Toward an Anti- and Alter- University: Thriving in the Mess of Studying, Organizing, and Relating with ExCo of the Twin Cities (original) (raw)

2017, Out of the Ruins: The Emergence of Radical Learning Spaces

After eight years of existence, hosting over five hundred courses with thousands of participants, ExCo of the Twin Cities has blazed a unique path for radical study projects. What distinguishes Ex Co from most of the fifty or so contemporary free universities and free schools in North America is that it emerged out of struggles within and against normal education institutions. From continuing to engage with those struggles while creating an alternative, Ex Co's organizers have developed a particular kind of political project that, if strengthened and spread, could become a powerful infrastructure for radical movement-embedded study. Yet they have faced many challenges. Writing from the perspectives of ExCo organizers, we offer selected narratives and critical analyses of the challenges ExCo has faced, leading towards our conclusion with a proposal of strategic guidance for organizers ofExCo and other projects of study within radical movements. Taking inspiration from its formative struggles, a driving motivation for many ExCo organizers over the years has been the opportunity to create an alternative university that would, among other things, avoid reproducing the modes of teaching and learning and the overall composition of higher education institutions in the Twin Cities. Instead of the predominantly white, middle- and upper-class knowledges and bodies that were valued at local universities and colleges, we would create ExCo as a working-class institution that centered ways of knowing and learning that resonated with peoples' everyday lives and histories, especially people who existed only on the margins, if at all, within higher education. Despite these desires and our experiments to envision and create a critical university utopia, we often failed in our attempts, with organizers and class facilitators being mostly white and college-educated. We focus our study on Ex Co's first six years (2005-2011) in order to highlight what we interpret as a major shift in its organizing practices. ExCo began through practices of collective, messy studying in-and-through organizing and building "a/ effective relationships" of creative resistance to higher education. However, this messy studying of questions and controversies—around access to or exclusion from higher education and around whom ExCo should serve—often became a source of discomfort. Our analysis highlights the various ways in which organizers tended to short-circuit, or take shortcuts around, these messy, collective inquiries. ... In telling stories ofExCo' s origins, we find a kind of indeterminacy about when and where the project begins. In the first part of the paper, a retelling ofExCo' s beginnings, we highlight how ExCo' s growth and change cannot be easily ascribed to linear narratives of intentionality and action or clean arcs of progress/growth and failure/ decline, but were embedded within the place-and-body-political relationships and study of those who were attracted into its project. In the second part, we narrate how, in ExCo's expansion, organizers grappled with tensions from trying to hold together both elements of ExCo's mission: its engagement with university struggles and its creation of a radical alternative. Attempts to deal with these controversies through structural transformation, unfortunately, ended up reproducing some of the technocratic, patriarchal features of the education system within ExCo's own approach.