Reimagining Higher Education: The GCAS Experiment
At GCAS College Dublin, we believe higher education should not be a machine for producing debt, nor a tool of nationalist propaganda. It should be a practice of freedom. In a time when universities are increasingly captured by corporate interests, ideological forces, and algorithmic surveillance, GCAS stands as an alternative—a borderless, debt-free, accredited institution owned and governed by its students and faculty.
GCAS began in 2013 with a simple yet radical idea: to build an accredited college for the future, one capable of resisting the forces that have hollowed out academia. Since then, we’ve grown into a global research community, with students and faculty from over 50 countries. We offer accredited degrees from the BA to the MA and PhD levels. From Paris to Mexico City, Bogotá to Belgrade, we’ve hosted courses, seminars, and symposia that bring together world-class scholars and grassroots activists in conversation across borders, disciplines, and traditions.
We do not romanticize the margins. We are fully aware of the concentrated power of governments and corporations seeking to reshape universities into training centers for obedient workers. In the United States, this trend has reached new levels under the second administration of Donald Trump, who has weaponized state institutions to attack academic freedom, suppress critical race and gender studies, and punish dissent. But this is not a sudden rupture. It’s part of a 50-year neoliberal strategy that began in earnest with Ronald Reagan, who once declared that “taxpayers shouldn’t be subsidizing intellectual curiosity.” Since then, public education has been defunded, tuition rates have skyrocketed, and student debt has become a multi-trillion-dollar industry.
Against this backdrop, GCAS offers a different vision. We believe education should be a public good, not a private privilege. Our graduates and faculty co-own the institution they attended. There are no administrators drawing six-figure salaries, no trustees demanding returns on investment. Instead, we operate as a cooperative, where decision-making power is shared and distributed. Our model is experimental by design: we are constantly rethinking what education is and who it’s for.
GCAS draws inspiration from thinkers like bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and Jacques Derrida—scholars who challenged the colonial, patriarchal, and authoritarian structures of traditional education. But our work is not only theoretical. In the face of surveillance capitalism and AI-powered disinformation, we offer seminars on psychoanalysis, theology, and resistance theory. We do not prepare students to become better consumers; we equip them to become better world-builders.
This work is not easy. It requires us to invent new tools, new grammars, and new forms of language. It asks us to confront painful histories and to build bridges across deep ideological divides. But we believe that a better world is not only possible—it is already emerging in the classrooms, conversations, and communities we help to cultivate.
If you believe education can be something more—more democratic, more collaborative, more transformative—we invite you to join us. Because in a time of planetary crisis, education cannot be neutral. It must take sides. And at GCAS, we’ve chosen to stand with the future.
The GCAS Team