Policy discourses about the third mission of universities in the knowledge economy have placed the question regarding the relation between university and society again high on the agenda. The aim of this article is to reconsider the university's third mission, in the widest sense of its relations with society, and to do so through the lens of the…

This article considers the role of experiments in learning in movements to democratise higher education "under the rule of capital" (Gutierrez, Navarro and Linsalata 2017). It focuses on the emergence of a new generation of "free universities" in the United Kingdom, situating these in a historical tradition of educational…

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…

This report describes my field visits to Berea and Deep Springs Colleges in the U.S.A. and explores their forms of ownership/control, governance, financing and organisational structure. Berea and Deep Springs are small, liberal arts colleges, distinctive in American higher education, in which students actively participate in a spirit of democracy.…