the privatization of higher education
Socialized university (the Nazim Hikmet Academy) and their aims and principles v.s. a PBS documentary about for-profit universities. I feel thrilled about NHA's ideas about education and their aggressive hatred of privatization. I was a student there and the only emphasis was making students understand the World better. The shit eating fat-cats who are peddling education like its an x-box or a hummer. shout out to Kaznowski working in the trenches! They should show this at the next workers film festival here in Istanbul.
Nazim Hikmet Academy
Goals and principles
"Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it"
(Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, Thesis 11, Brussels, 1845)
The Nazim Hikmet Culture houses were first launched in 1996. The Nazim Hikmet Cultural center has been open in Kadikoy, Istanbul, since 2004 and we are now in the process of widening our efforts to include a series of provincial and district culture houses.
In the fall of 2009 we succeeded in launching a Center for Marxist thought and intellectual output: the Nazim Hikmet Academy.
Under one roof the NHA will include both an educational program including a Literature, Music, Cinema, and Social Sciences branch as well as organizing work and research groups that will form an integral part of their activities.
-The World's intellectual sphere is under fire by the free market. According to those who complain of being affected by it in various ways, the main cause of this attack is marketization and its various effects. The NHA aims to go beyond mere complaining and to educate a group able to defend and develop humanity's scientific and artistic knowledge.
This phenomenon of marketization is caused by Capitalism's tendency to commodify everything. This general tendency of Capitalism is always at work, although some areas have been able to keep a level of autonomy apart from the usual demands of profitability and the pressures of market relations. In the last ten decades, however, these walls have come crumbling down and this has led to a liquidation of the public domain. Scientific and Artistic production, must take a stand against the market that is being imposed on it.
Taking a stand is not limited merely to protecting Science and Art from commodification. Intellectual activity is a vital element of the struggle for human liberation. In fact, there will be no place for Science and Art to participate in the struggle unless marketization and its own commodification is resisted.
This task cannot be fulfilled in the 'official centers of academia' neither if they are semi-public or wholly privatized. (The NHA does acknowledge the output of these intellectuals from official academies, regardless of whatever un-scientific ideologies they possess, be it liberal, nationalistic, or religious, as being part of their intellectual heritage.)
The mission of this organization, within the framework drawn up here, is to shape the dynamics for the emergence of a new intelligentsia. The NHA aims to contribute to this process.
Presently, there is an overriding tendency to partition and confine the different disciplines of science and art. Specialization of scientific and artistic production without a holistic understanding of such renders the World incomprehensible. The NHA, in its definition of Art and Science, will avoid this. Instead the NHA will champion an all-inclusive conception of intellectual production that combines thought with practice, science with art, and an interactive relationship between their different branches.
When we speak of an intellectual dynamic we are speaking in the sense of creating this type of holistic approach to intellectual production.
The NHA will aim to integrate the curricula of its different departments, even at the level of individual lessons, to achieve this type of holism.
The NHA will use Marxism as its intellectual foundation as it is the most advanced and scientific method for both understanding and struggling to change the World. Marxism also fosters the type of holistic scientific understanding mentioned above.
The purpose of the NHA will not be to ready minds for the free market. It is rather to contribute to the formation of knowledge by NHA's members of their respective disciplines. To put it concisely, NHA's goals is to contribute to the emergence of educated individuals who will strive to change the World.
Intellectual activity in the capitalist system has a tendency to work according to market rules. The age in which we live sees this tendency going beyond even its own limits. Education, culture, and science, is being consciously restructured along market lines. The NHA aims to fight against this trend and to strive towards building an entirely different alternative for society than what we now know.
The NHA refuses to see a distinction between teacher and student. The structure of the NHA will be such that those with thorough knowledge of a subject, “experts”, will work together and produce together with those who want to gain from their experience. The NHA will avoid being artificial in the process of learning, intellectual production and working towards change.
Today's intellectual production is characterized by its selfishness and destructive competitiveness. The NHA aims at being an environment of solidarity, communion, and collective production.
NHA courses will be for two years and will be offered to enrolled students in order to ensure the integrity and quality of its courses the different departments. In addition to this they will host concrete, production-oriented workshops aimed at ensuring participation.
NHA will not merely provide educational services, but will also make a call for collective production in the social sciences and arts.
This call if for those who want Scientific and artistic activities to be central to their lives and who have sufficient background to be able to make such a decision. During the candidacy process, students will be evaluated by which school they graduated from or where they went to school as much as it bears a relationship with their respective scientific/artistic field.
Nowadays there is an effort by the market and institutions to constrain intellectual work within borders in order to be able to exploit it. Instead of a system of international cooperation based on a superficial and formal academic standards, a drive towards higher profits and compensation which is opposed to scientific and artistic quality, another mechanism for motivation and reward is possible. The NHA is aimed at building international relationships with a global character.
NHA's work will strive to connect, share, and work with the community. The NHA will stress in its agenda the development of the necessary tools for the publishing and the organization of meetings and activities according to its own principles and perspectives.
Those who have worked in founding the NHA are aware that we are only part of Turkey's scientific, artistic, and intellectual community who shares our perspective. The NHA hopes to bring together these others under its roof with an ever increasing amount of activities undertaken with their contribution, education and production. We who have worked since the inception of the NHA, now hope to share with those artists and scientists who share out outlook and goals .
This text is both a statement of our principled approach and a call to work in this direction.
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