Imagining a University for the Common Good Reading Group (Session 4)

A Critical Conversations Event

This reading group invites faculty to engage deeply with urgent questions about the purpose and future of higher education in times of intersecting global crises through critical engagement with the book Transforming Universities in the Midst of Global Crisis: A University for the Common Good (by Richard Hil, Kristen Lyons, and Fern Thompsett; available with Pratt login through the Pratt Libraries!).

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781003021117/transforming-universities-midst-global-crisis-richard-hil-kristen-lyons-fern-thompsett

Central themes we will consider include:
– How the foundational logics of colonialism continue to shape university structures, knowledge systems, and relationships today;
– Understanding climate change, COVID-19, and systemic inequities not as external threats but as revealing the “glitch” in current systems, opening space for reimagining;
– Moving from minor adjustments to radical transformation and exploring what it means to “hospice” failing systems while nurturing alternatives;
– Examining concrete examples of decolonizing, democratizing, and regenerative approaches already emerging in educational contexts.

Join us in exploring what a university truly committed to the common good might look like!
We will meet weekly on Mondays at 12pm starting October 6 and ending November 10. Faculty can also engage with the text and with other participants asynchronously through a Canvas course with Perusall integrated.

Session 4

Reading:
– Chapter 6 – Free Universities: Free Learning, Slow Learning, and Decolonial Learning on the University’s Threshold

This chapter explores how “free universities” offer radical alternatives to neoliberal higher education by operating on the university’s threshold, simultaneously inside and outside formal institutions. We’ll examine how these collective, co-creative projects embody prefigurative politics, experiment with horizontal governance, anti-capitalist pedagogies, and “slow learning,” and prioritize relationships over outcomes. In discussion, we will consider how these experiments in “study” rather than “education” might inform transformation within our own institutional contexts and what it means to create learning communities grounded in mutual aid and social justice.

This event is part of Critical Conversations: creating space for and educating one another about our multiple cultural contexts, activism, civil discourse, and academic engagement.