07 December 2009
proletarian university against the university
From Ben:
My MPhil thesis was on Raymond Williams, and I touched upon his decision to move from working in Adult Education (aka workers education) to becoming a university professor. This was partly an affirmative decision following the rise in working class intake into the universities in the early '60s, but also a result of his disenchantment with a workers' education movement which had been coopted. It seems to me, if anything, the pendulum is swinging in the opposite direction now.
To understand the situation now, I think it's important to revisit the history of worker's education in Britain (which I only understand sketchily) - it seems that the formative event was the Ruskin Strike, and the split between the Pleb's League/NCLC (National Council of Labour Colleges) as a union-funded and therefore autonomous institution, versus the WEA which was linked into university extension courses. Williams worked for the WEA doing extramural education from Oxford university. His assessment, which I agree with, is that the NCLC had a constitutional autonomy, whereas the WEA did not, and thus it was a constant struggle, which he eventually abandoned, to maintain the proletarian character of the latter. Now of course the trade unions are deeply mired in the New Labour project so it seems that even this avenue has closed too!
The point I am trying to illustrate here is that it seems to me that if there is going to be a proletarian university, it has to be (re)founded on a basis separate from the universities, and provide a distinct alternative. Funnily enough, when I googled this idea, I found the following site: I have not heard of Len Burch, (who runs the page) before, but it might be worth contacting him!
My MPhil thesis was on Raymond Williams, and I touched upon his decision to move from working in Adult Education (aka workers education) to becoming a university professor. This was partly an affirmative decision following the rise in working class intake into the universities in the early '60s, but also a result of his disenchantment with a workers' education movement which had been coopted. It seems to me, if anything, the pendulum is swinging in the opposite direction now.
To understand the situation now, I think it's important to revisit the history of worker's education in Britain (which I only understand sketchily) - it seems that the formative event was the Ruskin Strike, and the split between the Pleb's League/NCLC (National Council of Labour Colleges) as a union-funded and therefore autonomous institution, versus the WEA which was linked into university extension courses. Williams worked for the WEA doing extramural education from Oxford university. His assessment, which I agree with, is that the NCLC had a constitutional autonomy, whereas the WEA did not, and thus it was a constant struggle, which he eventually abandoned, to maintain the proletarian character of the latter. Now of course the trade unions are deeply mired in the New Labour project so it seems that even this avenue has closed too!
The point I am trying to illustrate here is that it seems to me that if there is going to be a proletarian university, it has to be (re)founded on a basis separate from the universities, and provide a distinct alternative. Funnily enough, when I googled this idea, I found the following site: I have not heard of Len Burch, (who runs the page) before, but it might be worth contacting him!
