Britain decides to emulate USian University Epic Fail

Eagleton on a new, private university in London:

If a system of US-type private liberal arts colleges like this one gains ground in Britain, the result will be to relegate an already impoverished state university system to second-class status. So far, British society has held the view that the education of doctors, teachers, social workers and so on is too momentous a matter to be left to the vagaries of the profit motive. This is why though there are already one or two private universities in the country, nobody has a clue where they are. This new college, however, could be the thin end of an ugly wedge. Why should Grayling, Dawkins and their chums care about that, though, when they will be drawing down mega-salaries for what is reported to be an extremely modest amount of lecturing?

In the US, getting yourself a decent education depends in part on the whims of the well-heeled. It is they who decide whether to obtain their tax breaks by donating a new theatre or lab to your college, or whether to find some more devious way of avoiding the inland revenue. This new venture in Bloomsbury is said to be backed by multimillion pound funding from private investors. While the Graylings and Colleys spout on in the classrooms about humane values, they are in the pay of those who would not recognise such things if they were to move into their living rooms.

Cost-per-action in San Marino

SCEPSI - European School of Social Imagination
Conference 20-22 May 2011, Republic of San Marino

PRELIMINARY PROGRAM:
PRACTICAL INFORMATION:

Reinventing the autonomy of knowledge is the task of our time. It’s not only a political task. The epistemic foundation of research and learning as autonomous activities is at stake, when dogmas of profit, growth, competition take the lead in the old institutions of production and transmission of knowledge. This is why we are calling students and researchers, artists and scientists and social activists to gather in the first conference of SCEPSI that will take place in San Marino, on 20-22 May 2011.

Protests against the financial aggression and the destruction of the
public school in the European continent are spreading, but we have to
create new institutions, aimed to self organization of cognitive workers
and to the reactivation of social sensibility and imagination. The
conference will be the first act of the activity of the European School of
Social Imagination, that in the next year will organize seminars in San
Marino, and in European cities like Helsinki, London, and Oslo.

The activity of the School starts from four question[s]: 1. How can we think
the consequences to every day life in the face of a possible economic
failure of the European Union? 2. How can art and poetry arouse new
energies and revitalize the social field weakened by precarization and the
alienation of (digital) labour? 3.How can emergent scientific imagination
reconstitute the social body? 4. How can we open up spaces for the
autonomy of knowledge within the process of the marketisation and
capitalisation of the education system?

These questions will be foundational for the emergent curriculum of the first year of seminars and engagements of the European School of Social Imagination. The following is the program of the conference, that may change slightly during the next weeks.

One apparently must go to San Marino to find people talking about something worthwhile. Of course we USians gave up the autonomy of knowledge early on - was it at the time we decided that all speech should be impregnated by advertising? Or was it endemic to our method of escaping history -- making all speech, all public records, merely somebody else's marketing, to which we triumphantly suggest our counter-marketing?

If Europe is concerned for the destruction of the public school, it is now in need of referring to our history.