stimulant

A while ago, a friend of mine noted something that had been bothering me for some time: when I told people about my university, they were invariably excited, but the message came across more as a menagerie of features than a cohesive vision. Over dinner, he asked me a question I found incredibly helpful in focusing my thoughts and presentation, and one that really distills what I’m excited to do.

The question was simply, “What wouldn’t you compromise about your vision?”

• Non-coercive - School uses a variety of tools and institutions to coerce students, ranging from grades to parent notifications to a chokehold on economic empowerment. Working to break down, undo, and subvert these illegitimate sources of power will be a central part of the development of my university. In particular, the school will be a community of learners maintained by and for the benefit of those involved.
• Fiscal independence for the school and the students - Given that universities are producing world-class research and some of the best-educated people around, I think that it’s strange that they are, by and large, non-profit.
• Tight connection to the community - Currently, the university model creates mostly insular instituions, afloat in communities that range from resentful to grateful in their acceptance of the university. I think the membrane surrounding the university needs to be made far more permeable if I am to create a model of a learning and doing institution that is socially valuable and simultaneously sustainable and scalable.
• Real world problem-solving as a fundamental goal (not just pedagogy) - One of my most fundamental objections to the current institutions of education is the degree to which they encourage us to separate learning from living. By highlighting the learning process and constructing this immense scaffolding around it, we isolate it and make it strange to people. I think this is a mistake. I think we have thoughtlessly made “learning” an end in and of itself, rather than a means to purposeful, creative work. I think that an institution of learning should first be an institution of doing. And not in the way that Olin College is: aside from a host of other problems, hands-on, project-based work is a pedagogical concern at Olin. Doing is a context for learning, there. The ultimate goal is education. My ultimate goal is significant work, real doing: the learning is literally ancillary.
• Self-governance - I’m concerned for our political autonomy and empowerment. By and large, I distrust my government. I have faith in a largely autonomous, self-governing model of small communities taking care of their own concerns, empowering members of the community from the bottom-up, not addressing the symptoms of basic social ills from the top-down. This overriding concern for our political identity is manifest in my requirement that the university be a reflection of this vision of self-governing, scalable community. Currently, the administration and governance of schools is very top-down: those that aren’t (e.g. schools like Summerhill and the Albany Free School) aren’t taken seriously.¹
• Revolutionary research model² - Currently, scientific research is heavily hierarchical, socially insular, and tremendously expensive endeavor. There are a plethora of gatekeepers along the way (college, graduate school, postdoctoral work) and most of your time is spent on activities deemed necessary to create a researcher, as opposed to research. The nightmares created by the mostly governmental underwriting of science are well-documented.³ I want to create a completely different research workflow. Beyond fiscal independence, there is much work to be done reforming the peer-review process and the way in which scientists share discoveries and data (not to mention the media with which they do it).
• Sustainable (i.e. “green”) - People frequently cast environmentalism in a technological context. While there is certainly a great deal of work that can be done harnessing technology to make possible environmentally conscious living, I think even more work remains to be done harnessing simple technologies, habits, and designs to create environments and workflows that are robust, cheap, scalable, and “green.” And I want this to be a design goal from the very start of creating my school.
• Diverse population - Unfortunately, the shortsighted admissions criteria in college feed into a broken system. Given the commodification of college, anything seen as a valuable precursor to college (say, community service or good grades or research experience) falls prey to a perverse halo effect, overwhelmed by those in a position to game and master the system. Anything but the most natural methods of assessment and evaluation will encourage this type of behavior.⁴ To assess students’ fit in the school, I think we can take advantage of the flexibility afforded by the school’s novel for work and community to create an alternative admissions process that temporarily integrates applicants into the school for a significant period of time. With this valuable, truly significant data, we can then hand off the winnowing process to the community itself. Instead of trying to measure alleged bedfellows of the qualities we’re looking for, let’s just recreate the situation we’re interested in. So, when I say diverse, I don’t mean simply (or necessarily) racial or economic: I mean experiential.
• Free - Startup and maintenance costs are not the only banes to scalability and popularity: given that I want to forge a model for universal, self-directed, community-empowered education, the tuition model is fundamentally broken, for my purposes.

1. Strangely, purely democratic colleges don’t seem to exist. [↩]
2. Update (16 January 2008): Thanks to Michael Nagle for catching an editing slip-up [↩]
3. If you have trouble accessing the article, you can download a PDF version here. [↩]
4. Updated 19 January 2008: Jason pointed out that this was unclear, so, I clarified [my point] here. [↩]