Free universities are diverse but loosely networked projects that resist repressive capitalist and state configurations of power by re-imagining teaching, learning and research on their own terms, often through radical and ongoing experimentation. Drawing from my own experiences as a co-founder and organiser of the Brisbane Free University, along…

Educational institutions have long been terrains of struggle. Schools and universities have dispossessed Indigenous peoples of their lands, cultures, and labor, whereas alternative modes of study have been central to many resistance movements, including for decolonization. In this article, we put Indigenous study projects in conversation with free…

On the basis of insights provided by Whitehead and John Cobb, I show how the People's Free University of Saskatchewan (PFU) is a working model of free, open, community-based education that embodies several characteristics of Whitehead's philosophy of education. Formed in opposition to the growing commercialization at the original "people?s…

In 1967 the OECD Committee for Scientific and Technical Personnel launched a series of case studies concerning problems of innovation in higher education. The present report on the New College systems in Canada reflects the OECD higher education program concerning problems faced by countries in planning and setting up new structures of…

This article is a descriptive overview of one aspect of the history of Quebec's Tele-universite (TU). This case is used to unveil the inter-organizational and political tensions which may accompany the somewhat difficult development of a distance education model. Teleuniversite was created in 1972 as an experimental project by the Universite du…