The co-operative university: Labour, property and pedagogy

Abstract

I begin this article by discussing the recent work of academics and activists to identify the advantages and issues relating to co-operative forms of higher education, and then focus on the ‘worker co-operative’ organisational form and its applicability and suitability to the governance of and practices within higher educational institutions. Finally, I align the values and principles of worker co-ops with the critical pedagogic framework of ‘Student as Producer’. Throughout I employ the work of Karl Marx to theorise the role of labour and property in a ‘co-operative university’, drawing particularly on later Marxist writers who argue that Marx’s labour theory of value should be understood as a critique of labour under capitalism, rather than one developed from the standpoint of labour.

31 The End of a Golden Era of British Music? : Exploration of Educational Gaps in the Current UK Creative Industry Strategy

“…There are new initiatives to explore the viability of the first UK cooperative universities ( Bothwell, 2016 ;Cook, 2013 ;Winn, 2015 ). "New old" models of HE are being explored, focusing back on private vs. common vs. public good, including alternative models such as trust universities ( Boden et al, 2012 ;Wright et al, 2011 ;Wright and Shore, 2017 ), and also, more relevant for the creative sector, my own expressions of the role of universities in the creative economy and society ( Boehm, 2015b( Boehm, , 2014( Boehm, , 2015a( Boehm, , 2016a( Boehm, , 2016bBoehm et al, 2014 ).…”

Interview on Marxism, Critical Pedagogy and Inclusive Education: Discussions for a Revolutionary Discourse

“…Student as Producer at the University of Lincoln 'should be understood as a large-scale project operating inside and across the university, grounded in social theory that is against what the university has become' (Winn, 2015, pp.50-51 -original emphases). Its pedagogic practices and theoretical underpinnings can be viewed as a program of 'immanent critique' of mainstream, capitalising university life (Winn, 2015; and for more on Student as Producer see Neary, 2010 and. Of course, there are many examples of students pushing against the containment of education within capitalist forms, and the Chilean student movement in recent years has yielded such an example (see Simbuerger and Neary, 2015).…”

The common in higher education: a conceptual approach

“…Higher education cooperatives and autonomous educational initiatives are usually democratically self-governed by their participants, creators and users (like SHURE University in Japan or Mondragon University in Spain) and either formed outside the existing higher education institutions or based on conversion or dissolution of public or private institutions (Winn 2015). All these initiatives contribute to the development and consolidation of conditions for the social and fully democratic management of the wealth of knowledge and learning processes within and beyond their institutions.…”