The Free University of NYC

The Free University dedicates this Valentine’s Day re-posting of Laurie Penny’s article to all of the feminists world wide who work daily to smash patriarchy and end gender based violence.

Originally published in the Guardian. February, 12th 2013 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/13/new-feminism-defying-shame)

By Laurie Penny

“I’m sick of being ashamed.” Three days ago, an anti-harassment activist said those words to me in a flat above Cairo’s Tahrir square, as she pulled on her makeshift uniform ready to protect women on the protest lines from being raped in the street. Only days before, I’d heard exactly the same words from pro-choice organisers in Dublin, where I travelled to report on the feminist fight to legalise abortion in Ireland. I had thought that I was covering two separate stories – so why were two women from different countries and backgrounds repeating the same mantra against fear, and against shame? Continue reading →

(This is a response to the recently published “Closing Down the Roach Motel,” which appeared in Inside Higher Ed on February 5, 2013 [http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/02/05/cuny-graduate-center-hopes-offer-public-model-reform-doctoral-education])

By Colin Ashley, John Boy, Anne Donlon, Gregory T. Donovan, Colleen Eren, Zoltán Glück, Karen Gregory, Stefanie A. Jones, Eero Laine, Ben Miller, Christina Nadler, Jared Simard, Jennifer Sloan, Alyson Spurgas, Chris Alen Sula, Suzanne Tamang, Jen Tang, Monique Whitaker

We are current and former students at the CUNY Graduate Center. Many of us have been involved in the Doctoral Students’ Council (DSC), the student government run by graduate students. We also take classes, write dissertations, work in university offices, perform research, and teach (often three or more courses each semester) at different colleges throughout the City University system. In our work on the DSC, we are elected student officers, newspaper editors, committee members, media coordinators, and student organizers. Continue reading →

This article was written as a reaction to the latest developments in the Hungarian student movement. The student occupation of a building on the campus of Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) represents an escalation of the struggle of over the future of the higher education in Hungary. Today students allowed a group of neo-nazis to enter a forum they were holding and allowed them to speak. Fredrick Schulze, an American anthropologist and PhD student at Central European University, Budapest, offers this important critique.

No-Platform: Notes on the Hungarian Student Movement

by Frederick Schulze

February 12^th, 2013 in Budapest

Today at ELTE

Today I watched as about fifteen nationalist footballers walked calmly into the forum of the student blockade at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest and participated in the discussion. Their participation was defended by the student organizers on ‘democratic’ grounds. This brief paper will explain why this is a massive mistake and what this mistake says about left organizing in Budapest as well as a simple concrete solution on how to correct this. Continue reading →

by Zoltán Glück, Manissa McCleave Maharawal, Isabelle Nastasia, and Conor Tomás Reed, students and faculty of the City University of New York

Flashpoints

In Florida, the Dream Defenders march for three days and hold a sit-in at a sheriff’s office to demand George Zimmerman’s arrest for murdering Trayvon Martin. Undocumented youth in the Southwest enter detention centers that violate President Barack Obama’s proposed immigration reforms, and they organize the detainees. Philadelphia high school students perform a zombie flash mob to protest the closure of thirty-seven schools; their video goes viral. New York City students and faculty host a Free University with hundreds of teach-ins in a midtown Manhattan park while Cooper Union students stage an arts-driven occupation to keep their school tuition-free. Students in California patiently construct a statewide student union that includes a wide mosaic of participants. Fossil fuels divestment campaigns at Swarthmore, Harvard, Syracuse, and elsewhere model their efforts on the anti-Apartheid movement. Internationally, students temporarily occupy bridges and buildings in Budapest, pour onto the streets of Delhi in outrage after the rape and death of a young female medical student, take control of public universities in Chile and Puerto Rico to oppose neoliberal strangleholds on school and society, and exercise mass disruptive power in Quebec to overturn proposed tuition hikes and oust government officials. Continue reading →

This spring, my participation in radical education is in a linedance course. For some reason, US country-western dancing has gained quite a following in our Swedish village, and there are now three courses offered every week, at a price of about fifty dollars for a whole semester. While most people take these courses because dancing is fun, they are also part of a history of radical education: folkbildningsrörelsen, “the people’s education movement.”

This educational movement is run by various studieförbund, “study associations,” the largest of which is the worker’s-movement affiliated ABF.[1] In 2009, studieförbund had almost 20 million participants.[2] For a country whose total population is only slightly higher than that of New York City, this is quite impressive; the average person in Sweden participates in over two studieförbund programs every year!  These numbers still mark a continuous decline over the past few years, down 24 percent since 2004.
Continue reading →

A few great resources for free education:

Radical Education Workbook, published by the Radical Education Forum

Teachable File

Others to come – add your own!