A Slow Reading [of] Notes and Some Possibilities of Liberated,Open,Becoming Universities

This Could Be You!

First, they hired far too many administrators and administrative assistants. Inquiries, questionnaires, tables, categorization, and documentation became business as usual. It became important to give a top-notch impression of oneself―how one sits, how one looks from the front, behind, and sideways. Every step called for documentation and reports. Offices were filled with documents of nonsense and records that nobody reads.

The newly appointed leader, director of our school, had a personal goal to transform the university. Nothing more than true transformation. Learning leap, performance leap, looo-ong leap was wanted and needed. The management was ignorant of it, but their language bears a chilling similarity to the dark history of Mao’s China [similar to a dictator or an elitist and hierarchical management]. Unofficial texts and talk, and behavioral scripts underlined the need to become one among other successful institutions. Existing faculty and personnel were called “old, resistant, and stiff material.” Doctoral students were told that moving abroad was highly desirable and just a matter of good organization, as if women with families and financial dependence upon husband’s work here could move just like that: “Immigrate and make a name for yourself!” The importance of shaping one’s mind and body was overemphasized. It was important to be efficient. Every minute needed to be used carefully to maximize “face time.” “Make important contacts and network!” “Don’t waste your time with ‘losers’ but ‘prioritize!’” Concrete suggestions were also given on how to practice specific sports that would make us dynamic persons and offer us contact time with big names.

“In the future our institution will have much less students but they will be much much better, more prepared, and more successful” was promised in a general meeting with the staff. We are nothing now or we have been nothing in the past but the future is much much better and the quality (of everything) will get so so high. What was not spelled out at that meeting, but came later filtering in through our head of department, was that in the future we would also have fewer but much much better personnel.

Face-to-face meetings with the director were arranged. He was hard working, and he filled up his entire spring calendar to meet with the faculty and staff. Meetings lasted from the morning to the evening. He gave 15 minutes to every worker in the unit. The atmosphere was very uncertain, and nobody knew what was coming, thus most faculty elected to meet him. Faculty and staff who made appointments had to send him their CVs ahead of time for “inspection and evaluation.” The feeling was pitiful. When faculty and staff exited the director’s office after their evaluation meetings some cried, many were shaking, or very angry. Some staff kept repeating that “this does not apply to me.” Director kindly gave me personal advice such as “You really can’t go on writing in the local language anymore―one has to go for the English now” or “I always carry along a little notebook to list useful and good phrases and ideas for later use.” He did not read the CVs, for sure, because then he would have seen that the faculty had already published in English. So, this advice was just random, or maybe it was triggered by faculty’s outlooks or their connections. He did say, he had heard “people talking about your unit.” He said that like there was nothing good to be heard. He left it like that, a hint. Only later some faculty realized how odd that was, and how improper.

This particular director had been hired to serve as a change manager, and his task was to rethink and reorganize the university to become yet another Harvard. Various other steps followed personal meetings. For example, faculty were misleadingly informed that the financial situation was very tight and there was an urgent need to reorganize. There was no united front against the administration. With a solid front, faculty and staff might have had a chance at least to postpone the “transformative” changes. However, the administration’s strategy was to break the front by threatening some and rewarding others. In addition, only the most senior professors were allowed to participate in the negotiations, including conversations about limited resources and downsizing. Nobody was fired, but many people’s temporary contracts were not renewed in the absence of “need,” even when they had worked 15 years for the department and had responsible positions.

Faculty and staff eliminations operated under the discourses of disguise. At the same time, curriculum was pieced out to mincemeat and the unity of it eliminated so no long-term vision, effort, or financial commitment was needed. First the administration disabled the program and took away its resources. Then, they laid the people off, as there was no longer a program or courses to teach! There was a parliamentary complaint about eliminating local language from all programs, but it was overruled. Everything must happen in English. Even the undergraduates must write their theses in English.

They recruited new staff. However, established names from abroad did not necessarily want to come to this provincial “wannabe-Harvard.” In any case, our school couldn’t afford to pay them. So they had to settle with some smaller names, including local researchers who had earlier worked at this university, or ex-politicians, or “practitioners.” It really did not matter who these people were since the school’s only goal had to do with climbing up the rankings and illustrating that the school had made a “radical turn.” All was totally different, brand new.

The Global University

Rinne, Jauhiainen, and Plamper (2015) noted that university similar to church is one of the oldest institutions passing and preserving cultural heritage. In addition, universities are active societal contributors and influential communal contingences in our contemporary society. However, recently increasing numbers of these traditional and historical functions of universities have become hijacked by neoliberal practices and values (e.g., capitalism without capitalism; see Cannella & Lincoln, 2015). Oftentimes, alternatives to the restructured and liberated universities are considered as unwanted exceptions. Potential higher education anomalies cannot be fully materialized or practiced due to the limited resources, paralyzing normative practices, market-driven beliefs, and capitalistic values of dominant higher education systems and structures. Instead, decreasing state resources are channeled to support effectiveness, commercialization of universities, financial resource building and independence, and profitable business exchanges (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997; see also Ylijoki, 2009). At highly effective neoliberal university, paying customers are treated well, and their voices are sought out and heard. However, university personnel and staff are perceived and governed as replaceable and renewable. One could argue that market-driven university is the best kind of neoliberal university, fiercely protected and supported by elitist leadership and its underdogs.

In addition, many neoliberal universities have a totalizing function or highly stipulated position as Biesta (2011) notes, “as if there is no alternative” (p. 36). Universities’ totalizing function produces ultimate practices and exclusionary discourses, thus limiting and eliminating possibilities for alternative visions and utopias. Furthermore, in many contexts scholars themselves engage in a kind of “self-colonization-thinking,” and even more independently governed institutions colonize themselves by imitating successful peer institutions to improve their chances in the competition for students, external resources, and best and most talented faculty. Fearful faculty and scared staff gain control of their own universities before others (those outside the institution itself) do, colonize their own practices while being anxious about the implications of doing otherwise, thus imposing the accepted and even mostly critiqued values of neoliberal university on each other. Many universities create documenting and surveillance structures as well as different hierarchical governing practices, hoping that they are there first to innovate and produce successful and employable students. Their competition-based mandate rewards those who can assist institutions making themselves similar to the best, most successful and famous peers, that is, toward an ideal and general model of a top or “global university” (Biesta, 2011). Scholars operate as Homo entrepreneurs, self-enterprises, and the men of production who are required to produce more than they spend simultaneously contributing to the common “financial” good and the profit of the broader entrepreneurial university system (Cannella & Lincoln, 2015). Davies and Bansel (2010) wrote,

Academics are persuaded to teach the same way, complete the same forms, make applications to the same funding bodies, make links with industry—in short to reproduce the same practices in order to re/organize themselves to fit the template of best practice as this is defined by management (p. 7),

or, we might add, the current discourse on neoliberal university. “Risk-free sameness” (p. 12) is celebrated and rewarded. This neoliberal move could be referred to as the economics of competition (see Cannella & Lincoln, 2015). Biesta (2011) also argued that the value of universities is measured in relation to other universities instead of considering the ways in which values, practices, and functions of universities are meaningful and impactful in relation to the society, cultures, and citizens.

“While one could say that the global university is trying to be useful, . . . what is different is that the global university is mainly adapting to private interests rather than supporting public projects and the common good” (Biesta, 2011, pp. 41-42).

Slowly Toward Universities’ Fragile Futures

We could talk at length about the body-less subjects, weightless critiques, and nameless governing structures neoliberal universities produce. Similarly, we could spend this article discussing our endless fight against visible and invisible institutions, graduate offices, dean’s offices, publishing companies, and data warehouses. Kundera (2005) proposed that dutiful and obedient citizens fight endlessly the systems by sitting in the offices, waiting rooms, meetings, and document storages. Salminen, Suoranta, and Vadén (2010) also explored different types of surveillance that are potentially built within neoliberal universities: time card and surveillance cameras that are stored as an internal implant into each university affiliate. Rather than continuing these discourses, we would like to take a step forward, discuss, dream, and image diverse possibilities or universities to come, to open up “spaces of difference where new possibilities might emerge from the previously unthought or unknown” (Davies & Bansel, 2010, p. 12). Thus, in this article, we focus on imagining, pondering alternatives, and writing notes (to be read slowly) about fragile futures of liberated, open, and becoming universities. Neoliberal universities no more! Biesta called for imagination, a response that shows that there is always an alternative to the logic of competition and the culture of fear. He would like to see more “smaller gestures” and “creativity that is political in that it seeks to insert other ways of being and doing into the university” (pp. 45-46). Smaller gestures, creativity, and utopias laid out here might offer something else than overly limiting structures and dehumanizing experiences to think about. Utopias of liberated, open, and becoming universities could also become “real” in many ways, provide hopeful visions, turn into goals and future practices. Utopias and seemingly unconnected (yet planned) notes might offer points of departure or maybe even provocative monstrous examples to follow, especially since university (when broadly conceptualized and practiced) is never already here in its completeness, but there is always much more.

Furthermore, Salminen et al. (2010) argue that liberated universities need more realism. Speaking about increased competitiveness is not realism for them, but finding out how much a university student eats a day and where his or her food comes from, how much energy it takes to heat or cool university spaces, and where at the university one can sleep, make love, and critique administration would describe questions associated with needed realism.

It is also important to note that, in this article, stepping forward, discussing, and visioning will be done through hesitation and slowness. We will draw from Wittgenstein’s (1980) notes and his experimentation with slow reading and writing. In Wittgenstein’s book Culture and Value, German and English text lay side by side. Text is accompanied by musical notes, poems, and metaphors. Wittgenstein emphasized how a text should be read in the right tempo and sentences ought to be read slowly: “I really want my copious punctuation marks to slow down the speed of reading. Because I should like to be read slowly. (As I myself read)” (p. 68e). More specifically, we follow Wittgenstein’s aphoristic style (notes, short and individual thoughts, and paragraphs separated by spaces) to make readers think more than read (fast), especially since speed and need for speed could also be seen as one symptom or outcome of ever ticking and producing neoliberal higher education machinery. According to Honoré (2004), “Time-sickness can also be a symptom of a deeper, existential malaise. In the final stages before burnout, people often speed up to avoid confronting their unhappiness” (p. 33). Hesitation and slowness as a scholarly practice also follow the fragment(ed) note by Fichte (2012) who writes, “[W]hy do scientific findings have to be more complete than the first outline? Voids, mistakes and gaps reformulate the question of freedom and change” (p. 416).

So take your time with these notes!

Notes About Past—Still Living—Discussions

1.

Rinne et al. (2015) studied the changes in university doctrines in the written and delivered speeches of Finnish university presidents.

For example, the doctrine of academic tradition (in operation until the 1960s) was characterized as a time of freedom in pedagogy and research, university autonomy, absence of short-term benefits, focus on long-term benefits, education of students for the leading positions in the society, and less state oversight. This type of university was considered an “elite university” in comparison with the “market-driven neoliberal university” of the 2000s.

The doctrine of the 2000s was, in turn, characterized as a university of neoliberal public administration, flexible teaching and research, globalization, accountability, privatization, university mergers, innovation politics, new public management, profitable competition, quality control, centers of excellence, and equity through individualization.

The former president of the University of Helsinki noted that universities are brands without patent protection. University brands can sell educational services as well as big hopes, dreams, and useless degrees (see Rinne et al., 2015).

A university brand can produce and sell nothingness and nonsense.

University as a fixed static institution might be dead and in need of burial.

The static discourses around the neoliberal university are likely to lead to a wrong direction, or they are simply misleading.

University can be thought as a production force; a force that produces and manufactures . . . knowledge, innovations, patents, workforce, . . .

. . . marionettes to be used and played with.

Sometimes educated people can operate mechanically as marionettes.

Who is setting up the ideals and utopias?

Who is building and gluing together the marionettes?

Who is fixing them when they break?

Who?

Thank you Juha Suoranta, anonymous scholars and colleagues for your ideas and insightful conversations that have shaped the writing of this article.

2.

Dead creativity—the death of the creativity within the “production university.”

What happens?

Who or what dies?

What if the university does not have a pulsating heart and core (or care) any longer?

It is all about impacts, calculations, and marionette play.

Even in dead universities scholars and students need to find safe havens to be able to experience and experiment with something new and meaningful.

For example, similar to the writing of this paper collaboration is not institutionally depended or institutionally governed.

It is a (more) organic and pulsating form of sharing and connectivity; maybe a scholarly operation “in between.”

It is inspiration, curiosity, discovery that cannot be predicted, dictated, or governed/managed in advance, from above.

It is exploring and creating alternatives, and perhaps also resisting compliance to production aims and predictable outcomes.

It is not-knowing together under the radar of neoliberal eyes, without financial productivity goals and premeditated relationship indexes.

Some scholars will leave the university,

some will stay,

and some will always arrive.

Everybody is replaceable.

Scholars’ impact can(not) be measured.

Scholarly or academic work is not just work to be replaced by another work, even if scholars leave or are forced to leave the university.

Academic work might be understood as a broader way of life, a way of concentrating (in a non-trendy way) to persevering activities and slow thinking.

It is committing oneself to working in a peaceful manner—reading and writing, inquiring and teaching—with a passion (or love) of figuring out things that are important both to oneself and others, about the world, the human and non-human, the society, culture and nature and (much) more (see Tomperi, 2009).

Once one has begun an academic way of living it is hard, even impossible to give it up:

the idea of scholarship,

the continuous questioning and curiosity,

the will to explore and investigate,

the need to share thinking,

the possibility for joint and critical discussions,

the ideal (of) wonder lingers and serves as an implant impossible to be removed.

How to nurture your love for university and academic work and life?

How to love?

How to love in the neoliberal context?

How to care?

3.

What is academic realism?

How does it operate?

What happens when you ask from a night nurse if they love their jobs and if they are having fun?

At the same time nobody is just a nurse but they are always much more.

Where is the comparison point?

Where is the comparison point for neoliberal universities?

4.

University could live in various ways beyond the degrees and meritocracy.

What happens if universities open their gates to all; some people seek degrees, some people come over after work to learn, some people stop by for Saturday conversations, some people will come to clean the offices, some will bring their children to the libraries and computer labs?

What “open university”—open, where, when, why—

What university could be?

How to provide and offer “life support” to universities and rescue their pulsating muscle mass and beating heart?

What if the university’s productivity is being calculated based on saved souls (see Salminen et al., 2010)?

Open university as open-ended.

Open as to be added and changed (see Peters, 2010).

Open forever.

“Open university” can be experienced as a spatial concept; a place.

“Open university” as timeless space that enables and supports certain activities such as learning and inquiry.

It is an institutional space for scholarships even without physical structures; a spatial and temporal creation in people’s and learners’ minds, in people’s and learners’ encounters.

“Open university” offers time and space for people to think about the most important things (whatever those might be) in the world; a space where learners and scholars can find something bigger than themselves.

“Open university” can also promote some kind of affluent society and volunteering work that might be in relation to extracurricular activities that have educative and educational function.

Freedom of the university is felt and sensed like the university in the 90’s in Finland.

Freedom is not a right but embodied affect.

Palkkatyöläistyminen on kyynistävä asia.

5.

Professors and teaching professiorate have joined the discourses and practices of capitalism. Capitalism’s desire—“kapitalismin vietti” has taken over.

Common and united front of open and liberal universities is easily lost to capitalism.

Too many of us (scholars and administrators) operate based on “destroy and concur” ideology.

Impact measures are external and very narrow so that the purpose and impact of universities can be only calculated with these measurements.

Can measuring sticks and systems show us how the world is changing?

Changes in the university world are announced but only through the lens of measures that are not actually looking deeply into the change itself.

6.

Following Kundera (2005), what if a university does not evaluate or reclaim truths but asks questions, wonders, and trusts.

University’s function and appearance could be as diverse as possible: metaphorical, ironic, hypothetical, hyperbolic, amusing, entertaining, provocative, utopian, and close to the people.

Vanhanajan opintokirja on loistava esimerkki vähemmän byrokraattisesta yliopistosta.

Ennen aikaan opiskelijat kiersivät opintokirjonsa kanssa professorilta toiselle kooten merkintöjä opintojen ja tenttien suorittamisesta.

Ylimääräinen ja tarpeeton byrokratia ei kuulunut nykyisessä määrin silloiseen yliopistoon. Opintokirjat ja henkilökohtaiset dokumenttien vaihdot tulkoon takaisin!

Kundera (2005) kuvaa ajan käsitettä kahden ihmisen välisenä kamppailuna joka on nykypäivänä muuttunut ihmisen kamppailuksi hallintoa vastaan.

Kunderan mukaan hallintojen olemassaolo tapahtuu inhimillisen ajan ulkopuolella.

“Ihminen ja hallinto elävät kahdessa eri ajassa.” (p. 122)

Byrokratia on pitkä ja ihmisen elämä lyhyt.

The life of bureaucracy is long and the life of the individual is short.

Two different time dimensions.

Two different ways of life.

Two different languages.

Byrokratiakoneisto on niin suuri, että virheet ovat jo tilastollisestikin väistämättömiä. Tietokoneiden käyttö tekee niistä entistä vaikeammin havaittavia ja hankalammin korjattavia, Meidän elämässämme, missä kaikki on suunniteltua ja ennalta määrättyä, ainoa mahdollinen odottamattomuus on hallintokoneistossa tapahtuva virhe ja sen ennakoimattomat seuraukset.

(Kundera, 2005, p. 123)

Voids, mistakes and gaps—unexpected consequences.

Voids, mistakes and gaps—unanticipated possibilities.

And Fichte (2012) wrote how

[I]nhumanity and contempt for language have gone so far in the social sciences that by now there are researchers without a word of Portuguese, who are working on Brazilian syncretism, others are publishing on mental illness in Africa, unable to speak—let alone understand—a single African language.

At which point scientific jargon becomes no more than blatant neocolonialism. It obscures connections instead of revealing them, it ignores its own ideological reflexes instead of reflecting on them.

That kind of language is a form of exploitation, torture, and it’s a torment to extrude it—so that in the end these catastrophic linguistic polluters get the same hacking coughs as the rest of us. (p. 411)

He (Fichte, 2012) urges to

compare this to the language of the early theorists, behavioural scientists and ethnographers—Hesiod, the Presocratics, Herodotus—their magic, their discipline, their light touch, their imagination, their freedom, their brevity, in short, their beauty: anyone can see how diminished our engagement with the world has become, how diminished the bland rote-rococo of our universities and journals.

[. . . ]

Who says we need technical terminology to fully grasp the world these days?

What exactly does it achieve?

Disenfranchisement.

Disenfranchisement through scientific language. (p. 414)

7.

University not yet or no longer! University no more!

Hold on a minute—slow down!

Is there a single meaning or purpose for university?

Tomperi (2009), for example, distinguished two different ways to understand and talk about the university: First, in the eyes of the state or the university administration, university is mostly understood as an economic-administrative organization whose success or regression can be measured with diverse quantifiable performance indicators. Second, in the eyes of the personnel (students, teachers, and scholars), university can be understood as a learning, teaching, and scholarly community that aims to enhance people’s growth and education, or criticality in society and a creative renewal of culture, a place for academic freedom and shelter to do research without interference from external pressures.

Dichotomized, categorized, and classified universities.

The first categorization is about (global) knowledge production (with key performance indicators according to the hegemony of globalized capitalism) and the second about creation: the creation of (unpredictable) possibilities, potentialities, or speculating about how “things” could be.

Or could we think of multiple universities and multiple purposes?

Universities beyond categorizations and classifications.

Universities multiplying themselves, continuously regenerating their purposes and differentiating in lines following Deleuze (1994)?

What potentialities might emerge from not thinking universities through the current (managerial) discourse of sameness, through the ideal model of a global (top) university but, for example, through the embodied practices or doings that emerge in inhabiting the university or the universities, the academic work, or an academic way of living?

University beyond (fixed and established) institutions is a space, place, and time committed to curiosity, inspiration, critical questioning, sharing thinking, and continuously discussing things that matter to people. Anyone can join and leave at any time.

8.

We have already many universities including private and public University, the Napoleonic, the Humboldtian, the Newmanian, and the Deweyan University, the Kantian and Middle-ages university (Biesta, 2011).

Universities named after men by men.

How might we understand the university through a new combination of concepts?

Salminen et al. (2010) envisioned a form of “invisible university,” which operates wherever the students and the people are.

“Invisible university” could form networks, secret societies, unofficial reading and writing groups, and discussion and debate celebrations.

In “invisible university” knowledge is born through inter- and intra-actions (Barad, 2007), which can happen anywhere and as such is impossible to be audited.

In their other example, “guerrilla university,” all action is based on honor, rituals, and shared respect (Salminen et al., 2010).

Cells and cell groups can operate independently, or they can copy operation models from other cells.

Cells and cell groups move simultaneously to multiple invisible directions.

This type of university grows through multiplication and duplication, and it operates without deans or central campuses with the assistance of guides, diplomates, and mentors.

Peters (2010) suggested a “post-historical university,” which preserves founding historical discourses while adapting them and “redefining them as an imaginative basis for resistance against the narrowing of thought” (p.158).

“Korpi-yliopisto” and future oil crisis parallels to the crisis of neoliberal universities.

If the oil ends what happens to the universities?

It is also possible that oil will not actually end because it will become overly expensive and unaffordable.

This might be the price future students’ pay—the western curse.

How about liberal, free, urban, vocational, virtual, prefectural, pontifical, post-historical, poor, corporate, massified, post-colonial, off-the-grid, in-yer-face, dialogue, wiki, silent, and university of masses (see also Peters, 2010; Salminen et al., 2010)?

Universities are continuously changing.

9.

Faculties in universities emphasize the needs to do critical research at the same time when the main principal and the perspective taken is the perspective of business leaders.

It becomes self-evident that the purpose of everything is to find new ways and techniques to generate and create profit.

However, exotic group of scholars who are interested in all kinds of questions (beyond the profit production questions) also exists. These scholars question everything, and they might promote thinking that is questionable for business or profit making. These folks are called critical studies scholars. These groups constitute such a small minority in neoliberal universities that they are easily eliminated.

Unfortunately university as an institution is incapable of adopting practices that it studies and reports in academic forums.

Are learners, student, faculty, and supporter of universities ready to make non-fashionable choices?

10.

Derrida (2002) wrote about university without condition; about university without power or defense. He referred to the university as a place “in which nothing is beyond question, not even the current and determined figure of democracy, and not even the authority of the ‘question’ form, of thinking as ‘questioning’” (p. 26). Universities should have a right to say and publish everything including fiction and experimentations with knowledge.

Borrowing from Derrida, maybe we could have “perhaps university,” which would “keep not with the possible but with the impossible” (p. 54).

University is a historical institution, which calls for über-radical democratic ideas and utopias. What can be the functions of über-thinking and über-universities?

How would super-radical or beyond radical university or democracy function?

With new combination of concepts, we might crumble/crush the monopoly of the current understandings of what we mean by “a university.”

Or one might even ask “whose university,” or in whose interest are we talking about “university,” in whose terms are we negotiating the university?

Or even one might ask how is the university or as Peters (2010) suggests, “How is the concept of ‘university’ used?” (p. 159).

University to come? University by the people?

What if one extends the notion of university beyond the current institutional structures to the people, the citizens?

For creating people’s communities, home bases, for questioning and inquiring, for learning together, and through collective engagement, participation, and joint activities.

Knowledge and knowledge creation would be in service of (local) communities.

The people live out of knowledge and knowledge lives in them.

“The university of life and flesh”—the creation of everyday life in communities by the people themselves and the creation of life they want to live (Salminen et al., 2010).

University is not quite this, the current understandings and doings and maybe not quite that either (future).

11.

“Becoming university” builds from openness and difference.

“Becoming universities” have specific places, spaces, and minimal requirements. They are there where people and citizens gather to discuss their problems and create new questions and establish inquiries (Salminen et al., 2010).

“Becoming universities” promote rebellious research (Suoranta & Ryynänen, 2014), and a part of rebellious research has to do with igniting and fueling anger. According to Suoranta and Ryynänen (2014), becoming angry is necessary to form and strengthen active resistance. This kind of anger sparks, ignites, reflects, and forces action. Rebellious university would include rebellious researchers who work for better world and better future. Collaboration with students and citizens enables movement and activism. Rebellious researcher promotes collaborative and situated ways to address and solve societal problems.

The university to come, “becoming universities,” in plural.

Multiplicity is a value.

The becoming university is in a constant state of becoming,

becoming another or

becoming one another,

but never complete.

Projects in the becoming universities are open and unpredictable generating puncturing perspectives.

Neoliberal university operates through singularity and plurality simultaneously. For example, it appears to us that there is the (worldwide) singular and shared commitment to neoliberal values (the ideal) across many universities but the variations of neoliberal universities (the material) can be many and multiple. Neoliberalism creates its unique “material university variation” potentially each time differently as neoliberalist ideals, for example, of profit driven privatization and deregulation, take different physical forms and produce a variety of palpable constellations in different cultural contexts.

Could universities transgress the tension between the homogeneous (singular) values of the global university (the mission of neoliberalism) and the plurality of modalities and appearances with respect to (neoliberal) universities by adding the value and concept of multiplicity into the discourse? And what would happen to neoliberalism in these spaces of multiplicity?

The global universities, the “performance-oriented” and “entrepreneurial organizations” . . . “generated by the imperative of international competitiveness” (Peters, 2010, p. 151), transform themselves according to diverse local socio-cultural and material conditions and, thus, diversifying the global university.

The multiplicities within the global university could (perhaps) create an academic community not of consensus but of dissensus, puncturing perspectives.

“A community of dissensus as a model for the post-historical university: not one based upon consensus and transparency, but rather upon openness, opaqueness, incompleteness, and difference” (Peters, 2010, p. 158; see also Salminen et al., 2010).

Pyrkyri yliopisto—apua!

Älä tule meille.

Kalle Kilpailija- lähde muualle!

Welcome others!

Free/liberated university rising beyond neoliberal universities

In the fringes, beyond the current major discourses of neoliberal universities, academic capitalism, new public management, key performance indicators, hard times and more within the (global) universities, something else is being created: the free/liberated university. Instead of aiming at the external virtue and goods (such as the economic profit, the research rankings, and innovation stories), the value is in pursuing the internal virtues (such as critical thinking, educated understanding, academic communities, and professional practices) (see also MacIntyre, 1981).

12.

The new free/liberated university got started during extensive restructuring crisis affecting Finnish higher education institutions. Many intellectuals were interested in starting something new. However, after the summer break many of the older staff became busy looking for a new job, doing the jobs of several laid-off colleagues, or orienting themselves altogether toward life outside Academia. However, the idea of a foothold kept returning to the minds of many faculty members. After a year or so, a small group of citizens and scholars from various universities started to spread the word about a new possible university, a free/liberated university. They started to think about what needed to be accomplished and what kinds of aims this type of university might have. A draft of a mission statement was created, which was later posted on a webpage.

It was decided that financial streams of free/liberated university had to be separated from the public university, so that free university would not be trapped in the same game that dictated the decision making at public universities. Planning members of free university had experienced how monetary allocations to research projects had become the most dominating goals/task of neoliberal university simultaneously turning fellows into competitors. There was a lesson to be learned. Free university should be non-profit in the sense that people who do things for free/liberated university receive no money or fame (as measured by neoliberal university indicators). Instead, members of free university would receive appreciation from their colleagues, internal recognition, and non-monetary rewards for their academic work. Involved people would have a chance to talk to others honestly and respectfully. Collective learning, serious listening, and keeping one’s doors always open offered alternative values for those involved in free university activities. These values also helped scholars and citizens to rebuild what was broken by academic capitalism and new neoliberal universities.

The first meetings took place in a small space in Kallio, Helsinki, Finland. People from different backgrounds and contexts came, not only scholars from universities. The atmosphere was gentle which seemed quite strange. Not a trace of the usual academic aggressive-defensive style but a mixed gathering of people who really wanted to listen and share their concerns. All originators and conveners were women who did not want to dominate or control the meeting but who tried very hard to make the meeting productive and successful.

The first meeting left a strong trace. Trace of sensitivity. Without invitation.

Since the first meeting, diverse sessions and thematic groups have been organized around varying themes; some of which have attracted many people while others have been less crowded. In addition, much protesting has taken place since the government started its devastating austerity past year imposing the biggest ever lay-offs affecting Finnish public universities. It is interesting how protest and sensitivity (humanity) can go together. There is something new here becoming. What is it?

Recent thinking and discussions have been about themes or things that often remain in the margins of major media. Or the discussions have deepened the ongoing public and educational discussions in some way.

One of the concerns in the free/liberated university has been the question of research and the possible ways of doing research. This group is called “Toisin tutkiminen” (Researching otherwise). Instead of a technocratic and cold model of research, the discussions have weaved around research that has conscience (con-science!), that takes justice seriously—and modes of slow and gentle research.

Free/liberated university has also a task of societal protest.

Free/liberated university is one mode of protest.

Free/liberated university is about free meetings, gatherings, discussions, and participation to create new cultures for thinking and acting, where scholars and activists together with people start to generate knowledge and to act.

Free/liberated university is not about impossibilities but concrete utopias concretizing in things that are possible now.

(see http://www.commons.fi/vapaan-yliopiston-julistus)

13.

A university—please take me gently, generate new ideas, and provide hope!

And think more becoming, open, free/liberated ways—explore the possibilities of universities in the fringe!

Université Populaire de Caen created by philosopher Michel Onfrayn in France (http://upc.michelonfray.fr/)

Or

The Silent University (http://thesilentuniversity.org/)

Or

Precarias a la deriva in Spain (http://eipcp.net/transversal/0704/precarias1/en)

Or

Colectivo Situaciones in Argentina (http://www.nodo50.org/colectivosituaciones/)

Or

NOU Nowe Otwarcie Uniwersytetu in Poland (http://noweotwarcie.org/)

Or

Kämpa Tillsammans! In Sweden (https://libcom.org/tags/kampa-tillsammans)