The People's Free University: Alternative to the Corporate Campus and Model for Emancipatory Learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Our article describes how the People's Free University (PFU) emerged directly from a series of seminars at the University of Saskatchewan in the Fall of 2001 that addressed critical concerns about a discernible tendency on campus towards the adoption of a business corporate style of governance steered increasingly by marketplace priorities. The seminars, open to the public as well as students, staff and faculty, turned to a discussion on the significance of a "people's university" envisioned for the University of Saskatchewan by its first President, Walter Murray. Invoking Murray's vision opened the way to the remarkable beginning and subsequent creative program development of a free university. Examples of community-based adult education initiatives from which PFU drew are identified, situating it historically within an on-going critical legacy that has become even more relevant in the face of neo-liberal imperatives. The emancipatory pedagogy entailed is informed substantially through the theory and practice of Paulo Freire, Thomas Hodgskin and Alfred North Whitehead. Essential learning processes and guiding principles which characterize PFU pedagogy are illuminated under the rubric of "everyone can teach, everyone can learn." In drawing a connection between the PFU experience and resistance to attacks on academic freedom at the University of Saskatchewan, we align the enlightened aims of community-based popular education embodied in PFU against profit driven encroachments of corporate business interests.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.061 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.017 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".