2.3 Freeing knowledge: the Free U

One way that students and junior staff could claim ownership over knowledge was to start their own university. The Free University near the University of Sydney, known as the Free U, aimed to free knowledge from the university hierarchy that guarded it, and make it available to any who wished to inquire. Sydney’s Free U started in 1968 with 150 students (at its peak had approximately 300), of which around 20 were University of Sydney staff.[1] The Free University movement was an international one and Sydney’s participants drew on the previous experience of others in establishing it.[2] The Free U’s formation was heralded in Honi Soit in 1967 with invitations to students and staff to participate in its planning.[3] This participatory approach – where staff and students were ostensibly equal, where course content was not fixed, course leaders were “convenors”, not lecturers and there was no assessment – expressed some the key knowledge utopias of the 1960s and 1970s.  

After the 1967 library fines/Humphreys affair at the University of Sydney, Hall Greenland (a student activist of such notoriety in the 1960s and 1970s that he has his own index entry in the records of the Sydney Senate Minutes) said: 

Students are beginning to decide that they want more power in their universities, but not yet what kind of university they want.[4] 

The Free U sought the creation of a utopian alternative to the existing system – the “kind of university they want” in a constructive sense, although most articles about it spent considerable time establishing its criticisms of the existing system.[5] These criticisms included failure by what Terry Irving described as the “mass university” on several levels.[6] These were failures of pedagogies and teaching practices, including the inability of the traditional university to establish and maintain a “true” community of scholars – and a failure to develop new academic material that focuses on the “real” issues of society or that students face in their daily lives.[7] Instead, the mass university was complicit in the goals of the “establishment”, since government funding implied and actuated government control, and it focused as a conservative force on traditional academic faculties rather than as a progressive ones:[8]  

Just as the university serves the nation, so the “good” teacher serves the university by instructing his [sic] students efficiently in those skills whose acquisition the nation has already made a condition of his entry to the university. Some departments and some teachers resist this atmosphere; others accept it, or encourage it by continually complicating the lives of staff and students with regulations and forms.[9] 

The mass university, claimed the “Committee for a Free University”, employed teaching practices that reflected poor pedagogical models. Unacceptable staff/student ratios contributed to a culture that valued the seniority of the lecturer over the student, positioning the lecturer as the “knower” and the student as “doesn’t know”.[10] The disadvantage of this pedagogy for teachers, said Free U leader, Bob Connell, was that teachers only ever taught what they already knew, missing a learning opportunity themselves.[11] Traditional hierarchies and disciplinary boundaries designed to protect existing knowledge, inhibited the production of new knowledge. Admission to a mass university was based on decisions by administrators, not the teachers who, in a Free University, would select students for admission themselves and “teach who they want”.[12] 

The Free U was set up in a house in Chippendale, a very short walk from the main Sydney University campus, sometimes extending to a nearby pub.[13] But, as Terry Irving claimed at the time, the Free U, unlike Sydney University proper, could not be defined by its “campus” – like most utopias, the Free U did not really exist in space, but was a fleeting, shifting reflection – as in a mirror – of an ideal university.[14] The Free U expressed the emerging notion that knowledge should be neither owned by the traditional university nor by the professors who lead it. It assumed that students were active in the discovery process and that they produced ideas from which their teachers could also learn. Functionally, the Free U positioned learning in an immersive, experiential community that blurred the boundaries between theory and practice, thought and emotion, student and teacher, academics and professionals, known and not known: 

When you walk in the front door of the Free U, you leave outside the formal distinction between students and teachers … The group studies what the people in it decide they want to study… The way they tackle it is decided by themselves on the spot: not by someone else beforehand. The “course” is what the people in the course group make of themselves.[15] 

The Free U drew on traditional conceptions of universities, especially “community of scholars” to promote a romantic notion of a renewed university, containing as it did a strong desire for authenticity, individuality and spontaneity. As well as romanticising knowledge and an academic community, the Free U also embodied a revolution in the conception of the ownership of knowledge in a university. It repositioned the student to the centre of teaching and learning, redistributing knowledge to participants who held “a strong sense that knowledge was for sharing”.[16] In so doing, the Free U problematised the legitimacy of the system in which knowledge was understood to be foundational and objective, with independent thought only possible after the foundation is acquired through careful discipline and examination. By positioning students and professionals as potential teachers it gave new legitimacy to knowledge constructed as reflections on current affairs, social experience and professional practice. It challenged the idea that academic knowledge should be the possession of Professors.[17] The Free University aimed to free knowledge from the disciplines and from the guardianship of professors as traditional owners. By enacting knowledge utopias, the Free U staked its own claim to the ownership of knowledge, by showing that it could be produced and possessed by anyone.  

Despite challenging the legitimacy of their roles and their right to determine what real university knowledge is and to grade it when they see it, the University of Sydney professors could still generally afford to ignore, tolerate, or perhaps even support, the Free U, while it existed (which was just until 1972).[18] At worst, some would benignly “knock” the Free U as utopian and therefore useless.[19] One was a little more vocal. Student protest was fairly quiet at Sydney in 1968, a peace that the notoriously right-wing Professor of Philosophy, David Stove, warned would not last (who he thought he was warning, one may well wonder, when he was writing to the student newspaper): 

Not all the campus radicals are so disoriented by the thoughts of Mao-Tse-Tung or other hallucinogenic drugs as to be incapable of action. Some of them found enough energy, for example, to inaugurate the Free University (though admittedly this involves no more than the assembly of an article which is imported from America all ready-cut, complete with instruction-manual of assorted meaningless sayings about alienation, etc).[20] 

All participants admitted that the model the Free U had adopted was heavily reliant on its proximity to Sydney University.[21] It is noteworthy that – unlike the “Learning Exchange” students attempted in Canberra[22] and the Open University model, which was a topic under discussion everywhere[23] and was successfully launched in the UK in 1969[24] – admission to the Free U seems to have largely assumed existing university participation, creating a “community” that was basically a Sydney University clique.[25] Its admission policy was also attached to the criterion by which a course could be offered, one of the first instances, perhaps, where market demand explicitly determined academic curriculum: 

Anyone can run a course, provided he [sic] can get students[26] 

Of course no one thought of this as market demand, but rather as “reform from below”.[27] That “student demands” in a political sense would one day become “student demand” in an economic sense was a gradual and unforeseen consequence of shifting the ownership of knowledge from Professor to student. By applying the ideologies of the New Left to structures of knowledge as well as society and “the establishment” student movements formulated utopian ideals that had temporary expression in the Free U – utopian ideals that perhaps transformed into utopian wish-images of a consumer/student body. 

Terry Irving felt that the Free U was not utopian, since its existence did not rely on its probability of success in the reform of mainstream universities by the Free U: 

The Free University…is not an academy for instruction in doctrinal truth…and it is not the answer to the mass university…we now think of ourselves more as a conscience than a catalyst for the mass university.[28] 

Irving’s 1971 chapter in Counterpoints suggests that they had initially seen the Free University as an instrument of reform but, after a couple of years, had come to accept themselves for what they were, just a “unique academic community”.[29] The Free U would close in 1972 and must have seen itself as a temporary expression of ideas rather than the cause of some. Despite the brevity of the Free U’s existence, these it expressed powerful ideas felt across the whole tertiary sector and which we can see permeating teaching and learning concerns throughout the 1970s and beyond. The ideas that informed the Free U arguably had more permanent expression through organizations like the Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia (HERDSA), established in the 1970s and encouraged student-centred approaches through professional development for university teachers.[30] While the Free U lacks a causal relationship to the transformation of teaching and learning philosophies across Australian Universities, when it commenced in 1968 it had all the elements (for better and worse) of the revolution to come: student-centred pedagogies, market-driven curriculum, blurred boundaries between disciplines and types of knowledge and validation of all types of knower as owners of knowledge. On the main campus of the University of Sydney, however, the professors were not only holding tightly to knowledge, they were forgetting to tell the students things they really needed to know.