Abstract

In 2010, the UK (Conservative-Liberal Democrat) Coalition Government announced a series of reforms to higher education in England. These reforms have essentially financialised and marketised the sector - the culmination of a series of reforms which, since the 1970s, has seen higher education policy become increasingly influenced by the logic of neoliberalism. These reforms have not gone unopposed and, in 2010, they sparked a wave of protests across the UK, which included student demonstrations, union-led strikes, occupation of university property, and the emergence of education experiments offering free higher education. Focusing on the latter, I examine what can be learned from these education experiments in terms of developing an alternative model of higher education institution (HEI) in response to the Coalition’s reforms to higher education. Using Mathiesen’s (1974) Marxist framework for institutional change I argue that one possible model for an alternative HEI could be informed by the emerging idea of a social co-operative university.