Aims & Principles

Preamble

Historically, universities have been training-grounds for the professions, but they have also fostered the free pursuit of truth, however conceived. For centuries, through every upheaval in society and knowledge, elites alone have had the opportunity to pursue this ideal. After World War II, many nations sought to extend the franchise of knowledge through mass education at tertiary level. However, as the post-war boom faded, governments, especially in Australia, withdrew from the collective commitments educational justice entails, whether financial or political. In Australia too, the move was abetted by conservatism, utilitarianism and authoritarianism within universities themselves, combined with the anti-intellectualism of Australian culture.

Aided by the marginalisation of alternative economic theories, heartened by the dissolution of so-called communist states, overawed by globalisation and the new technologies, many used the narrowest market principles to impose the forms and functions of the business corporation on very different organisations. The results can be traced through tertiary education as a whole and, in varying degrees, through each institution across all of its parts: whether in finance and governance, in leadership and management, in administration and community relations, or in research and teaching. In practice if not in theory, access to critical and reflective knowledge has been abridged. Accordingly, the freedom to deploy such knowledge has been curtailed, and the freedom of future generations to shape their own lives has been compromised.

Akademos, the Australian Tertiary Education Cooperative, exists to develop and practice alternative forms of tertiary education in this apparently hostile environment. It does so in recognition of everyone's fundamental entitlement not only to a vocation, but to the human empowerment and fulfilment that reflective knowledge provides.

Aims

 To that end, Akademos will:

1. Campaign for alternative tertiary education in universities, TAFEs and other adult, community and further education providers with the eventual aim of establishing a cooperative university.
2. Offer a range of standard and alternative academic fora, including seminars, lectures, and workshops.
3. Undertake and foster continuing exploration into the forms of teaching and research, community relations and administration, management and leadership, governance and finance appropriate to our principles (stated below).
4. Encourage and protect critique of existing ideas, institutions and policies.
5. Foster the aims and principles stated here through public advocacy, private support and collective action.
6. Form alliances with other, like-minded groups and individuals, especially staff and student associations and cooperatives working in other or related areas.

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Principles

 In pursuing these aims, Akademos will adhere to and advocate the following principles:

1 Collaboration

Collaboration rather than competition should be the model for relations within and between educational institutions, their staff and their students. Indeed, an internationally distinctive style of Australian tertiary education cannot be achieved through institutional competition for market dominance. Collaboration should also be the model for relations between those institutions and the communities that support them, without restriction to or emphasis on business enterprise.

Collaborative leadership is a leadership of ideas not ideology, of collective goals not personal vision alone. The same can be said of management. They are not forms of command but forms of service. They should therefore foster the creation not only of new technologies but of new concepts and knowledge in every field, especially those that re-think the social relations in which all technology is embedded.

2 Integration

Collaboration entails the integration of individuals with society, where society is understood as a collective directed to realising everyone's potential across the parameters of social difference. Collaboration also presupposes the integration of human life with the rest of the natural environment. It entails too a concept of efficiency which integrates internal with external costs, instead of transferring the expense of private research and development onto the public sector and the financial burden of education onto individuals.

The forms of knowledge appropriate to collaboration are ones which integrate theory with local practice, sciences with humanities, and disciplinarity with inter-disciplinarity. They integrate valuable history and traditions with future growth and development. They integrate technology with human needs, especially in pedagogy. They integrate administration and management with education and research rather than subordinating the latter to the former through coercive, quantificational policy and management. Finally, they integrate staff with students in the pursuit of deep but broad-based knowledge.

3 Autonomy

Since collaboration is an alternative to the quest for market dominance, collaborative education entails autonomy from market relations insofar as they dictate competitive practices. Whether this is achieved through taxation, bonds, incremental endowment, trusts, or other instruments is a question of tactics. It should not be left to the temporary discretion of governmental policy or party politics.

Research too should not be preferentially governed by narrowly economic imperatives. Nor should academic freedom be institutionally confined. To the extent that universities were collegial, they integrated intellectual authority with democratic administrative process. They were self-governing and autonomous. To the extent that managerialism imposes hierarchies of control, it vitiates this limited work-place democracy. Instead, participative democracy should be extended, as a primary form of social collaboration and autonomy alike. The role of staff and student associations should be re-conceived accordingly. For the same reason, management teams should be subordinated to broadly representative university Councils and fully democratic process.

4 Creation

To be realised, every one of these principles requires sustained ingenuity and creativity. Creation, however, includes not only products and ideas, but cultures, communities, and selves: it is the development to and from autonomous human expression. Genuine innovation is its result. It is not a goal in itself. Instead, creation presupposes that imagination, nurtured by learning, guides the responsible realisation of personal and social possibility. In this sense, creativity is not only the foundation of a true knowledge economy: it is fundamental to human being.

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Collaboration between individuals, institutions and communities; integration of individuals with society, environment and knowledge; autonomy in economic, scholarly and institutional affairs: these are the preconditions for creation. They stand or fall together. Without collaboration, problems of competition arise. Without integration, problems with society, environment and knowledge arise. Without autonomy, problems of authoritarianism arise. Creation for one another, for ourselves, and for the future depends on these inter-implicating values. In the end, educational justice does so too: access to a vocation, to reflective knowledge, and the freedom to apply it.

At any given time, Akademos may choose to be large or small. It may choose to localise its activities or to act in a range of places. What it does, and how it is structured, may also change as Akademos adapts with the environment it would influence. Without such flexibility, these principles may go unrepresented and unrealised. Adaptive flexibility, then, is the key to Akademos' own survival and that of the principles for which it stands.

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