Odyssean Education Plays the Coronavirus - Ideation and the Immune Institution

The paper provides a critique of the concept of Odyssean Education - a programme for teaching and learning in higher education set out by Dominic Cummings, the Chief of Staff to the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. Odyssean education supports an interdisciplinary approach to problem-based learning favouring the natural sciences, cybernetics and machine intelligence. The focus of the paper is Cumming's proposal for institutional immunity in the context of a pandemic. The paper counterposes Cummings' version of institutional immunity with communist science. Communist science, after Marx, is based on the notion of ideation; or, critical practical reflexivity: the rigorous critique of everything that exists - to create an institution immune from its own delusions