We exist in a precarious space, tucked into the collarbone of the London Stock Exchange. What we choose to fill this space with, in the little time we’ve made for ourselves, is what will decide our success or failure as a movement once we’re history.
Consider that, precisely because we have magicked up our own village out of canvas and gaffer tape, we bear total responsibility, and total freedom, to craft it in the image of our choosing. So perhaps it is a little disheartening to see emerge, out of all the infinite possibilities that festoon the walls of our lovely brains, a thing that bears the exact same title as an institution that we already see repeated in thousands of towns and cities around the world: the university. For hundreds of years, they have disseminated certain habits of reasoning, justified certain dogmas of explanation, and directly contributed to our current, rather humiliating, predicament: trussed up in a gordian knot of global crises. Finally, maybe most importantly of all, this is the year in which UK universities will wholly embrace their evil-twin neoliberal identity and start charging mortgage-like fees for the privilege of selling education-products to their student-customers.
You’d have to look pretty hard to find another university like Tentcity, though. You, if you’ll remember, as a part of the voice of the General Assembly, made us up out of thin air just over three weeks ago, to serve the occupation as an autonomous, non-hierarchical centre for learning. Our one purpose is to find and enlist speakers to discuss with the occupiers and the general public on the issues that stand out as of paramount importance to our cause. We derive our license from you, our purpose from you, our goals from you.
Every week we’ve held teach-outs on the steps of the Bank of England, in the long shadows of Canary Wharf or on the banks of Embankment, anywhere we can bring public debate into the financial capital, and preferably in the places where it’s least wanted. Everyday you can come down and listen to the speakers and take part in the debate. Every evening, Occupy Cinema shows a mind-expanding collection of films in the same space. Soon we’ll be taking our occupation’s debates into prisons, churches, campuses, all in an attempt to bring to account the power-interests that have oper
ated for too long, protected by a privileged kind of silence. Tentcity is far from perfect in form, sometimes we’re guilty of letting a hierarchy emerge in a workshop, or letting a speaker take over a debate, and yes, we could be getting a better breadth of expertise and experience in for you. Perhaps what we’re guilty of is sometimes letting the shadow of what a normal university is re-emerge in our new space, of allowing the sarcasm of our name to solidify into something not intended. That is the challenge that faces all of us, though; to make anew a better kind of world, from the iniquitous structures we’ve inherited. If you’ve got any notions as to how we can do that better, grab the mic and let us know.
By Ben Walker of Tentcity University