Early in August of 2015 I was invited to make a short presentation at a Community Harmony Luncheon at Pure Land Learning College in Toowoomba, Australia. The topic of the presentation was on the roles that dialogue and engagement play in social harmony.
One of the challenges that fee-free education faces is the stigmatizing assumption that anything that is free must be inferior. In addition to considering the logic of free education, it is also worth considering the benefits of open education, and asking why fee-free college and open education are critically important and are not being discussed together as part of the same public policy debate.
In a 2014 article published in Liberal Education Stephen Rowe provides a framework to help interpret the reasons for the rise of Managerialism in the contemporary university, the negative impacts of Managerialism, and some approaches that might rectify or at least mitigate the negative impact of Managerialism on the university. While striving for similar outcomes, I propose open and agile practice as an alternative to the reductionist and hierarchical assumptions of traditional strategic planning.