The Free University of NYC is back again. Four months after the May Day week of teach-ins and skillshares, this glorious experiment in liberated learning has returned to its Madison Square Park campus to celebrate a year of Occupy Wall Street. Like the People’s University organized last year in Washington Square, the Free University is an inspiring example of popular participatory democracy in education, sprouting in the midst of the festering corruption of the capitalist representative democracy. As the OWS website notes:
Just across the street from the Free University, on Tuesday evening, the Barack Obama presidential campaign [held] a $40,000 a plate fundraiser at the 40/40 Club, hosted by Jay-Z and Beyoncé and attended by the president. The cost and exclusivity of the event is a reminder of both the increasing concentration of wealth in U.S. society and the inaccessibility of the political system to ordinary people. “The fact that the 1% can spend $40,000 on an evening, while millions of people have tens of thousands of dollars in debt hanging over their lives for getting an education, shows that the system is out of balance. We need free education for all, as demonstrated in the Free University, now more than ever,” said organizer Carwil Bjork-James.
More from The Free University:
OCCUPY YOUR EDUCATION WITH THE FREE UNIVERSITY WEEK
The Free University of NYC will host a week of free educational courses and events in Madison Square Park this September 18-22. Bringing together people from around the world, Free University will advocate for education as a human right and demonstrate our ability to implement free education for all.
HOW TO GET INVOLVED:
- Fill out the Free University NYC Registration Form
- Host a workshop, a skills-share, a teach-in, a reading, a performance
- Facilitate a discussion
- Move your class, kindergarten through college, all ages welcome
- Bring your community organization
- Assist with planning in the lead-up to September 18
- Assist with logistics on the days of September 18-22
- Volunteer with mutual aid, help out the info table, bring food, assist with child care
- Be a participant
GET CONNECTED:
freeuniversitynyc.org
FreeUniversityNYC@gmail.com
@FreeUnivNYC
Free University Facebook Group
Facebook Event
SCHEDULE:
Come see us at Madison Square Park!
September 18-21: 2:00pm-7:00pm
September 22: 10:00am-2:00pm
PRINCIPLES:
The Free University of New York City is an experiment in radical education and an attempt to create education as it ought to be. First conceived as a form of educational strike in the run up to May Day, 2012, the Free University has subsequently organized numerous days of free and open education in parks and public spaces in New York City.
Our project is born out of a recognition that the current system of higher education is as unequal as it is unsustainable. With increasing tuition at public and private institutions, the increasing use of precarious adjunct labor, and the larger and larger amounts of debt that students are expected to take on, a university education is systematically becoming a rarefied commodity only available to the few.
It is in this context that the Free University operates as a radical and critical pedagogical space. We collaborate on the following goals and principles:
- to be a cooperative enterprise working for a new form of education that re-defines what it means to be educators and students.
- to prefigure a more democratic, horizontal, and radical educational structure.
- to empower ourselves, each other, and our communities to become decision-makers in our own processes of self-education.
- to expose the inequities of the existing university system.
- to intentionally and conscientiously created educational spaces that are anti-oppressive, anti-racist, anti-authoritarian.
- to fight against the casualization and precaritization of academic labor.
- to join others who see education as a form of direct action by withdrawing from the failing capitalist education system, and collaborating in the realization of a more accessible education for all.
