:: Education & Ethics ::

ìOur critique of ëThe Scientific Method' skips ëScience' . . . skips ëMethod' . . . but finds ëThe' guilty of a crime. The tyranny of ëThe' is a part of language that attempts to unify the menagerie of human curiosity and struggle into just one investigative technique and in doing so fails both science and humanity.î ñ Frederick Markatos Dixon, from ìThis is Folk Science!î

It is likely a safe bet that most who read this book will have some relationship, however ambivalent, with the university. Whether this is as a student or as faculty, as an employee or whether living in the community where the university is located. The university, far from being a space removed the workings of the economy and the state, has come to play different roles in the various fields of power in which it operates. Ivory tower no more, if it ever was. The question is how the space of the university can be used for something else, for a purpose that goes beyond and undermines the role it has come to occupy in reproducing the social order. Noam Chomsky comments on the university that, ìIt would be criminal to overlook the serious flaws and inadequacies in our institutions, or to fail to utilize the substantial degree of freedom that most of us enjoy, within the framework of these flawed institutions, to modify or even replace them by a better social order.î

How can we create, to borrow the words of Osterweil and Chesters, a space, ethic, and practices that uses the space of the university to go beyond itself to create something else? How can we open the space of the university, to use its resources, for the benefits of movements and organizing? How can we draw from this space to create a forum for collective reflection and reimagining the world from wherever we find ourselves? It is this constituent process of collectively shared and embodied imagination through which the boundaries of the classroom, the boundaries of where knowledge is created and where struggles occurs, start to breakdownand shattered.

Where might we go from this space? It's hard to say. And truthfully that is a question that only can be answered from the particular situations from in which it is asked. Just as the vanguardist notion of a cadre providing strategies from on high is deeply problematic, the idea that one could know where and how to go when forging new spaces to work would also be deeply flawed. But we can say that it is more likely to go in the direction of what Frederick Markatos Dixon describes above as a folk science. That is, in a direction not directed by some quest for universal knowledge nor to fill the ever-revered gap in the literature but to explore problems and curiosities as they arise, to find new hidden passageways and lines of flight. It becomes a question of inheritance and transformation, of repetition, resistance, and creation. Inheriting the forms of knowledge and practices developed by current organizing efforts along with the historical experiences and concepts of movements and struggles.