher-education

Leave A Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.