V is for Virtual Vniversity BY CHRIS THOMPSON

As an undergraduate student I was always slightly embarrassed for my institution of higher learning, and thus, on some implicit level, for myself, at the sight of its name emblazoned on campus flags and bookstore T-shirts. Not because they were shameless self-promoters — which was actually somewhat comforting as a student investing large sums in their product — but because they were one among the many schools in our land who opt to adopt the quasi-classical practice of re-Romanizing their lettering, replacing the "U" in "University" with a "V" to produce what their marketing folks convinced them was a much more imperious way of spelling "Vniversity."

Anyone who would be swayed by this properly Roman propaganda deserves to fund this and comparable absurdities by paying their Vniversity’s full tuition.

Four decades ago, artists Robert Filliou and George Brecht devised an educational experiment that is as polar an opposite of this kind of corporatized approach to academia as one could hope to encounter. They called it the "Non-Ecole de Villefranche," the Non-School of Villefranche, where one and all who participated could expect, in their words, "carefree exchange of information and experience, no student, no teacher, perfect freedom, at times to talk at times to listen."

Art historian Hannah Higgins has suggested that it’s time to move ideas like this one into higher education. Her idea is to use a school’s curricular structure to create a flexible and open-ended line of study that could "be called something like Investigative Studies and would include those creative practices appropriate to a teacher/learner’s methods and questions. The course of study would by definition be unspecialized; rather than focusing on discrete job skills, it would emphasize exploration and expression of individual skills and adaptability to the ever-changing job market."

The role of teachers in such a learning environment would be to "facilitate not by transmitting information, but by offering open-ended opportunities to problematize, to look for patterns in the students’ experience and meaningfully guide them through their personal concerns and interests."

In an interview with Filliou in 1970, composer John Cage offered a sobering critique of the form of learning that imagines understanding to consist of a process of accumulating information. "Within five years after you get a Ph.D. from a given American university in a particular field," he said, "all the things that you learned in the course of your education are no longer of any use to you."

Cage believed that this obsolescence owed "to the fact that changes are happening more rapidly than they happened earlier, that the techniques involved, the information useful, etc., are not the ones which you were taught." He felt that the only way to tackle this situation was to embark on a radical re-imagining of interdisciplinary experimentalism and intimate collaboration. It would be crucial "to give each individual, from childhood, a variety of experiences in which his mind is put to use, not as a memorizer of a transmitted body of information, but rather as a person who is in dialogue."

In his book on philosopher Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze reflects on how this dynamic dialogical potential of education is often subordinated to the process of producing pupils. He writes: "It is the school teacher who ‘poses’ the problems; the pupil’s task is to discover the solutions. In this way we are kept in a kind of slavery. True freedom lies in a power to decide, to constitute problems themselves."

With this in mind, I propose that Portland serve as the start-site for a test-run of a 21st-century version of Filliou and Brecht’s non-ecole.

The most difficult part of going live with any decent idea is advertising it and generating the community of consumers necessary to sustain it. But we’ve got that problem solved from the start. In fact, the advertising mechanism is really the only fully formed component of this idea; its cohesion gives the rest of the plan the luxury of being anarchic. Besides, as this is not a school we’re talking about but a non-school, the curriculum is nothing more and nothing less than what the students/teachers decide it should be, which means that the primary aim is to create the conditions for students/teachers to come into contact with and, crucially, to recognize each other. The rest will unfold accordingly, in its own good time.

That’s where the Roman "V" literally comes in handy. The gesture made by holding index and middle finger spread apart in a "V" can denote a range of meanings: victory, peace, and, in Edinburgh, go V yourself. To this list we could add Virtual Vniversity, perhaps pushing our luck and the alliteration by Villefranche to honor the first non-ecole.

Imagine you’re waiting for the bus. A stranger gives you the "V." If you return the gesture, consider any interaction that happens in the wake of this to be a learning experience. Perhaps you’ll initiate your own. Maybe you’ll hold forth on a busy corner, talking about art or politics or food or sports or philosophy. Maybe you’ll decide to do it regularly, at a specific time and place arranged in advance, or just wing it and see what happens.

It’s an accidental forum, an exclusive vniversal network of elite academics in which anyone can enroll or take up a teaching post. People with letters after their names and those with letters in their names are equally useful in this pedagogical enterprise. If at some stage in your course you find your instructor talking nonsense, simply become the instructor, pull rank, buy your new student a drink, and get to work on rethinking things.

Let’s try it for V months and see what happens.

Chris Thompson can be reached at xxtopher@hotmail.com, or "V" him next time you see him in person.