In my first post today, I wrote about the puzzle of working out what I actually meant when I announced that I wanted to “start a new university”.

Something that became clear to me only this week is that there are at least five different elements which I’ve been grouping together under the heading of the University Project. Up to now, I’d not made a clear distinction between these, and the result was pretty confusing — for myself, and probably for others.

All of these elements are good, possible and by no means unconnected — but they don’t necessarily belong within the same timeframe.

Also, this is only a personal list. Among the gang that has gathered around the project over the past six months, there are already other manifestations taking shape. Perhaps these are all applications, and the project itself is a platform on which we’re building them? I don’t know; we’re working this out as we go along.

For now, here are the five elements which I’ve recognised — each of them, a reason why I'm committed to this project.

1. The Big Picture: Something Is Happening

There’s something important coming together around networked technologies and new sociable collaboration spaces, that’s beginning to feel plausible as an alternative home for the spirit of the university. And it’s happening just as long-term strains within existing institutions, together with the acute effects of economic crisis, are prompting many people to look for such an alternative.

There’s a role to be played here, making sense of what is emerging, telling stories and making connections. If a major disruption of our existing institutional forms is under way, then this is also a good time for a deeper enquiry into the promise at the heart of the university, the social good for which it has provided a home, and the ways in which this is (or isn’t) made available to people through both existing institutions and emerging alternatives.

2. The Opportunity: Hub Westminster

There is the potential of a high-profile platform for this emerging culture, in the shape of Hub Westminster.

This is an ambitious new collaboration space, opening next month, and aiming to be a home for London's "changemakers”. If you’ve seen John Geraci’s blog posts about the coming disruption of higher education, it’s exactly the kind of space he’s talking about. It’s also right on the doorstep of the British political establishment.

I first met Indy Johar, whose team are behind Hub Westminster, when the pair of us were brought in by Demos on their Edgeless University project, where I first suggested that higher education was facing a “Napster moment”.

When I wrote six months ago that I’d had “a serious offer of space and resources to set up a new kind of university in central London,” it was the offer of using this space that I had in mind. I’m grateful to Indy, Alice and the rest of the gang for inviting me to get involved in bringing the space to life, and for encouraging the idea of the University Project making use of its capacity at evenings and weekends as a home for our work.

Quite how this works in practice is something we’ll figure out as we go along. As a starting point, we’re hosting a ‘Universities: Past & Future’ weekend from 14-16 October. The aim is to offer a platform to the whole range of emerging projects and experiments, as well as recognising the long history of the invention and reinvention of institutions for the cultivation of knowledge. Because, on our own, the task of “creating a new kind of university” is absurdly ambitious — but if we recognise that a new kind of university is emerging, from a hundred places at once, then hopefully we can contribute to that process.

3. The Dream: A Thinkery

In the longer term, I’m personally interested in creating some kind of “thinkery”: “a home for a certain kind of learning,” as I wrote before, “led by curiosity, grounded in friendship, engaged with the world, but resisting its pressures, open to surprise, and never simply a means to an end.”

I think of Illich’s description of the origins of the Centre for Intercultural Documentation in a one-room shack overlooking the Caribbean, where four friends sought to create:

a place of study in which every use of the personal pronoun "nos-otros" would truthfully refer back to the four of "us", and be accessible to our guests as well; I wanted to practice the rigour that would keep us far from the "we" that invokes the security found in the shadow of an academic discipline: we as "sociologists", "economists" and so forth.

There’s inspiration, too, in the Blackden Trust, where Alan and Griselda Garner have created a home for serious academic thinking, grounded in a deep relationship to place.

Whatever form this dream of mine eventually takes, it will doubtless be as different from either of these as they are from each other. Somewhere like Hub Westminster is not a natural home for it, though; it’s likely to be quieter and smaller in scale. And it may well be five or ten years, or longer, before I’m in a place to bring it about. But it’s good to name this now, because it’s part of the orientation that I bring to the University Project, and the reason it draws me.

4. The Network: An Invisible College

There’s another strand which has come into focus within the group that formed around the University Project over the past six months. Many of us are conscious of belonging to a kind of “Invisible College” of friends and collaborators — and are interested in exploring ways of making this more legible, so as to support lighter and more informal ways of pursuing intellectual enquiries, and to provide entry points to networks which can seem elusive at best, exclusive at worst.

There is an idea of a guild-like structure, with nomadic elements, which seems to resonate with a lot of people. Also of seeking to define ourselves around enquiries: in other words, by what we are curious about, rather than what we are authorities on. Other elements include developing social customs which make it easier for people to become connected to these networks, and to make requests and invitations to other members.

Out of these conversations, I wrote a very rough draft of a model for how such a structure could work. This is a long way short of being ready for publication, but I’ll happily share it for comments with anyone who is interested. I’ll also have an opportunity to explore the idea of new kinds of guild as my contribution to The Resilients project — about which I’ll write more in a future post.

5. A Course: The Masters in Reality Administration

I spend a lot of my life giving talks and lectures, putting together reading lists, helping people think about their own projects and ideas, and developing my own thinking in sustained dialogue with particular collaborators — essentially, many of the features of an academic existence, without the institutional structure. So, what if I offered people a more sustained way to sign up to learn the things I have to teach?

So far, it’s a thought-experiment, something I’ve been playing with for a year or so. It has a working title - the Masters in Reality Administration! - and I’ve written various drafts of what it would cover and how it might be structured. I see it as sitting in the terrain Bruce Sterling terms “speculative culture”: an initiation into the art of making things happen, grounded in serious intellectual reflection, in an environment where many of the roles and identities which separated “thinking” and “doing” have become obsolete.

I also sketched out a three-part structure, which could map to the three years of a conventional degree: an “unlearning” phase, focused on cultivating the capacity for “second thoughts”, becoming aware of our assumptions, and acquiring a toolkit of ways of thinking about the world; a phase dedicated to “finding your thing”, focusing on what you’re most alive to, finding others who share this focus and learning how to become a useful contributor and build your own skills and knowledge; and a phase dedicated to “building a life”, focusing on how to combine “your thing” with the practical realities of life beyond the end of this period of study.

I’ve no idea when or how this sketch might translate into reality, but it strikes me that there are plenty of other people who — individually, or in collaboration — could offer fascinating alternatives to an institutional course.

And, as one small move in this direction, I’m working with Vinay Gupta and Barbora Patkova on short courses for the KaosPilots and Schumacher College over the next few months.

Pulling things together

So those are five levels at which I’m interested in exploring and developing new ways of doing some of the things which universities have done.

They’re not the sum of what the University Project is or will be — and some of them may end up having little to do with it — but they do represent a map of the interests which have led me to talk about “starting a university”, and they suggest possibilities for where this could go over the years ahead.

Meanwhile, others have already brought their own strands into the mix, some of which will make up the University Project’s activities at Hub Westminster, some may find homes elsewhere.

Together, we’ll be telling the story of our plans and ideas, over on the new University Project blog — which means I can let this go back to being my personal blog, where I write about stray thoughts and upcoming events.

Speaking of which, please do join us if you can for the Universities: Past & Future weekend at Hub Westminster, London, 14-16 October, where we can continue this conversation in person.

 

(Thanks to Ben Vickers, Keith Kahn-Harris, Keri Facer, Alex Fradera, Rhett Gayle, David Jennings, Indy Johar, Alice Fung, Johnny Hopkins, Eleanor Saitta, Vinay Gupta, Anna Bjorkman, Tessy Britton, Dana Ahdab, Deljana Iossifova, Charlie Davies, Clodagh Miskelly, Ann Light, David Kernohan, Nick Stewart, Alison Powell, Adrian Hon, Andy Gibson, Fred Garnett, Weezie Yancey-Siegel, Edmund Harris, Andrew Taggart, Pippa Buchanan, Jeremy Till, Pat Kane, Mike Neary, Juliette Kristensen, David Gauntlett, Tom Stafford, Anthony McCann, Steve Lawson, Ansuman Biswas and many others for contributing in one way or another to the conversations around the University Project over the past six months.)

I wrote earlier about what happened after I announced that I wanted "to start a university". The next post will go into more detail about what the University Project means to me, and the practical forms it might take.

First, though, I sent my mum the slides and script from my TEDx London talk last week, and she wrote back that "it seemed like as clear a description of your activities, inspirations and plans as I have taken in up to now." (Perhaps it'll even make it easier for her to answer, when people ask what I do...)

Anyway, based on her response, I'm posting the talk here, too. (There should be a video of it before too long.)

In our last term at university, a friend of mine had a conversation with her tutor.

“Ten years ago,” he told her, “I would have insisted you stay on and do a doctorate. The way things are going now, just get your First and get out of here.”

My life has been shaped by the company of a kind of “university in exile”, made up of people who would most likely have gone into academia a generation or two ago, but who saw what was happening to our higher education system and took their chances elsewhere.

Throughout my twenties, I kept coming across other members of this invisible college. I learned more in their company than I had in my time at university, because we were led by our own curiosity and passion, and because the networked technologies available to us made it easy to find each other and to get access to the materials we needed.

Today, I want to tell you about what we learned, the projects we ended up creating, and the gamble to which it has led me — that the promise at the heart of the university is about to be reborn in a DIY revolution, much of which will come from outside of existing institutions.

It is a gamble – because none of us know what is coming next. We’re living in deeply unpredictable times, as institutional, financial and ecological crises unfold before us, while networked technologies rewrite the social rules for how they play out.

Let’s start, though, with the promise at the heart of the university — that there should be places within society which are dedicated to the cultivation of knowledge, places available to all kinds of people for a time during their lives, and where those with a particular vocation may dedicate themselves to it in an ongoing way.

Now, this is rather old-fashioned language — but I use it deliberately, because one of the places where I think we go wrong as we talk about how technology changes society is that we underestimate how little people actually change, from century to century. Radical changes often come when we find a new way to make room for something old, something which has been pushed aside for a time, but which meets our deep needs.

The university has become all things to all people — an economic engine, a gatekeeper to high-status jobs — and it’s original promise is in danger of being lost. Yet that promise may be finding new homes, elsewhere.

I graduated ten years ago and started a career as a BBC journalist — exactly the kind of high-status job university was supposed to be a springboard into — but I dropped out after a year. The gap between outward success and an internal sense of lostness was too strong to ignore.

I started to come across others in a similar position, looking for a meaningful route through life and finding the careers service had nothing to offer us. Instead, we stumbled into projects like the University of Openness — a wiki where anyone could start their own research project.

Or the Pick Me Up email magazine, written by its readers, which came out every Friday afternoon — with the aim of inspiring you to do something more interesting than check your inbox on a Friday afternoon.

The first rule of Pick Me Up was you couldn’t be a journalist, reporting on someone else’s story; you had to get involved in making something happen, then tell the story from the inside. The second rule was, you couldn’t tell the story in a way that would make people feel, “I wish I could do that” – you had to tell the story in a way that made them feel, “I could do that.”

It could be big or small. Everything from the guys who installed a street piano outside their house, to five mad Danish girls from the KaosPilots – a kind of cross between an art school and a business school – who mobilised hundreds of young Bosnians to reclaim a bombed out concert hall in Sarajevo.

Being part of Pick Me Up was an initiation into the craft of starting projects and making things happen. And among all the playfulness, the most serious projects we started were experiments in creating new kinds of learning space.

There was the London School of Art and Business, inspired by the KaosPilots – and School of Everything, a website that makes it really easy to find someone near you who wants to learn something you want to teach.

By now, what had started as DIY experiments had grown into something that people were taking seriously.

School of Everything became an internet startup, with investors and tens of thousands of members. We won awards and got written about in the papers.

We didn’t get it all right. There was a revolutionary passion at the heart of School of Everything, but we allowed ourselves to get off-track — to build something investable, rather than listen to our guts. 

The part we got wrong was that we built a system for making transactions — an “eBay for learning” as Cory Doctorow described it — when we knew from our own experience that learning is not a commodity to be exchanged. It’s something that happens between people, over time, within relationships. 

But here’s what we got right. We knew that the real power of the internet was not about spending more of our lives in front of screens. When universities were busy building campuses in Second Life, we were out there talking about First Life — about the way the web makes it easier to find each other, to get together and make things happen in the flesh. And that wasn’t as obvious five years ago as it is now that we live in a world where everything from a birthday party to an insurrection gets organised over social media.

The next thing that happened was that a bunch of young artists and activists took over a huge mansion in Mayfair and opened something called the Temporary School of Thought, a three week long “free university” that became an extraordinary crossing point between worlds.

Admittedly, that wasn’t exactly how the newspapers described it!

But when they invited me to give a talk there, I found myself reconnecting to the spirit of the projects I’d been involved with before I’d become an accidental internet entrepreneur.

Around then, I began to step back from School of Everything, and I started a meet-up group inspired by the idea of making good use of empty space…

The first wave of the economic crisis was biting, and people were wondering what to do with all these empty shops and offices. 

We wanted to connect that to longer-term changes in the ways we were working and learning, to the new sociable collaboration spaces that were opening up, and to how we create sustainable local economies for the future.

And because we were hosting that conversation — face to face, and online — we started to get approached by local authorities and property owners who wanted to understand this DIY approach to making space.

So out of the meetup came a company, Space Makers Agency, whose first project was to transform twenty empty shops in an indoor market in Brixton into a rolling festival of temporary creative and community projects, makers, artists and new independent local businesses.  Two years on, we’ve left, but the market is still there and thriving – in fact, it’s at full capacity for the first time since 1979.

From there Space Makers has gone on to work around London and around the UK — I just got back from Penrith last night, where our latest project is getting underway.

Now, it might seem like what we’re doing with Space Makers doesn’t have that much to do with the future of the university. But there’s a thread here – a DIY spirit and a culture of reflection on deep social questions – which runs through Pick Me Up, the Temporary School, the University of Openness and all those other projects. All of it grounded in the existence of this pool of itinerant thinkers and doers, who chose to take their chances outside of existing institutions. There’s something happening, and my bet is that we’re just at the beginning.

The person who crystallised this for me lately is another internet entrepreneur — someone who’s similarly inspired by the power of technology to bring people together in the real world — John Geraci, the co-founder of outside.in.

He argues that, over the next decade, we’ll see the coworking spaces and incubators, hacker and maker spaces, fab labs and media labs and all the other kinds of new sociable productive collaborative spaces mature into a real alternative to the university as we know it.

Now, since I started Space Makers, I’ve found myself in some interesting conversations about particular spaces and how to bring them to life.

One of the most interesting came in January this year, with the architect and social innovator Indy Johar. Indy and I had met a couple of years ago, when we were brought together by the thinktank Demos as the outsiders on a project called The Edgeless University. We’d listened to a lot of higher education insiders talking pretty complacently about the future of their institutions, and we’d found ourselves agreeing about how much disruption could be in store in the years ahead.

So we’d made sure to keep in touch, and I knew that Indy had plans for a new kind of collaboration space in London.

And now that was about to become a reality.

This is the vision of the Hub Westminster – 12,000 sq ft of converted offices, a block away from Trafalgar Square, a massive new collaboration space for people and projects to create social change.

The night Indy told me about it, I found myself saying, “I think the way to make this amazing is if all the people at the heart of it can use it to do the thing they most want to do next.”

“What do you most want to do next?” he asked me.

“I want to start a university!” I said. 

It’s one of those mad things that come out of my mouth before I stop to think, and I’ve spent most of this year being daunted by the scale of it. But I’ve also discovered that the reinvention of the university is starting from a hundred places at once - people all over the UK and all over the world are starting experiments to create new pockets and pathways for the cultivation of knowledge.

And so here’s my pledge — next month, as part of the launch of Hub Westminster, we’ll host a weekend of conversations and encounters, a festival of universities, past and future. And we’ll go on making the space available as a meeting point between these experiments.

Because if Geraci is right – and I think there’s good reason to believe he is – then it seems to me there’s a need for deep cultural reflection into the fundamental questions about the university, about the social good it offers, and how that can be made available to people our institutions fail to reach. So join us next month as we go further into the process of reimagining and reinventing the university.

It’s six months since I wrote here that I wanted “to start a university”.

Go around talking like this and you quickly discover how much hunger there is for something which people have looked for and found too rarely within the university as we know it.

You also get asked what, exactly, you mean. It seems to me now that one reason for making such a wild statement is to find that out: to discover what it means, through the conversations it leads you into.

“Of course, you won’t be allowed to call it a university,” several people pointed out. And I found myself saying that I was less interested in what name we could legally use for whatever form this eventually took, than in staking a claim to the legacy of the university. This was the wager: that the spirit of enquiry and community of learning which make up the idea of the university might find a more convivial home today in new and seemingly marginal places, than in those institutions which bear its name. (This is not to deny that wonderful things go on in places within those institutions.)

“What makes the thing you’re talking about a university?” others asked. And that question opened directly into a larger enquiry: “What makes anything a university?”

That’s part of what we’ll be exploring at the Universities: Past & Future weekend which a group of us are hosting at the new Hub Westminster in London, 14-16 October. This is the first public event to come out of the University Project (as my co-conspirator Ben Vickers named the group of old and new friends that gathered around that blog post).

I’ll post more shortly about the project itself. Meanwhile, for anyone who’s been following this blog — and wondering about the rest of those seven requests for help — here’s a little more context on what’s been going on over the past six months.

Where this came from

There’s a more personal level at which I’ve been trying to make sense of what I mean by all this. Why am I even talking about such an epic project, when I already have responsibilities as director of Space Makers Agency and co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project — not to mention trying to find time for writing, and maybe even a personal life?

It goes back to that epic post I wrote last New Year. Reflecting on what I’d learned in the eight years since I ditched my career at the BBC, I found myself looking the same distance ahead, which takes me to the other side of 40. What could I start working on in 2011, that I could imagine still having at the heart of my life then?

The answer came from the pattern I saw when I looked back: one way and another, I’d kept returning to the attempt to create a home for a certain kind of learning, led by curiosity, grounded in friendship, engaged with the world, but resisting its pressures, open to surprise, and never simply a means to an end. What if I could place that more consciously at the centre of my work in the years ahead?

And no sooner had that question formed, than a series of serendipitous invitations and interconnections began to open up, the momentum of which led to that declaration about starting a university.

What happened next

It’s been a bit quiet on this blog since then. I never did post the remaining five of those requests for help; they related to the future of the other projects I’m involved in, and how these coexist with the new focus of the university. I had second thoughts about sharing those questions with the world, and instead I’ve been working through them more quietly, with friends and collaborators.

Along the way, I’ve become clearer about the connections — the extent to which the University Project grows out of the other things I’ve been working on. Not least, as I talked about at last week’s TEDx London, the contribution of the “space hacking” culture to the emergence of new homes for the spirit of the university.

There’s another reason why I haven’t posted much since that original blog. I’ve been struggling to define the University Project with any consistency. Every time I gave a talk about it or tried to explain it to someone, different elements came into focus, while others seemed to disappear from view.

I had a breakthrough with this a few days ago, when I saw that there are actually a whole set of distinct elements which I’d been grouping together under the heading of the project. So in my next post, I’ll explain how these break down — hopefully resulting in a clearer picture of what we’re working on.

Meanwhile, there’s more information about the Universities: Past & Future event (London, 14-16 October) on our wiki — please add yourself to the People section, and add links to the Projects and Reading sections. You can also follow @UnivProject on Twitter.