We are the University-
An invitation to autonomous education
The university is under pressure to adapt. Existing degrees and departments are considered less relevant, less valuable, in a competitive economy. At the same time the role of the university is considered greater than ever as innovation, research and technology are presented as the engines of economic growth. We can see this ‘adaptation’ happening through the prioritisation of research outputs over teaching, the subordination of this research to pre-determined ends set by state and corporate agencies and in the limitation of spaces for participative learning such as tutorials.
The questions of role and relevance are at the heart of how the university is represented by its spokespeople. These questions amount to a struggle over knowledge and its proper place, knowledge and its proper function. But in these struggles there is an absence: the students on which the university ultimately depends.
We understand “student” in its broadest sense. Although today the university is a hard to access space, in many cases expensive and unaffordable, we think that it should operate on an egalitarian basis, i.e. it should be opened up to every interested individual, independently from their social status/ qualifications/ skills. Autonomous education obliterates the spatial separation of inside and outside by breaking the ‘policed’ boundaries that increasingly separate campuses from the rest of society and the world.
Autonomous education is a movement that is centred in the activity of study, and whose aim is to take this activity back to its root, i.e. to desire – studere in Latin means “to desire”.
At the university knowledge and pedagogic organization are, by their nature, never definitely fixed. They are open to infinite subjective interpretations, uses and articulations– independent from bureaucratic and economic circumstances. The principle that elevates the university to a ‘universal’ institution is an egalitarian one, corresponding to what Ranciere defines as the “generic human capacity to think”.
Today the independent and egalitarian dimensions of study are under attack. This attack is not limited to the university. It echoes wherever people act independently of market objectives and, in particular, act on the basis of equality (e.g. community development, public health care…).
Nor is this attack limited to the present. In the 18th century the English colonial apparatus sought to subordinate the Irish people to its political and economic objectives. This meant an education system prescribed according to what was deemed appropriate to the Irish subject. In resistance to this, and staying true to a desire for learning, autonomous hedge schools emerged.
Autonomous education imagines what a hedge school could be today. The creation of an institution which confronts a university-as-bureaucracy with a university expressing our desires and potentials.
To begin this re-invention we want to initiate gatherings- events, screenings, talks, readings- with the intention of reaching a point where we can construct our own ‘course’.
What is to be done? Potential lines of experimentation:
The participation of interested people not necessarily part of the institution; the production of documents not ‘normalized’ according to academic/bureaucratic criteria, documents which might circulate outside the hierarchical self-referential academic publishing circuit; the collective re-conversion of institutional spaces into the ‘public spaces’ they are supposed to be; the subtraction of study time from disciplinary forms of ritual performance and the valorisation of the collective components of this activity. These are just a few possible examples of AE’s pedagogic and political organisation.
