Transparency at GCAS Builds Trust & Empowerment
A few weeks ago I became a member of a revolutionary global education project. Hyperbole? Not at all. When was the last time you heard of a school, any school, asking for input on high-level administrative and academic decisions? Never. Right?
Well, every aspect of The Global Center for Advanced Studies that can be transparent has been made so, and nearly every step of university development is a cooperative effort open to all participants. The chancellor of the school routinely posts requests for all manner of input which, if offered and accepted, have various values of exchange within the school, i.e. for tuition or school ownership or both. When before have you heard of a school that requested input on program design or what to name the school cryptocurrency? (Ya… I just used cryptocurrency in a sentence.)
Sound bizarre? Maybe it sounds weird, but check out the affiliate faculty page and you’ll see that I’m not the only dreamer here. I mean hello…. Luce Irigaray!
It’s precisely because of this transparency that I can invite my insightful friend, Jennifer Hancock ~ who is a Lit professor and a post-apocalyptic-baseball poet and scholar, to consider offering a certificate program for GCAS. I really hope she offers - because who wouldn’t want to take that course?! And because GCAS’ own professor Julie Reshe offers a certificate program in BDSM therapy, I could refer my dear friend Devin Pinkston, who is the only gender therapist in western Colorado, to take a course of study at my school.
Fringe topics!!! ~ some may shout. But please recall that Socrates, Galileo Galilei, and Joan d’Arc were once at the fringe of social and political action. Research that leads to new knowledge is essential in this age of “alternative facts” being tweeted around the clock. The transmission of new knowledge, created & generated by fringe curiosity, is responsible for the eradication of polio, for Rap music as a social justice movement, and for the existence of air travel. The fringe is not for chumps.
When a person is given the freedom to participate fully in their own future, the sense of accomplishment and resulting empowerment belongs more fully to them as creators of new knowledge. This is the very reason I pursued a relationship with GCAS in the first place, and not another university that wanted to mold my research into their vision of what the outcome should be. I wanted to do my own interdisciplinary research with support and guidance - not to have my well informed context diluted.
GCAS is a place where widely diverse discussions about Cryptoeconomics and Colonialism in Psychology exist side by side in the same community forum without judgement or pretension. It is a place where all participants are there for the betterment of the human condition and not for their own personal glory.
GCAS is awesome. Over and out.
*Originally posted at on the author’s blog.