On the emergence of Pigeon Towers
Foreword by Karim-Yassin Goessinger
“Rather than spend primary energy to get the university to become a community of scholars, create your own—and by so doing you may affect the institution as well as making a practical difference.”
- Paul Goodman in Compulsory Mis-Education and the Community of Scholars
The term “Ivory Tower” conjures up images of carefully and often symmetrically landscaped university squads, concerns with dogmatic and increasingly corporate institutions of higher education, and questions of relevance to the practicalities of daily life. In 1837, French literary critic and author Charles Augusting Sainte-Beuve showing concern with the Ivory Tower’s secretive and cloistered intellectualism, contrasts the Ivory Tower-like way of being with a more socially engaged way of being, as was exemplified in his time by Victor Hugo. Today, the purpose of the Ivory Tower is perhaps more contested than ever. It has come to be equated with the university system, or perhaps more cynically, the “college-industrial complex”. With higher education becoming a privilege, and no longer a right, the university system is in flux. It seems increasingly evident that with the rise in tuition the university system is unlikely to remain functional in the long term. University degrees no longer guarantee entry into an increasingly saturated labor market. At the same time, we see changes occurring inside and around the modern university, including attempts to blend online and offline learning as well as efforts to engage with community at large. Perhaps what we is needed is a different metaphor to that of the Ivory Tower?
وأنت تحرّر نفسك بالاستعارات
فكِّر بغيركَ
مَنْ فقدوا حقَّهم في الكلام
محمود درويش
As you liberate yourself in metaphor, think of others
Those who have lost the right to speak
Mahmoud Darwish
The metaphor of the Pigeon Tower first occurred to me when searching for a name to give to the Cairo Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences’ (CILAS) newsletter. Inaugurated in the summer of 2013, CILAS was set up with the intention of inviting adult learners to engage with the tradition of liberal arts education. My concern as founder was less with formalizing, that is with accrediting, such a learning experience as it was with co-creating a learning environment that would be conducive to critical inquiry, self-reflection and civic engagement.
The first cohort enrolled in a loosely structured study programme which was to span over the duration of an academic year. The programme was divided into trimesters: the first trimester served as a foundation, exposing students to various histories and philosophies of the arts and sciences, some of the more prominent –isms of the modern age as well as the ongoing debates around them. The second and third trimesters were dedicated to matters of concern to students, which could be studied under the guidance of the teaching fellows. Students would engage in community service in parallel with their intellectual training.
Over the past five years, students have come to CILAS from all walks of life, disciplinary backgrounds, and have ranged in ambitions from shifting careers to developing a wise appreciation for the complexity of the world. In the early days, I was repeatedly asked how I saw CILAS in relation to the existing higher educational landscape. Did CILAS prepare for or somehow complement an Egyptian university education? Many, if not all, students that found their way to CILAS felt that there was nothing to be complemented, that university had been a hardly memorable, if not entirely futile experience.
CILAS has been inviting students to participate in discussion – both intuitive and theoretically-informed. Classrooms, of which initially there were two, hardly resembled conventional classrooms. Taking its first steps in the side alleys of Fatimid Cairo’s al-Ghuria neighbourhood, CILAS occupied a space that previously served as a scholar’s residence. The space did indeed display both scholarly and residential qualities. It was an unusual location sitting on the second floor at the end of a narrow alley.
Al-Ghuria's bustling corridors have been dressed in everything from nightgowns and lingerie, to sandals, kitchen utensils and blankets. Everybody in al-Ghuria got to know of CILAS: from the shop owners to the pushers of the wheelbarrows transporting incoming goods from al-Azhar street into the deep veins of al-Ghuria, to the bicycle riders carrying stacks of baladi bread on their heads. It was amidst the turmoil of al-Ghuria that the metaphor of a Pigeon Tower emerged. The Pigeon Tower has since come to serve as a guiding metaphor in the exploration of the operations and the raison d'être of CILAS.
Three characteristics of this metaphorical Pigeon Tower are worthy of consideration here.
First, the metaphor of the Pigeon Tower recognises the importance of forming communities of scholars, or scholarly collectives (I use the two interchangeably). Actual pigeon flocks self-organize and form inclusive and non-hierarchical collectives in a truly fascinating way. A recent study conducted by Oxford University’s Navigation Group in the Department of Zoology has found that pigeon flock leaders who attempt to give their fellow pigeons incorrect information about their direction of travel are overruled by the collective wisdom of the group. It is this collective wisdom of pigeon flocks that, I would suggest, could guide our efforts to reimagine higher education. Oxford’s Navigation Group’s research shows furthermore that pigeons demonstrate flexibility in their collective decision-making, and, that, crucially, they do so in situations where the performance of the whole flock would suffer if they were inflexible. Pigeons' inherent capacity to demonstrate structural flexibility and to reorganise leadership hierarchies could be of service to the formation of communities of scholars.
Pigeon flocks can remind us of the potential for collective wisdom held by scholarly collectives, such as CILAS.
The second characteristic of a Pigeon Tower stems from its sense of place. CILAS spent its first three years in the neighbourhood of Al Ghuria. Moving from one part of Fatimid Cairo to another, it is now situated in the neighborhood of Darb al Labbana – a historical and popular neighbourhood in precarious condition. As a Pigeon Tower, CILAS is embedded in the urban fabric of Cairo, facing the twin mosques of Sultan Hassan and al Refai, witnessing everyday piety, the practice of trades, the celebration of weddings, children playing football, tourists visiting historical monuments, goats wandering about, and CILASians coming and going. Moving from one neighbourhood to another CILAS has constituted a co-created learning environment that co-produces knowledge, sounds and laughter. Pigeon Towers feel cozy and home-like, a place to share a meal in – be it made of thoughts or of fresh produce –, an abode to be barefoot in, and a space for contemplation. What makes Pigeon Towers and their characteristic of embeddedness so charming is that they recognise imperfection and fallibility. Remaining open to the unexpected, Pigeon Towers endure turbulences and cope with instability.
Pigeon towers are fragile pieces of infrastructure sitting amidst unpredictable and at times hostile geographies.
The third characteristic of a Pigeon Tower is its bridging function. It bridges intellectual learning or academic training, and experiential, place-based learning. At CILAS, students critically engage with theory while always seeking to ground it in the local context, in relation to different things and at different scales. Put differently, a Pigeon Tower as exemplified by CILAS floats mid-air between the height of the Ivory Tower and the streets. It occupies the mezzanine level affording students the tranquility an elevated piece of infrastructure like a tower provides, while not distancing itself from its surrounding. In other words, the Pigeon Tower allows for both the meditative practice, the slow pace and the deep inquiry needed to cultivate a scholarly attitude, and the embodied practice that nurtures the quick wit and making of connections associated with street smartness. It is after all in bringing one’s formal drive, or the intellectual mode of learning, and one’s sensuous drive, or the experiential mode of learning, into unison that one starts to play. What is needed then is a playground which is what the Pigeon Tower in its floating presence embodies.
Pigeon Towers recognize the importance of balancing intellectual and experiential learning.
The idea behind a collection of essays on the emergence of Pigeon Towers was to reflect on CILAS with the help of the guiding metaphor of the Pigeon Tower. This reflection took the form of a dialogue between myself, the founder of CILAS, and the contributing authors, Teun J. Dekker, Surti Singh, I-Kai Jeng and Robin Weiss, over several months. With the help of a grant issued by the Arab Council of Social Sciences and funded by the Ford Foundation, I asked the contributing authors to develop philosophical inquiries in the form of essays on what I called the anchoring principles of a Pigeon Tower. In putting forward the metaphor of the Pigeon Tower I was less concerned with reforming the existing structure of higher education, or with developing a stance against the Ivory Tower. Rather the Pigeon Tower is meant to serve as an invitation to think about higher education in terms of a piece of infrastructure anchored by principles that accommodate and support the formation of scholarly collectives.
The authors contributing to this writing project are all academic philosophers. Two of them specialise in ancient philosophy and two in contemporary philosophy. I asked them to write on one of four anchoring principles, namely diversity, intimacy, ignorance and play, which are derived from and inspired by the experience of CILAS. During conversations around tea and via e-mail exchanges with them, the writing project took shape over the second half of 2017. I invited each author to draw on their methodological strength and philosophical expertise in choosing a format for their writing. Teun and Surti, I encouraged to write a speech and a playful essay, respectively. The latter essay deals with the anchoring principle of play and ties in pop culture into the reflection, while the latter essay clarifies the notions of diversity and differentiation, and the importance they carry for the emergence of Pigeon Towers. Robin and I-Kai, I encouraged to write a dialogue and to produce a fragmentary essay, respectively. I-Kai made a contribution on the anchoring principle of intimacy, and its flip side of radical equality, drawing on Jacques Ranciere. Robin I asked to write on the anchoring principle of ignorance in fragments and to shed light on the fragmentary nature of the pursuit of knowledge.
The four essays were written in English (download it from here) and translated into Arabic by Hussein El Hajj (download it from here). Surti and Robin discussed their essays at CILAS in the Fall of 2017. These discussions were audio-recorded and can be listened to below (coming shortly) the bios. Teun and I-Kai tuned in via Skype from the Netherlands and Taiwan, respectively. Our conversation with them was also recorded and is available here (coming soon).
I hope you enjoy the collection of essays!
Foreword by Karim-Yassin Goessinger
“Rather than spend primary energy to get the university to become a community of scholars, create your own—and by so doing you may affect the institution as well as making a practical difference.”
- Paul Goodman in Compulsory Mis-Education and the Community of Scholars
The term “Ivory Tower” conjures up images of carefully and often symmetrically landscaped university squads, concerns with dogmatic and increasingly corporate institutions of higher education, and questions of relevance to the practicalities of daily life. In 1837, French literary critic and author Charles Augusting Sainte-Beuve showing concern with the Ivory Tower’s secretive and cloistered intellectualism, contrasts the Ivory Tower-like way of being with a more socially engaged way of being, as was exemplified in his time by Victor Hugo. Today, the purpose of the Ivory Tower is perhaps more contested than ever. It has come to be equated with the university system, or perhaps more cynically, the “college-industrial complex”. With higher education becoming a privilege, and no longer a right, the university system is in flux. It seems increasingly evident that with the rise in tuition the university system is unlikely to remain functional in the long term. University degrees no longer guarantee entry into an increasingly saturated labor market. At the same time, we see changes occurring inside and around the modern university, including attempts to blend online and offline learning as well as efforts to engage with community at large. Perhaps what we is needed is a different metaphor to that of the Ivory Tower?
وأنت تحرّر نفسك بالاستعارات
فكِّر بغيركَ
مَنْ فقدوا حقَّهم في الكلام
محمود درويش
As you liberate yourself in metaphor, think of others
Those who have lost the right to speak
Mahmoud Darwish
The metaphor of the Pigeon Tower first occurred to me when searching for a name to give to the Cairo Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences’ (CILAS) newsletter. Inaugurated in the summer of 2013, CILAS was set up with the intention of inviting adult learners to engage with the tradition of liberal arts education. My concern as founder was less with formalizing, that is with accrediting, such a learning experience as it was with co-creating a learning environment that would be conducive to critical inquiry, self-reflection and civic engagement.
The first cohort enrolled in a loosely structured study programme which was to span over the duration of an academic year. The programme was divided into trimesters: the first trimester served as a foundation, exposing students to various histories and philosophies of the arts and sciences, some of the more prominent –isms of the modern age as well as the ongoing debates around them. The second and third trimesters were dedicated to matters of concern to students, which could be studied under the guidance of the teaching fellows. Students would engage in community service in parallel with their intellectual training.
Over the past five years, students have come to CILAS from all walks of life, disciplinary backgrounds, and have ranged in ambitions from shifting careers to developing a wise appreciation for the complexity of the world. In the early days, I was repeatedly asked how I saw CILAS in relation to the existing higher educational landscape. Did CILAS prepare for or somehow complement an Egyptian university education? Many, if not all, students that found their way to CILAS felt that there was nothing to be complemented, that university had been a hardly memorable, if not entirely futile experience.
CILAS has been inviting students to participate in discussion – both intuitive and theoretically-informed. Classrooms, of which initially there were two, hardly resembled conventional classrooms. Taking its first steps in the side alleys of Fatimid Cairo’s al-Ghuria neighbourhood, CILAS occupied a space that previously served as a scholar’s residence. The space did indeed display both scholarly and residential qualities. It was an unusual location sitting on the second floor at the end of a narrow alley.
Al-Ghuria's bustling corridors have been dressed in everything from nightgowns and lingerie, to sandals, kitchen utensils and blankets. Everybody in al-Ghuria got to know of CILAS: from the shop owners to the pushers of the wheelbarrows transporting incoming goods from al-Azhar street into the deep veins of al-Ghuria, to the bicycle riders carrying stacks of baladi bread on their heads. It was amidst the turmoil of al-Ghuria that the metaphor of a Pigeon Tower emerged. The Pigeon Tower has since come to serve as a guiding metaphor in the exploration of the operations and the raison d'être of CILAS.
Three characteristics of this metaphorical Pigeon Tower are worthy of consideration here.
First, the metaphor of the Pigeon Tower recognises the importance of forming communities of scholars, or scholarly collectives (I use the two interchangeably). Actual pigeon flocks self-organize and form inclusive and non-hierarchical collectives in a truly fascinating way. A recent study conducted by Oxford University’s Navigation Group in the Department of Zoology has found that pigeon flock leaders who attempt to give their fellow pigeons incorrect information about their direction of travel are overruled by the collective wisdom of the group. It is this collective wisdom of pigeon flocks that, I would suggest, could guide our efforts to reimagine higher education. Oxford’s Navigation Group’s research shows furthermore that pigeons demonstrate flexibility in their collective decision-making, and, that, crucially, they do so in situations where the performance of the whole flock would suffer if they were inflexible. Pigeons' inherent capacity to demonstrate structural flexibility and to reorganise leadership hierarchies could be of service to the formation of communities of scholars.
Pigeon flocks can remind us of the potential for collective wisdom held by scholarly collectives, such as CILAS.
The second characteristic of a Pigeon Tower stems from its sense of place. CILAS spent its first three years in the neighbourhood of Al Ghuria. Moving from one part of Fatimid Cairo to another, it is now situated in the neighborhood of Darb al Labbana – a historical and popular neighbourhood in precarious condition. As a Pigeon Tower, CILAS is embedded in the urban fabric of Cairo, facing the twin mosques of Sultan Hassan and al Refai, witnessing everyday piety, the practice of trades, the celebration of weddings, children playing football, tourists visiting historical monuments, goats wandering about, and CILASians coming and going. Moving from one neighbourhood to another CILAS has constituted a co-created learning environment that co-produces knowledge, sounds and laughter. Pigeon Towers feel cozy and home-like, a place to share a meal in – be it made of thoughts or of fresh produce –, an abode to be barefoot in, and a space for contemplation. What makes Pigeon Towers and their characteristic of embeddedness so charming is that they recognise imperfection and fallibility. Remaining open to the unexpected, Pigeon Towers endure turbulences and cope with instability.
Pigeon towers are fragile pieces of infrastructure sitting amidst unpredictable and at times hostile geographies.
The third characteristic of a Pigeon Tower is its bridging function. It bridges intellectual learning or academic training, and experiential, place-based learning. At CILAS, students critically engage with theory while always seeking to ground it in the local context, in relation to different things and at different scales. Put differently, a Pigeon Tower as exemplified by CILAS floats mid-air between the height of the Ivory Tower and the streets. It occupies the mezzanine level affording students the tranquility an elevated piece of infrastructure like a tower provides, while not distancing itself from its surrounding. In other words, the Pigeon Tower allows for both the meditative practice, the slow pace and the deep inquiry needed to cultivate a scholarly attitude, and the embodied practice that nurtures the quick wit and making of connections associated with street smartness. It is after all in bringing one’s formal drive, or the intellectual mode of learning, and one’s sensuous drive, or the experiential mode of learning, into unison that one starts to play. What is needed then is a playground which is what the Pigeon Tower in its floating presence embodies.
Pigeon Towers recognize the importance of balancing intellectual and experiential learning.
The idea behind a collection of essays on the emergence of Pigeon Towers was to reflect on CILAS with the help of the guiding metaphor of the Pigeon Tower. This reflection took the form of a dialogue between myself, the founder of CILAS, and the contributing authors, Teun J. Dekker, Surti Singh, I-Kai Jeng and Robin Weiss, over several months. With the help of a grant issued by the Arab Council of Social Sciences and funded by the Ford Foundation, I asked the contributing authors to develop philosophical inquiries in the form of essays on what I called the anchoring principles of a Pigeon Tower. In putting forward the metaphor of the Pigeon Tower I was less concerned with reforming the existing structure of higher education, or with developing a stance against the Ivory Tower. Rather the Pigeon Tower is meant to serve as an invitation to think about higher education in terms of a piece of infrastructure anchored by principles that accommodate and support the formation of scholarly collectives.
The authors contributing to this writing project are all academic philosophers. Two of them specialise in ancient philosophy and two in contemporary philosophy. I asked them to write on one of four anchoring principles, namely diversity, intimacy, ignorance and play, which are derived from and inspired by the experience of CILAS. During conversations around tea and via e-mail exchanges with them, the writing project took shape over the second half of 2017. I invited each author to draw on their methodological strength and philosophical expertise in choosing a format for their writing. Teun and Surti, I encouraged to write a speech and a playful essay, respectively. The latter essay deals with the anchoring principle of play and ties in pop culture into the reflection, while the latter essay clarifies the notions of diversity and differentiation, and the importance they carry for the emergence of Pigeon Towers. Robin and I-Kai, I encouraged to write a dialogue and to produce a fragmentary essay, respectively. I-Kai made a contribution on the anchoring principle of intimacy, and its flip side of radical equality, drawing on Jacques Ranciere. Robin I asked to write on the anchoring principle of ignorance in fragments and to shed light on the fragmentary nature of the pursuit of knowledge.
The four essays were written in English (download it from here) and translated into Arabic by Hussein El Hajj (download it from here). Surti and Robin discussed their essays at CILAS in the Fall of 2017. These discussions were audio-recorded and can be listened to below (coming shortly) the bios. Teun and I-Kai tuned in via Skype from the Netherlands and Taiwan, respectively. Our conversation with them was also recorded and is available here (coming soon).
I hope you enjoy the collection of essays!
Karim-Yassin GOESSINGER studied political philosophy and urbanism in the Netherlands, Brazil and France. He worked with different development agencies in Latin America and the Middle East in fields including micro-finance, informal housing and local governance. A Dalai Lama and Donella Meadows Fellow, he enjoys martial arts, languages, world music, cooking and tea. After his graduate studies at Sciences Po Paris, he founded the Cairo Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CILAS). At CILAS, he has coordinated the field of study Social Sciences and has directed the yearlong study programme in the liberal arts between 2013 and 2016. At the American University in Cairo, he convened two sociology courses in 2016 and 2017.
Teun J. DEKKER is Vice-Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences Education at University College Maastricht. He did his BA at University College Utrecht, the first liberal arts college in the Netherlands, and has been a staunch advocate of liberal arts education ever since. He completed his graduate studies in political philosophy at Oxford University, focussing on desert-based theories of distributive justice, and continued this research at Yale University. At University College Maastricht, he teaches courses in political philosophy, and writes about the educational philosophy behind Liberal Arts and Sciences education.
Surti SINGH is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the American University in Cairo She specializes in 20th Century Continental Philosophy, Critical Theory, Aesthetics, and Feminism. Her recent work explores issues in aesthetics from the vantage point of early critical theory; theories of the image and the imaginary within the framework of psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and social theory; and feminist approaches to subjectivity. Her work has appeared in The Aesthetic Ground of Critical Theory: New Readings of Benjamin and Adorno (Rowman and Littlefield: 2015), New Forms of Revolt: Essays on Kristeva’s Intimate Politics (SUNY: 2017), and is forthcoming in Subjectivity and the Political (Routledge: 2017).
I-Kai JENG received his PhD/MA in Philosophy and Classical Studies at Boston University. Before going back home and taking up a position in the Department of Philosophy, National Taiwan University, he was visiting fellow at CILAS for a trimester and shared his thoughts on Plato's Republic with the wonderful people there. He is a specialist in Greek philosophy, with special concentration on Plato's reflections on the philosophical engagement in politics and the character of philosophical discourse. He enjoys tennis (only theorizing, no practice!), cinema, and folding paper when he's not unfolding concepts.
Robin WEISS received her Ph.D. from DePaul University, and taught most recently at Mount Allison University in Canada. She specializes in ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy, and in Roman Stoicism in particular, where it relates to the connection between thought and action. She has written on how the Stoics understood practical, as opposed to theoretical, intelligence, and also how it was understood by their predecessor, Aristotle. Her interests extend to the differing ways in which this connection has been taken up by subsequent thinkers, who have variously described it—in the traditions of Continental Philosophy and American Pragmatism—as the connection between knowing and doing, truth and subjectivity, theory and praxis
Hussein EL HAJJ is a graduate of the Faculty of Arts in the Department of English at Cairo University. While at college, he began reciting poems, acting in plays and short movies, writing and translating poetry, articles, and short stories published in print and in online magazines, as well as keeping a personal blog. The transition from the arts to deep socio-political issues after the revolution was what brought him to CILAS in 2014.
