London’s Free University

London’s Free University (LFU) was inaugurated at the Bank of Ideas in November 2011. The aim was to provide free education in free spaces; free in the sense that nobody would have to pay but also free from the restrictions of contemporary institutionalised learning. Many people at that first and subsequent meetings were escapees from the neoliberal university – precariously employed lecturers, PhD students, and a couple of Emeritus Professors old enough to remember the days before fees, loans, “employability”, and degrees for sale – supplemented by a scattering of hackers and City workers. What emerged from these early meetings was a shared commitment to challenging the structure and content of higher education by providing an alternative committed to exploring radical ideas for social change.

The radical educationalist Paolo Freire likened the education systems of the 20th century to banking: investment for a guaranteed return in the form of quiescent workers and a populace educated into conformity. In the higher education corporations of the 21st century, education is packaged and sold like a commodity, with students expected to be informed consumers, investing in their own futures by betting on what they need to accumulate to give them an advantage in the job market. The net result, however, is pretty much the same.

Acquiescence and conformity are assured by a combination of crippling debt and a culture of competitive individualism, where grades are the only standard of achievement and students are forced to rely on an app that lets you borrow money. Radical theoretical approaches to the study of social and cultural structures emerged, largely, from the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1960s. These ideas had their most potent effects during the brief heyday of the polytechnics, but have now been incorporated into the kinds of instrumental knowledge required by ‘vocational’ degrees which churn out fodder for the ‘creative industries’. Students happily absorb the fact that language is ideological, that consumer culture depends on escalating levels of anxiety and contemporary global capitalism destroys ecologies and communities, but the seductive packaging of degree courses in what are loosely termed ‘the humanities’ performs an effective disconnect between knowledge and its practical, political implications.

The packaging of degree courses as branded products has coincided with increasingly stringent gatekeeping by universities. The shiny new campuses of the post-1992 new universities, which replaced the functional buildings of the old polytechnics, segregate students from the communities in which they are located. They effectively check credentials at the door, charge an admittance fee and then electronically tag those deemed suitable to make sure they comply with attendance requirements or to exclude those owing fees. What passes for education takes place within carefully prescribed boundaries marked by the physical limits of the university and the practical limits set by access fees and entry requirements.

Increasingly, what happens inside the institution is only related to the outside by its link to corporate investment, and what universities cynically refer to as “knowledge exchange” i.e. knowledge being exchanged for cash. The exchange value of what is understood to be ‘knowledge’ fluctuates according to utility. So, for instance, the “riots” of August 2011 are a hot topic attracting research funding and, outside the social sciences, psychology has been getting a much needed boost to its coffers from buddying up with evolutionary science to ‘prove’ that our selfish genes make us all natural capitalists. Unsurprisingly, Occupy itself is another hot topic. And, consistent with the universities’ mission to innovate in order to accumulate, new degree programmes proliferate, feeding back the results of hot topic research to the next generation of marketers, policy administrators and educators.

Reflexive knowledge is fundamental to people organising for social change. Freire believed this, which is why he advocated dialogue as a principle of radical pedagogy – the art of teaching – and why he considered the acquisition of literacy to be inseparable from the process of identifying and naming what limits our power to act in the world. A truly radical pedagogy, then, recognises those constraints and works to find collective strategies to surmount them. Although Freire was never a direct influence on the constitution of the LFU, the consensus that emerged from the early meetings seemed to respond to his ideas. In retrospect, this makes sense. If the function of the university is to not only transmit knowledge but to actively produce it, and not merely in the hallowed ivory towers of elite research institutions but in the interaction between students, teachers and the wider culture of which they are a part, then a free unversity associated with Occupy must necessarily take on board what is essential to the movement.

In part, this has meant that, whether by accident or design, we have found ourselves addressing issues urgent to the ethics of the movement: Who has a ‘right’ to the city? What is the social psychology of totalitarianism? What is the relationship between the banking system and social deprivation? How is the mythology of democratic government perpetuated? We also studied broader issues like what it means to describe ourselves as ‘human’ and the fundamental problems associated with thinking about democracy in a different way. But, the association between the LFU and Occupy has also meant that the space where these dialogues occurred had a profound influence on how they were conducted.

The classes at the Bank of Ideas and, later, the School of Ideas were crowded, lively and driven by a collective sense of radical participation. When the School of Ideas was evicted, we struggled on in pubs, community centres and, notably, the foyer of the Royal Festival Hall and a corridor in Friends Meeting House. Attendance dwindled and currently we are not so much taking a break as wondering where to go next. What this seems to suggest is a vital connection between the politics of space and learning as a political and social activity. Privatised education limits the possibilities of thought in the same way that privatised space controls how we function as citizens. We are determined that London’s Free University will live on and flourish in the borderless campus offered by the abandoned spaces of the city.

London’s Free University is part of the UK wide Free University Network

by Dr Debra Shaw