The Free University of Sheffield

The text of this article comes from a presentation delivered by one of our members–Josh Berlyne–to a Masters’ module in the English Literature department of the University of Sheffield, called “Theory as Potentiality – the Experience of the Possible”.  Josh would like to apologise that the last two paragraphs were written in a rush.

Since we’re discussing “potentiality” in these seminars, and I’m neither an English student, nor am I trained in continental philosophy, I thought it might be most interesting, or should I say productive, to give my perspective on the matter from an activist’s point of view.  I study History and Philosophy but, above all else, I consider myself an activist.

To properly understand the soup seminars, I think, you need to understand how the idea came to be.  Last year, I took part in a module similar to this one, called “Radical Theory”.  The form the module took was itself radical: there were no set texts, no lectures, no forced discussion.  Instead, each participant sought to analyse a social or political crisis of their own choosing, with a view to theorising (and performing) an intervention into that crisis.  Thus unlike traditional university courses, there was no “teacher”, per se.  In the traditional setting, the “teacher” assumes the role of the gatekeeper or owner of knowledge and it is the teacher’s role to impart that knowledge upon her students.  This is what Paulo Freire calls the “banking model of education”.  Students are treated as if they are receptacles ready to be filled with knowledge.  In contrast, Radical Theory set out a different model for learning which focused on the creation of knowledge, rather than the acquisition of knowledge.  Thus rather than learning from a teacher, we learnt from each other: the classroom became a meeting-ground for scholars to discuss, critique and oftentimes muddle through our ideas.  Because we came from different backgrounds, and were studying different crises, there were tensions between our ideas which opened up new avenues of thought.  However, it’s not clear to me that these new avenues of thought about our crises led to significant interventions into our crises.  The soup seminars emerged as a critique of this problem.

I’d like to take a slight detour to discuss the relationship between thought and action.  It’s a deeply problematic relationship, and one that often keeps me awake at night.  Paulo Freire discusses this relationship in depth in his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  It’s really helped me to think through this problem.   Freire tells us,

“It is only when the oppressed find the oppressor out and become involved in the organised struggle for their liberation that they begin to believe in themselves.  This discovery cannot be purely intellectual, but must involve action; nor can it be limited to mere activism, but must include serious reflection: only then will it be a praxis.”

So, the oppressed must not only recognise the fact that they are oppressed, and understand the ways in which they are oppressed: they must also believe in themselves.  This is because in any given situation of oppression, the oppressors are constructed as right, the oppressed are constructed as wrong.  Only when the oppressed come to understand that they are right, morally, do we then have one of the preconditions for action.  This is why eliminating the teacher-student hierarchy is a crucial aspect of revolutionary education.  The traditional model of education teaches us to doubt ourselves.  It teaches us that we are only right when the teacher tells us we are right.  This makes us wary of taking action.  Radical Theory and the soup seminars, on the other hand, attempt to teach us to believe in ourselves, while at the same time attempting to strip naked the relations of oppression in this world.  Thus is teaches us to understand that we are right to take action, while at the same time leading us to uncover what action it is that we should take.  However, revolutionary action does not occur simply by virtue of there being an oppressed class which both believes in itself and understands the way in which it is oppressed.  Remember, Freire tells us that the oppressed must “become involved in the organised struggle for their liberation”.   Furthermore, it is an intrinsic part of a revolutionary education, since it is only through the organised struggle that we truly begin to believe in ourselves.  Only when we begin to believe in ourselves, do we begin to regain that humanity which a situation of oppression has stripped us of.  And finally, it is only through organised and reflective action that we create the possibility of overturning a situation of oppression.  It is this exact point that makes the soup seminars a critique of Radical Theory.  And before I go on, I want to make clear what I mean by critique.  I do not mean that the soup seminars are better than Radical Theory.  Rather, I see the soup seminars as an attempt to address one of the problems I saw in Radical Theory, namely the problem of trying to make organised action develop out of a university classroom.

The primary difference between the soup seminars and Radical Theory is not the soup, although I will get onto that later.  Fundamentally, the difference is that the soup seminars attempt to take the model of Radical Theory out of the university classroom, and into a social movement.  Thus we attempt to add the final piece to Freire jigsaw of revolutionary action: by embedding the participants in a political movement, we open up the possibility for the education to take place within the context of organised resistance.  This means that there can be a direct link between education and resistance.  In their essay, “Towards a Revolutionary Left”, the Facing Reality Collective argue that “the university itself can only be the embalmer of revolutionary theory and politics”.  In contrast, “a revolutionary organization can be the fighting university of the working class”.  Although I do not wholly agree with their point about the university—in fact I think it can incubate radical ideas—I think it is true that radical or revolutionary ideas and education must ultimately end up in an organised political movement.  We need to re-think political movements as spaces not only for action, but also for reflection and education.  In fact, I think many political movements already operate in this way, but often it is not formalised or immediately apparent.  You might also wonder, why can’t universities be spaces for action?  I don’t have time to address this issue in full, but I will give you this.  Currently, universities are dominated by the interests of capital.  In order to stay in existence, universities must woo big business in order to get new buildings and new facilities.  If a genuinely organised political movement were to spring out of their classrooms, the university would crush it at first sight.  Management, afraid of losing investors, become conservative even if their politics are ostensibly progressive (Craig Calhoun, director of LSE and a Marxian academic, being a case in point).  However this is, of course, up for debate.

Finally, the soup: why do we include soup?  The purpose of providing soup at our meetings is to bring care centre-stage in our activism.  It seems often to be forgotten that capitalism not only makes many of us economically poor, but it also makes us time-poor.  In order to do things in this world, we need both time and money.  By providing free soup, we save people the time of going home to cook food, and the money of having to buy food.  This means that people who otherwise could not come to our meetings—primarily people who work full-time—are now able to participate.  I’d like to end on this note: political organising has taught me that, when we think about what is possible, it is just as important to think about the small details and the not-so-obvious issues.  We’ll never build a new society if the only ones who participate in its organisation are the ones who have the most time and the most capital.

Our seventh soup seminar will be at Union St, at 6.30pm on Thursday 24th September.  If we could have some help with collecting the vegetables and cooking the soup, that would be great.  Please email us at freeunisheff [at] gmail [dot] com.  As usual we’ll start cooking at 4pm.  Help would be really appreciated.  The burden of the care work should be shared, rather than letting it fall on one person’s shoulders.

In the soup seminars we come together to cook and eat food, and discuss how we can act to change society’s problems. We are creating a community of thinkers and activists to come together and work out constructive solutions to the problems we face today. (All food is vegan).

We have set out three principles of the soup seminars: (1) education must serve the needs of society, not the interests of the individual; (2) we cannot leave it up to academics or ‘experts’ to come up with ways to solve our problems – we are all experts; and (3) if we are going to change anything, we must study and act together.

See below for the email sent out to the mailing list, with information on what we discussed last week and what we’ll be discussing next week, including readings. To join our mailing list, please email us at freeunisheff [at] gmail [dot] com.

Hi everyone,

It was great to see some new faces at the soup seminar last week.  I hope everyone enjoyed it as much as I did.  Our next soup seminar will be at Union St, at 6.30pm on Thursday 24th September.  If I could have some help with collecting the vegetables and cooking the soup, that would be great.  Either reply to this email or text me on 07584092431.  As usual we’ll start cooking at 4pm.  Help would be really appreciated.  The burden of the care work should be shared, rather than letting it fall on one person’s shoulders.

Scroll down to see what we’ll be discussing next week.

Last week we discussed the role of students and teachers in the modern university, and how these roles might be different in a “free university”.  We discussed the “student as producer” project at the University of Lincoln.  While many people felt uncomfortable at the language of “productivity”, I think we generally agreed that the aim of the project was admirable: to engage students in the research process and recognise that students can be active creators and can participate in their own learning.  This is opposed to the current model of teaching, which sees students as passive and sees teaching as less important than research.

It is worth noting here that Walter Benjamin’s essay, ‘The Author as Producer‘ was a key text when the Student as Producer project was being developed by Mike Neary and others at the University of Lincoln.

Adam also noted how Joss Winn, in his article ‘The Co-operative University: Labour, Property and Pedagogy’, pinpointed as a central problem in the modern university the question of who owns knowledge.  In a free university, Winn suggests, there would be no strict division between “student” and “teacher” (or between student, teacher, cleaner, administrator etc.).  Anyone could be any of these things at any time.  This means people are not restricted to an official role in the university.  Furthermore, the official title of “teacher” carries with it the assumption that the teacher owns the knowledge which they pass onto students.  In a free university, there would be no official distinction between teachers and students, and therefore no one in particular would have ownership of that knowledge.  This idea forms the basis of the Social Science Centre Lincoln.  As Noelle mentioned, it is also closely tied to the ideas set out in Paulo Freire’s book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in which Freire sets out a model for “revolutionary education” which is based on dialogue between the teacher and student, and a recognition that the student can also teach the teacher a thing or two.

A major theme of our discussion was creativity.  We agreed that having a clear and definite “end point” and a strict route for how to get there can often inhibit creativity.  As Adam said, a big part of creativity is being able to experiment with new ideas, even if they often lead us into dead ends.  We should celebrate exploring these dead ends and making mistakes.  Louis drew a comparison with architecture, and how often buildings are seen as “finished” when their occupants move out.  Instead of exploring new uses for the buildings, the typical thing to do in this day and age is to demolish the building and put up something new in its place.

I think it would be good to continue this discussion on creativity next week, with a discussion on exams, coursework, and other types of assessment.  Think about the following questions:

– Do exams and other types of assessment in the modern university allow for creativity, or are they too restrictive?  Does a fear of failure make us scared of being creative or original?

– Do exams encourage last-minute cramming, and is last-minute cramming a bad thing?

– What might assessments look like in a “free university”?  Would there even be assessments?

– What does the growing culture of constant assessments say about our society’s attitude towards experimentation, making mistakes, and having freedom in the way we learn?

– What is the link between exams and the job market? Are exams really set up to test our abilities, or are they set up to test how hardworking we are?

I have attached the minutes of the last meeting if you want to catch up on what was discussed in more detail.

Reading

I am struggling to find short articles to read on this topic.  If you come across some articles worth sharing, please send them to our email and I’ll send them straight back out again!  However, I think there are a couple of things worth reading:

– Section II of Bertell Ollman’s ‘Why So Many Exams?‘

– ‘Wages for Students‘ by The Wages for Students Students

If you’re interested in reading more about this, Harry Cleaver has a reading list online for his Political Economy of Education module, with a section on grading and testing.

Hope everyone is doing well,

Josh

Tie-dye banner made at the Plan C creche for the Anti-Austerity demonstration, June 20th.

The Free University of Sheffield are pleased to announce our 4th soup seminar, hosted by the amazing Union St again!

We’ll be having our fourth ever soup seminar on Thursday, August 6th at 6.30pm. The cooking will start at 4pm for those who want to join in.

In the soup seminars we come together to cook and eat food, and discuss how we can act to change society’s problems. We are creating a community of thinkers and activists to come together and work out constructive solutions to the problems we face today. (All food is vegan).

Last week we discussed the importance of activists providing alternatives for oppressed groups, using Plan C and the Black Panther Party as talking points.

We discussed the alternatives that already exist in Sheffield — such as Timebuilders — and how we might support them or bring students into them. After all, we don’t want to simply replicate what’s already being done in our communities. On the basis of this, we decided that it would be good if we could begin to build a directory of alternative Sheffield services and projects which could bring students into their communities, and could help students in times of need.

A similar project is already being done by Alt Sheff. However, our idea is that this could go towards making the Free University a reality, by including all aspects of University life: housing, transport, education, study space, libraries, entertainment and so on. This way we can begin to build an infrastructure for a free university which is informal, decentralised and brings lots of people in their communities together.

We also discussed how it would be good to host skills workshops, and set up “alerts” for lectures, so members of the public can attend lectures at Sheffield Hallam and the University of Sheffield without paying extortionate tuition fees.

This time around we will be creating a map of these alternative projects, and we will also discuss how we can continue to build on these alternatives. There will also be a short workshop on consensus decision-making. For the “Seeds for Change” briefing on consensus, click here.  You can find a PDF of the full book in our Library.

In the meantime we’ve created a blank Google Doc for people to add the projects they already know are happening, in preparation for mapping them next week. It might be good to organise them under the headings “Housing”, “Entertainment”, “Study Space”, “Education” and so on, so that we can start to see what a real Free University of Sheffield might look like! Click here for the Google Doc.

We also have some articles to read before next time, which will hopefully give some food for thought about building on our alternatives and what we might be building towards! These are:

Kate Aronoff, ‘Have Reports of the Death of Capitalism Been Greatly Exaggerated?‘; and

Jonathan Blitzer, ‘In Spain, Politics via Reddit‘.

As ever, if you want to suggest a reading for the group, just email it to us (freeunisheff[at]gmail.com) and we’ll send it straight back out.

If you want to join the mailing list, just send us an email asking to be added.

Here are some lessons from activism which have been sent in by some of our members.  It would be good to read these and think through them before our next soup seminar on Thursday 23rd July.  They have been made anonymous for the safety and security of our members.

The stories will be updated as more are sent in.

• My perspective is from being around activism from a young age – my parents were both activists in London from the late sixties through to the noughties. We had meetings at our home regularly – so much so that we used to play games as kids where we would hand out agendas and take minutes, print pamphlets etc. My impression of those days is that decision making was very hierarchical – the ‘troops’ were expected to vote for things occasionally and the rest of the time follow the party line. Heavily influenced by Soviet style communism and such like. Nowadays the scene in activist circles is much more progressive, there is a genuine commitment to non-hierarchical decision making and involvement of those traditionally sidelined. It’s easy to be disheartened that the revolution isn’t happening this week – and overlook the real progress that’s been made. Now it’s standard practice to have a safe space policy, to actively seek to include all voices, to watch out for power dynamics and work to try to flatten them. It’s not the answer to everything, but it does maximise the power of the group and ensure that it doesn’t become self-serving but carries on focusing on the real issues of the members.

• I think I had two things to say when we went round the circle. The first was about what little I’ve learnt from being involved with pragmatic mutual aid organisations. Active groups that are horizontally-organised, autonomous, and have a shared understanding of a goal they seek to work towards have been profoundly successful in allowing people to identify, parse, and articulate their own needs. If groups create spaces where individuals feel free and empowered to subsequently find ways to meet those needs, then those spaces draw others, and also retain people who seek to empower others as they themselves were empowered; this has beneficial consequences for group sustainability. There are risks in this approach: that groups may be amorphous, may be coerced by particularly charismatic figures, or may allow people to pursue needs that contradict each other. But there are benefits too: creating a notional space where people are free to seek out shared co-operative strategies for meeting needs (educational, I guess, in the context you’re talking about) that cannot be met in the choking miasma of late capitalism’s socioeconomic clusterfuck is a strategy of redemption and about reclaiming a sense of human idealism. The second thing I said when we went round the circle was the importance of challenging Capital’s lie about “it’s always been this way, and it always has to be this way”. Educational Hegemony wants you to think that its way of doing this is the only way of doing things: this is one of the many ways it seeks to brook no alternatives, to allow no space even for other ways of learning to be conceived. But in Sheffield (as is the case in several industrial cities) there is a strong heritage of working class autodidacticism, in Friendly Societies, Free Schools, Mechanics Institutes, continuing right through to the later c.20th when despite the Conservative’s best efforts to gut the Ad Ed system, there still survived the proud traditions of WEAs and Continuing Education (both within and without the walls of the academe). If you seek other ways of learning, of other means of knowledge creation and dissemination beyond the horrorshow of the contemporary neoliberal HE sweatshop, there are other traditions to draw from that expose the claim that ‘this kind of learning is the only learning there can be’ as yet another dirty great fib.