@lightweight
> There's never been a time we needed people like Dr Mike Joy in the public arena more than right now.

Damn right. I did an environmental field work paper with Mike when he worked at Massey. He's a meticulous scientist, and unapologetically outspoken about his findings, however uncomfortable that might make the political-economic elites. A national treasure. I'm guessing he got run out of Massey by Big Ag interests and now Vic too. Seriously WTF.

@lightweight
Something is rotten in the state of our universities. I suspect it has a lot to do with the consequences of the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s/90s, and the rise of managerialism that David Graeber (RIP) wrote about:

https://davidgraeber.org/papers/anthropology-and-the-rise-of-the-professional-managerial-class/

@lightweight
It's really past time those of us who are educated, *and* independent of the "professional-managerial class" (as Graeber politely describes it), launched a serious campaign to re-democratise our universities, and put them back in service of independent research and academic freedom.

@lightweight
To quote Graeber:

"Universities are—or, better said, until recently have been— among the only institutions that survived more or less intact from the High Middle Ages. As a result, universities still reflected an essentially medieval conception of self-organization and self-governance; this was an institution managed by scholars for the pursuit of scholarship, of forms of knowledge that were seen as valuable in their own right."

How do we bring this back?

@strypey @lightweight

I think part of the problem is the focus on the education function of universities rather than the learning or curatorial functions. That distinction may seem subtle...

In an educational instutution, the teachers are the doers: they are assumed to already have knowledge, and act to impart it to essentially passive service users.

In a learning institution, everyone is learning collaboratively, but some are further along the curve than others. #1/2