6. Closing the factory: Reimagining higher education as commons

This chapter describes the evolution of higher education’s social imaginaries over time. It depicts first the “elite knowledge commons”, an imaginary remarkably similar across civilizations that produced great public goods but was accessible only to an elite. In response to industrialization, as well as economic and technological developments over the past 150 years, the imaginary evolved into a “knowledge factory”. This second imaginary has succeeded in expanding access and human knowledge, but it has come at great costs to human individuality, creativity, and cultures, while maintaining elite control. Ultimately, the goal of the knowledge factory, learning at scale, cannot work. I propose that academics and societies can and should create a third imaginary, a new knowledge commons, based in Elinor Ostrom and related scholars’ work on the success of commons as collaborative social institutions, and grounded in open pedagogies and practices. The new knowledge commons promises to humanize higher education.