Beyond public and private: a model for co-operative higher education

In 2010, following a policy review into higher education in England (Browne, 2010), the newly elected Coalition government increased tuition fees three-fold and removed all public funding from arts, humanities and the social sciences. This was an intensification of neo-liberal government policies which have been ongoing since the 1980s (Shattock, 2012). The policy sparked a wave of protests and student occupations against the increase in fees and the introduction of other austerity measures (Palmieri and Solomon, 2011). An important debate at the time among the protestors was that there should be democratic alternatives proposed to capitalist and corporate higher education, rather than simply an attempt to defend the public university: getting beyond the public and private models of higher education as currently constituted (Neary, 2012). We suggest there is an alternative. This paper introduces a new participatory research project to develop a model for co-operative higher education