Now Is the Time for Co-operative Higher Education

Abstract

With the passing of the UK Higher Education and Research Act 2017, new opportunities for challenger higher education institutions, including co-operative universities, have emerged. However, discussions around the idea of the much broader Co-operative Higher Education (CHE) have been in evidence for some time. This chapter sets the scene for the CHE experiments discussed in this book, many of which have not previously been written about in a scholarly context. Whilst the Co-operative College’s founders saw its establishment in 1919 as the start of a long journey towards a co-operative university, the intellectual genealogy of the CHE movement has become more intense only in the last couple of decades. The chapter discusses marketization and the crisis of HE in particular, setting CHE in the context of critical university studies. A substantial literature on the neoliberal university and its crises reflects the increased tensions within the academy as to its future. Pedagogical, epistemological and institutional attacks from without and within the academy increasingly pressured and precarious, students experiencing soaring levels of debt, the corporatization of institutions accompanied by high executive pay and increasing managerialism as universities are run as businesses. This chapter shows how co-operative models of governance and ownership offer a way to re-engage students and academics, so allowing them to take control and reclaim the university and education as a public good as members. This is the concern of many of the experiments discussed within this book.