No abstract

Ten Cameroonian women were interviewed in order to find out how they had managed to become scientists and science educators. We talked to them about the kinds of support they had been given by their families, how science was taught in schools both in the past and at present, and whether or not they thought it possible to integrated science and African traditional thought in schools and universities. We used a framework incorporating the concepts of gender and social class in order to interpret their views. On this basis, we understood why these women tended to underestimate the importance of institutional discrimination in science and to conceive of the norms of professionalism as unsurpassable. In contrast, we suggest that women in Cameroon will only be able to participate fully when their own experience and ways of knowing are incorporated into the teaching and structures of science.

 e market model of education, which is enveloping Canadian universities, endangers the advancement and dissemination of shared knowledge as a public good. By reducing all knowledge to a private good, it fails to acknowledge that education has opposing goals, motivations, methods, and standards of excellence to those of the corporate market. Statements made by leading advocates of the market model exhibit a habitual tendency to expunge all evidence that does not serve the overriding goal of maximizing private money profi ts. When taken together, these characteristics suggest that the market model of education has become a totalizing moment in human aff airs, which Canadian faculty and students must oppose if the university as a public institution is to survive.

Academic freedom has been a contested concept throughout its history, but it is a necessary condition for the advancement and dissemination of shared knowledge. It is an integral part of university education and research, and is intimately connected with collegial governance and the common good. In Canada's research-intensive universities, the threats to academic freedom are both internal and external. This article examines these issues and suggests ways in which to resist and possibly overcome them, including the establishment of alternative universities.

This article stems from the author’s experience as one of the organizers of an alternative form of higher education, which drew its inspiration from the civil commons.  In the early years of the new millennium, the People’s Free University of Saskatchewan (PFU) offered a wide variety of courses to members of the public without charge, adopting as its founding principle the belief that “Everyone can learn, Everyone can teach.”  As a form of community-based education, the PFU accommodated the needs and aspirations of a diversity of individuals and groups too often denied by “research-intensive” universities.  The civil commons itself is a web of interlocking institutions based on the life-code of value, which strengthens the public interest and enhances the growth of organic life.  Unlike the money-code of value, whose goods are only available to those who can pay, the goods of the civil commons are accessible to all.  This inner logic enables a full realization of life value as exemplified in the living tradition of popular university education.