RestlessThinkers

From UoWiki

Given present conditions, I believe that the future survival of fundamental truth-seeking, the production of knowledge and genuinely 'owned' university teaching, together understood as part and parcel of the total way of life, may well only be assured through cultural migration, and the creation of new, subversive and marginal institutional embodiments. (Richard H. Roberts, Professor of Religious Studies, University of Lancashire*)

In England, it will soon be impossible to do pure research in a university. New funding structures to be implemented in 2005 will ensure that any project must be subjected to FullEconomicCosting, which effectively rules out anything that can't be justified in terms of return on investment.

It's been like that in America for some time, academics reduced to the status of court poets hustling for every penny. The University of Openess is a fine example of responses to this danger. A pioneer in the resistance to co-optation of all knowledge production by the bean-counters and factory lines, the blank-eyed GangrapingOfCulturalEnergy, the University of Openess begins to show what needs to be done.

As traditional institutions become ever more untenable a new generation of renegade intellectuals will self-institute to create new cultural matrices structured as affinity groups, non-exclusive and self-selecting and composed of the restless thinkers who cannot but use their minds. These thinkers will be one of the few things standing between the economic juggernaut and those shattered remnants of cultural life remaining in a smoking cultural wasteland.

This is one of those points at which the sheer fuckedupness of where we're at tips over into something potentially exciting. A large number of people who under the more 'civilised' circumstances of a generation ago would have opted for a quiet life in ivory towers or bureaucratic welfare systems have had that security pulled from under them . The more naked the system gets, the more obvious to anyone who can step outside of it long enough to get their eyes into focus that it can't go on like this. This swells the ranks in the greenwood: the mythical home of the outlaws, the masterless men and women or those whose allegiance will no longer allow them to submit to those who claim power over them.

But it isn't all making merry. Those of us who would always have been outlanders need to meet the newcomers and be willing to learn from them.

And as thinkers, the symposium will not be all about the drinking. We need to consider what deserves salvaging from traditions of rigour and discipline - after all, these are among the things under liquidation as our universities are converted into knowledge factories. One starting point may be the disreputable origins of the mediaeval university, as well as the monastic cultures that preceded it.

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