Reimagine the University -24th-26th November - Leeds
ROU | 20.11.2010 11:04 | Culture | Free Spaces | Social Struggles | Sheffield
Are you a skint student? An overworked member of University staff? A Leodian with a vision of a more inclusive University system?
The Really Open University invites you to ‘Re-imagine the University’, a three-day event dedicated to exploring and demonstrating an alternative educational system.
Download the programme here:
http://reallyopenuniversity.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/programme-of-events1.pdf
The Really Open University invites you to ‘Re-imagine the University’, a three-day event dedicated to exploring and demonstrating an alternative educational system.
Download the programme here:
http://reallyopenuniversity.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/programme-of-events1.pdf
How can we transform the universities? How can students and lecturers learn differently through more creative, critical and empowering processes? How can higher education institutions benefit their local communities? How do we secure free education for all? Is it even possible to transform the universities?
These are just some of the questions that will be explored in a series of free workshops, lectures, films, plenaries, installations and interventions across the city.
All events are free and open to everyone.
Background
For a long time the university has been undergoing a process of privatisation. Universities are now run as businesses, with students as consumers and lecturers as creators of products. Knowledge has become a commodity that can be bought and sold.
The recent Browne report exacerbates the threat to education with proposals to increase student fees to £9000 a year, while universities face funding cuts of 40%.
All this results in students taking on more debt for the same education, lecturers being forced to carry out ‘economies exercises’ and staff working longer and harder hours for less money.
It doesn’t have to be like this.
Another University is Possible
The university system is becoming bankrupt and in need of profound change, we need to envisage an alternative, a solution, a way out.
As workers and students at different places within the university system, The Really Open University can see a different way forward, we don’t have all the answers, but we have many ideas and are sure there are many more out there.
We would like to explore how universities can become a place where creative and critical thought is fostered, where participants teach what inspires them, learn what they are passionate about, where people share and develop their skills and knowledge in order to create a more equitable and sustainable world, not simply for jobs and profit.
The Really Open University calls on YOU - students, lecturers, university staff and local residents - to come together and demonstrate that another university is possible.
It is time to Re-imagine the University.
Download the programme here:
http://reallyopenuniversity.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/programme-of-events1.pdf
These are just some of the questions that will be explored in a series of free workshops, lectures, films, plenaries, installations and interventions across the city.
All events are free and open to everyone.
Background
For a long time the university has been undergoing a process of privatisation. Universities are now run as businesses, with students as consumers and lecturers as creators of products. Knowledge has become a commodity that can be bought and sold.
The recent Browne report exacerbates the threat to education with proposals to increase student fees to £9000 a year, while universities face funding cuts of 40%.
All this results in students taking on more debt for the same education, lecturers being forced to carry out ‘economies exercises’ and staff working longer and harder hours for less money.
It doesn’t have to be like this.
Another University is Possible
The university system is becoming bankrupt and in need of profound change, we need to envisage an alternative, a solution, a way out.
As workers and students at different places within the university system, The Really Open University can see a different way forward, we don’t have all the answers, but we have many ideas and are sure there are many more out there.
We would like to explore how universities can become a place where creative and critical thought is fostered, where participants teach what inspires them, learn what they are passionate about, where people share and develop their skills and knowledge in order to create a more equitable and sustainable world, not simply for jobs and profit.
The Really Open University calls on YOU - students, lecturers, university staff and local residents - to come together and demonstrate that another university is possible.
It is time to Re-imagine the University.
Download the programme here:
http://reallyopenuniversity.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/programme-of-events1.pdf
ROU
e-mail:
info@reallyopenuniversity.org
Homepage:
http://ww.reallopenuniversity.org
Comments
Hide the following 9 comments
Reimagine
20.11.2010 12:53
Have a nice meeting but remember that staff and students are just members of the larger public which owns Leeds university and all state educational establishments. They have no special right to decide how universites are run.
Pete
Trianing for Work?
20.11.2010 14:17
In terms of the 'public' owning the university and reaping it's benefits, I think some reading up on corporate interests involvement in education might be in order Pete!
As for having a 'special right' to decide how the university is run. We are the ones that work in and run the university. The University managers and the lib-con government's job is to try and discipline us into being docile workers that accept any ideologically imposed restructuring and cuts they throw at us. Last Wednesday's 50,000 strong demonstration against the edu-cuts and the occupation of Millbank showed that we will no longer remain the apathetic and docile individuals that the government would like us to be.
Part of this refusal (against cuts, against the REF, against neoliberalisation etc), is also the recognition that the university has always been about the reproduction of social elites. It is these elites that Pete would like the university to carry on serving and reproducing.
However, the edu-crisis means that we have an opportunity to rethink what the possibilities and potentials of what education could be and what/whose needs the University should serve.
anti-pete
@pete
20.11.2010 16:13
I agree, that's why they are best run openly with everyone who is involved taking a stake in how they are organised and how courses are structured. If this was the case then we will see universities as radically different spaces. Unfortunately as the previous comment illustrates, education in a capitalist orientated economy fulfills it's role for the sole purpose of providing newly educated workers into the labour market not about the quality and critical understanding of the world.
Unfortunately pete it seems that you yourself are as much a product of this dominant marketised logic as the rest of us, however instead of accepting it we aim to create a inclusive and open movement to remedy the situation. You are obviously invited to attend!
regards
a
find out the facts
20.11.2010 20:26
I think you'll find that training some people for specific jobs and ensuring that others are employable ranks quite highly on the list, probably top.
The Worsley medical building at Leeds, which I helped to build as a labourer during two summer vacations while I was an undergraduate at Leeds, was paid for by the public with the sole purpose of training doctors and dentists. I doubt the public now want anyone to reimagine a new use for it.
Pete
Who are the 'public'
20.11.2010 20:47
Anyway, nobody appears to be arguing that doctors are not needed, or that society does not need a whole host of skills. However, why should the opportunity for those that want to go on to study and train in those skills (among others) be only open to rich elites? Do you not think the increase in fees will make this situation worse?
And do you think departments such as Humanities and Social Sciences should close because they are not considered 'useful', or indeed deemed needed by this 'public' that you refer to?
Not Pete
Job training.
21.11.2010 02:47
No re-imagining is necessary.
I'm sure there is still a place in today's world for for the type of pontification that was the speciality of mediaeval Oxbridge, but I'm not sure the public wants too much of it going on at places like Leeds university. And I suspect they want none at all at places like the universities of Bolton and Bedfordshire.
Pete
Back to School
21.11.2010 11:33
Nobody likes people like PEte
website correction
23.11.2010 20:51
or
ROUer
Wrong homepage address
23.11.2010 20:52
GB