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.)