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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

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

ROU
- e-mail: info@reallyopenuniversity.org
- Homepage: http://ww.reallopenuniversity.org

Comments

Hide the following 9 comments

Reimagine

20.11.2010 12:53

As a graduate of Leeds university and now a taxpayer, I'm reasonably happy with with the university as it currently is. So long as it trains engineers, doctors, teachers and other skilled people etc then I think the public won't want too much re-imagination going on.

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

I think Pete mistakes the role of the University as purely a form of 'training for work'. This is exactly the neoliberal mentality that is driving the further corporatisation of the university. The result of this will be the destruction of many subject areas that are not immediately beneficial to the reproduction of capitalist society - e.g humanities, social sciences, the arts etc. As well as the further instrumentalisation of education, and the production of more unthinking, uncritical subjects.

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

Pete you say "They have no special right to decide how universites are run."

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

After you've had your reimagination session why not organise some kind of survey to see what the university's owners, the public, want from it?

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

Pete, who is this mysterious 'public' you are talking about? Some homogeneous mass of people? Do you not recognise any different interests and inequalities within this mysterious general public that talk of? Things are not as simple as that.

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

Another Pete, you should realise that the majority of our universities were set up by the taxpayers specifically to train useful, employable members of society.

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

Pete, please show evidence of the extensive research you have done into this glorious public opinion you seem to know so much about. Either that of go back and resit your methodology class!

Nobody likes people like PEte


Wrong homepage address

23.11.2010 20:52

The link given here doesn't work. There are letters missing. It should be www.reallyopenuniversity.org

GB