My keynote presentation for the Oxford Brookes Learning and Teaching Conference 2017: Working Together, Impacts and Challenges. See: http://bltc17.ocsld.org/

1. The really open university: working
together as open academic commons
Professor Richard Hall
@hallymk1 // rhall1@dmu.ac.uk // richard-hall.org
bltc17, Oxford Brookes // 14 June 2017

2. working together has both possibilities
and impossibilities, which need a richer
discussion inside the University

3. Use-value of your four pathways:
staff and student collaboration; peer projects; transnational
partnerships and networks; and inclusive and diverse practices.
Exchange-value as the new normal:
1. Educational innovation reveals an entrepreneurial reconfiguring of
the idea of the University;
2. Educational innovation is a crack through which we might analyse
the transnational interests that drive value production and
accumulation.

4. In the face of socio-economic and
environmental crises, is it possible to
reclaim the organising principles of
the curriculum for a more meaningful
form of working together?

5. 1. Technological and organisational forms of production, exchange and
consumption.
2. Relations to nature and the environment.
3. Social relations between people.
4. Mental conceptions of the world, embracing knowledges and cultural
understandings and beliefs.
5. Labour processes and production of specific goods, geographies,
services or affects.
6. Institutional, legal and governmental arrangements.
7. The conduct of daily life that underpins social reproduction.

7. Working together: the University and the secular crisis
ONE. Our labour as students and staff is folded inside a systemic, historical
crisis of capitalism. This secular crisis demands a courageous political return.
TWO. The University is a node enmeshed in associations of capitals acting
transnationally through commodification, financialisation and coercion. We
are told that there is no alternative to this material reality.
THREE. The University is a central site of struggle over our social
reproduction. How, with whom and where do we work together?

8. This Bill will make it easier for a new generation of institutions to
cater to the aspirations of a new generation of learners and deliver
the skills necessary to keep our economy globally competitive...
It will also ensure that ensure that our universities are delivering for
the students and families who invest so much in a university
education [and who] deserve value for money…
We will not tell universities what or how to teach, but we will
demand that their teaching delivers good outcomes, in the form of
students who complete their degrees and progress to highly skilled
employment.
Johnson, J. (2017). We must break open the higher education closed shop.
Conservative Home. 10 January 2017.

9. • A new performance metric: repayment of
loans by course and institution
• Outcomes/HMRC data
• One metric to dominate all others
• Human Capital Investment
[The measures] will also help to create an
incentive and reward structure at
universities by distinguishing the
universities that are delivering the
strongest enterprise ethos and labour
market outcomes for their students.
The Small Business, Enterprise and
Employability Act (2015). Section Six,
‘Education Evaluation’
See: McGettigan, A. (2015). The
Treasury View of HE: Variable Human
Capital Investment. PERC Paper 6.

11. “a new disease… technological unemployment.”
“This means unemployment due to our discovery
of means of economising the use of labour
outrunning the pace at which we can find new
uses for labour.”
Keynes, J.M. (1930). Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.

13. working together has both possibilities and
impossibilities, which need a richer
discussion inside the University

15. The use-value of the curriculum
the curriculum itself develops through the dynamic interaction of action and
reflection. That is, the curriculum itself is not simply a set of plans to be
implemented, but rather is constituted through an active process in which planning,
acting and evaluating are all reciprocally related and integrated into the process.
Grundy, S. (1987). Curriculum: Product or Praxis? London: Falmer Press, p. 115.
Vygotsky argues that teaching begins from the student’s experience in a particular
social context. Pushing that notion to the extreme of its radical logic, he suggests
that the social context must be arranged by the teacher so that the student teaches
themselves: ‘Education should be structured so that it is not the student that is
educated, but that the student educates himself’ or, in other words, ‘...the real
secret of education lies in not teaching’
Neary, M. (2010). Student as producer: a pedagogy for the avant-garde? Learning Exchange,
1(1), 5.

16. the possibility of struggle and emancipation lies in the
autonomous organisations that exist within and between both
the factory and the community,
with a focus on the forms of labour and the exertion of
“working class power… at the level of the social factory,
politically recomposing the division between factory and
community.”
Cleaver, H. (1979). Reading Capital Politically, University of Texas Press:
Austin, TX, p. 161. Available at: http://libcom.org/files/cleaver-
reading_capital_politically.pdf

19. Re-imagination: open co-operativism
• co-operative, educational histories
• democratic governance and regulation
• a social focus for collective work
• a framework for common ownership
• connecting a global set of educational commons
• public environments for the transnational, socialised
dissemination of knowledge
• transitional and pedagogic

20. The curriculum is white because it reflects the underlying logic of colonialism, which
believes the colonised do not own anything – not even their own experiences.
The role of the colonised in knowledge production mirrored their role in economic
production, where their resources were to provide raw materials that could then be
consumed in the west…
Implicit in the white curriculum is irrefutable evidence of white superiority as a matter
of truth and objectivity, while crafting a world-view that judges anything that it could
define as “non-white” or “other” as inferior.
‘Why is My Curriculum White?’ collective, 2015

21. 1. Technological and organisational forms of production, exchange and
consumption.
2. Relations to nature and the environment.
3. Social relations between people.
4. Mental conceptions of the world, embracing knowledges and cultural
understandings and beliefs.
5. Labour processes and production of specific goods, geographies,
services or affects.
6. Institutional, legal and governmental arrangements.
7. The conduct of daily life that underpins social reproduction.

22. the accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of
the general productive forces of the social brain,
is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to
labour, and hence appears as an attribute of
capital, and more specifically of fixed capital
[machinery].
Marx, K. (1993). Grundrisse. London: Penguin.

23. As intellectual workers we refuse the fetishised concept of the
knowledge society and engage in teaching, learning and
research only in so far as we can re-appropriate the
knowledge that has been stolen from the workers that have
produced this way of knowing (i.e. Abundance).
In the society of abundance the university as an institutional
form is dissolved, and becomes a social form or knowledge at
the level of society (i.e. The General Intellect).
It is only on this basis that we can knowingly address the
global emergencies with which we are all confronted [i.e.
through collective work/in the social factory].
The University of Utopia (2015). Anti-Curriculum: A course of action. http://bit.ly/1qgEq8C

24. ‘a little more of a politicised
relation to truth in affairs of
education, knowledge and
academic practice’

25. In developing the social use-value of your 4 pathways:
•extend democracy into/through the curriculum;
•uncover our own alienated labour: private property; the
division of labour; and commodity exchange;
•eliminate the social division of labour between owners and
non-owners of the curriculum;
•create less alienating and harmful relations of production;
•a curriculum open to the global educational commons and
critical pedagogy as points of departure.
How do we do this in order to reveal the kinds of societies we
wish to enact, and the values on which they are based?

26. That learning process comes easiest to those of us who also believe that our work is not
merely to share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students.
To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we
are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.
bell hooks. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, p. 13.

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Attribution 4.0 International License.