A world reimagined without the university

Originally published on eve.gd on 26 February 2016.

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I’m at a workshop in Madrid organized by FORCE11. The first exercise was to imagine a world where universities did not exist, their hierarchies and power were abolished, but we still knew what we know. What would we build?

I answered through a series of “undoing” questions:

• What is HE for?
• Why do we research?
• What is “knowledge”?
• What financial form would have to underpin whatever we build? (this world isn’t that different it seems)
• How do we remunerate labour?
• Who gets to be “in” whatever we build?
• Why humanities/sciences?
• Why disciplines?
• What is relationship between knowing things and governing/having power?
• What kinds of freedom are needed to pursue knowledge?
• How do we tell people what has been found locally?
• How do they find it?
• How do they use it and how much do we want to determine how it is used?
• What labour forms are involved?
• Do we want division of labour and specialisation? Even in communications?
• Who might wish to harm us and how do we stop them?