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FREE UNIVERSITY OF SEETHING
Here are some of our brilliant professors at the Free University of Seething
CATHY GALE
Professor of Ludic Heterotopias
Cathy Gale (MA: RCA / SFHEA) is a research-led educator and graphic artist specializing in critical performative approaches to design as a social praxis. The Free University of Seething (FUS) provides the focus for her research into collective community identities, speculative play and the politics of public life. The Community Brain and FUS are framed as ludic heterotopias in which design is given a societal purpose – as a catalyst for playful provocation.
Cathy is Course Leader MA Communication Studies: Graphic Design, and a PhD supervisor at Kingston School of Art, London; external examiner (Chelsea College of Art & Design, UAL; Arts University Bournemouth). She also holds the inestimable position of Professor of Ludic Heterotopias at The Free University of Seething Wells.
DR DAVID (JEEVA)
JEEVENDRAMPILLAI
Professor Praeter Stultus
Jeeva is an anthropologist of citizenship, belonging and democracy. His interests focus on the relationship between people and place from the politics of community building to the phycogeographies of wandering. He has published extensively on the Village of Seething - on the relationship between play and community - and has curated exhibitions on Seething life.
He has published and taught about Seething life internationally including in UCL Anthropology, UCL Bartlett, NTNU Norway and at MIT. He has a long history of community engagement through both research, teaching and community work in the performing arts. His current work concerns people sense of relation to the planet through earth photography from Outer Space.
DR HELEN WICKSTEAD
Professor of the Overlooked and Champion of Small Finds
Dr Helen Wickstead is a Senior Lecturer in Museum and Gallery Studies at Kingston University, London. In 2012, when the government introduced huge rises in university tuition fees, Helen refounded the Free University of Seething to encourage free learning for all.
Helen has spent decades excavating rubbish and rescuing lost, neglected, stigmatised or hidden phenomena. Her publications include; histories of aerial archaeology and old maps; the world’s first dedicated study of Soho Bibles (including the discovery of 21 smuggled into the British Library); an archaeology of concrete megaliths; an investigation of the folklore of Seething; nineteenth-century photographs from the secret museum inside the British
Museum; a study of phallus collecting; an account of the Edwardian Cult of Kata and assorted archaeological excavation reports.
As a member of the Finds Committee of the Chartered Institute of Archaeologists Helen sets national standards caring for every small find excavated across Britain. She has been a Museum Mentor for the Society for Museum Archaeology and is currently Archaeologist of Today at the Museum of Today. She believes in the wonder of small things.
DR PAUL MICKLETHWAITE
Professor of Undisciplinarity
Sustainability Consultant to the Free University of Seething
ABOUT THE FREE UNIVERSITY OF SEETHING
Long before the ‘Open University’ the people of Seething founded the Free University of Seething. Indeed it is considered by many to be oldest true university in the world. Built upon the foundations of Lefi’s Law that ‘all people good and true’ should ‘enjoy and prosper through knowledge freely given through love of learning of Seething’.
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From ‘all people’ we get ‘Universal’ and from ‘love of learning of Seething’ we get ‘learnseething’ which became ‘universalearnseething’ which in its shortened form was spoken as ‘universeethee’ – the origination of the modern pronunciation of university.
However, as with so many Seething innovations and institutions, the Free University has almost been expunged from common history which now holds to following. The word university is derived from the Latin universitas magistrorum et scholarium, roughly meaning “community of teachers and scholars”. The term was coined by the Italian University of Bologna, which, with a traditional founding date of 1088, is considered the first university.
No other European institution has spread over the entire world in the way in which the traditional form of the European university has done. The degrees awarded by European universities – the bachelor’s degree, the licentiate, the master’s degree, and the doctorate – have been adopted in the most diverse societies throughout the world.
In the UK Oxford is now claimed to be the oldest university in the world, there is no clear date of foundation of Oxford University, but teaching existed at Oxford in some form in 1096 and developed rapidly from 1167. It is however clear that the Free University of Seething predates both Oxford and Bologna.
The Free University of Seething was closed as an institution in 1902 as a result of its then contentious work on global warming and the effects of over use of the earth’s resources. Subsequently much of this work has proved to be sadly correct although unfortunately the hypothesis that within 100 years ‘man would have found a way to overcome greed and resolved a world where resource was shared according to need’ (IWLWHW) still defeats us.
However the Free University of Seething has fresh life again thanks to the efforts of Dr Helen Wickstead who has relaunched the institution and is currently organising a series of public lectures - ‘all people good and true’ shall ‘enjoy and prosper through knowledge freely given through love of learning of Seething’.