Toward a New Mode of Knowledge Production
A History of the Global Centre for Advanced Studies
The Global Centre for Advanced Studies was born from a profound disillusionment with the structural realities of elite academic research. Its founder, Creston Davis, first conceived of the institution during his years as a graduate student at Yale University in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Having previously studied at Oxford and Duke, Davis arrived at Yale with considerable experience of Anglo-American higher education at its most prestigious levels. What he encountered there, however, fundamentally altered his understanding of how knowledge is produced, controlled, and distributed within the contemporary university.
Davis observed firsthand how research agendas in elite institutions were often shaped less by intellectual merit than by nepotistic networks and entrenched hierarchies of prestige. A small cohort of academic “stars”—reproduced through systems of reputation largely reserved for cultural elites—exercised disproportionate control over what questions could be asked, what methodologies were deemed legitimate, and whose voices were permitted to speak. Original, critical, and socially disruptive research was frequently sidelined, marginalized, or actively blocked by these closed circuits of authority. The academy, Davis came to believe, had betrayed its own founding promise: the free pursuit of truth.
When Davis’s own research was effectively prohibited at Yale, he transferred to the University of Virginia, where he discovered a more open intellectual environment and greater academic freedom. There, he worked closely with the philosopher and theologian John Milbank and the Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek, collaborations that would prove formative in shaping his critical approach to philosophy, theology, and political theory. These relationships also planted the seeds for what would eventually become an international network of scholars committed to genuinely independent inquiry.
During his doctoral studies, Davis began constructing the intellectual infrastructure that would later support GCAS. He edited a groundbreaking volume for Duke University Press on the then-emerging field of political theology—a work that, for the first time, brought together diverse strands of research within a single scholarly framework. The scope and ambition of this project attracted significant attention and led directly to the creation of a new book series, New Slant, co-edited with Philip Goodchild and Kenneth Surin.
This initial editorial success was followed by an even more influential venture: the launch of Insurrections: Critical Studies in Politics, Religion and Culture with Columbia University Press, co-edited with Žižek, Jeffrey Robbins, and Clayton Crockett. The series quickly became internationally influential, helping to redefine critical debates across philosophy, theology, politics, and cultural theory. It demonstrated that rigorous, intellectually adventurous scholarship could thrive outside the narrow channels controlled by academic gatekeepers—a lesson that would prove central to GCAS’s founding vision.
At the conclusion of his doctoral studies, Davis was offered several academic positions but declined them for personal reasons. In 2006, he accepted a tenure-track position at Rollins College in Florida. Teaching at the undergraduate level proved unexpectedly transformative—not because of any deficiency in the institution itself, which remained a strong liberal arts college, but because it exposed Davis to the deeper structural crisis afflicting American higher education as a whole.
What Davis discovered was an educational system profoundly entangled with an economic machinery that generated trillions of dollars in student debt while employment opportunities for graduates—especially in the humanities—continued to contract. This produced a crisis not merely for higher education as an industry, but for the disciplines devoted to critical thinking about history, politics, social relations, and power. As student debt increased and career prospects narrowed, critical thinking itself was systematically undermined, threatening the very foundations of democratic life. Universities increasingly functioned as elaborate job-training centers, while students were financially punished for pursuing the forms of critical inquiry most needed to resist propaganda, misinformation, and corporate manipulation.
Davis began to investigate the deeper structural and economic foundations—what he termed, following Marx, the “mode of production”—on which contemporary higher education rests. His research revealed a dangerous convergence between cultural elites, corporate interests, and institutions of learning that had been developing since the 1970s. Neoliberal policies had systematically attacked and hollowed out the university’s critical function, subordinating education to market logics and neutralizing the humanities as sites of genuine critique. The university had been captured.
It became clear to Davis that critical thinking could not be preserved without fundamentally transforming the economic foundations of higher education. What was needed was nothing less than a new mode of production—one not dependent on student debt, administrative managerialism, or the whims of state and corporate funders. This insight became the animating idea behind the Global Centre for Advanced Studies.
Davis posed a central question that would guide the institution’s development: How could a college or university be created in which professors, rather than administrators acting as proxies for corporate interests, controlled the economic and pedagogical conditions of education, while simultaneously protecting students through a genuinely debt-free model? The answer would require rethinking nearly every assumption about how educational institutions are structured, funded, and governed.
In 2012, shortly after being promoted to Associate Professor, Davis resigned from his position at Rollins College. The following year, he withdrew his retirement funds and used these modest resources to found GCAS in August 2013. The act was at once a leap of faith and a calculated gamble—a wager that intellectual community could be built on foundations entirely different from those of the neoliberal university.
From the outset, the project was met with both enthusiasm and skepticism. Critics—often young academics seeking positions within the neoliberal academy or established figures whose careers depended on its structures—questioned whether an independent, countervailing mode of production was even possible. Some of these critiques gained traction in GCAS’s earliest iterations, exposing genuine growing pains as the institution found its footing.
Nevertheless, the project attracted a wide range of independent scholars, researchers, artists, and writers whose work existed outside the neoliberal academic status quo. GCAS deliberately refused reliance on government funding, state control, or foundations that demanded ideological conformity in exchange for financial support. This independence came at a cost—resources were always constrained—but it preserved the intellectual freedom that was the institution’s raison d’être. Many joined as supporters, affiliate faculty, and research fellows, forming the nucleus of what would become a genuinely global intellectual community.
To realize its vision of accessible, democratic education, GCAS embraced a decentralized, internet-based pedagogy that allowed anyone with an internet connection, anywhere in the world, to participate in advanced education. This model removed the economic barriers associated with relocation and living costs required by elite universities in the United States or Europe. As a result, GCAS radically diversified its intellectual community, opening space for perspectives from marginalized voices, particularly in the Global South and other regions historically excluded from elite academic discourse.
From 2014 to 2020, GCAS developed a hybrid model combining online education with low-cost, in-person residential seminars held across Europe, North America, and beyond. These gatherings became legendary within the GCAS community—intensive weeks of intellectual exchange that forged lasting bonds among participants and demonstrated that rigorous scholarship need not be confined to traditional institutional settings.
In 2018, GCAS incorporated in Ireland, a move that enabled the creation of a co-ownership model shared among faculty, staff, and graduates. This was a decisive step toward realizing Davis’s original vision of an institution governed by those who taught and learned within it, rather than by external administrators, donors, or state bureaucracies.
A crucial turning point came in 2022, when GCAS began offering EU-accredited degrees, starting with a Master of Arts in Philosophy. In 2023, the institution expanded dramatically to include a Bachelor of Arts program, additional Master’s programs in Psychoanalysis, Theology, and Politics, and two doctoral programs. With accreditation in place, what skeptics had once dismissed as impossible matured into a functioning and growing reality. GCAS became fully autonomous, co-owned by its faculty and graduates, and capable of delivering internationally recognized degrees while remaining intellectually independent and entirely debt-free for students.
GCAS’s intellectual life has been shaped by an extensive history of seminars, conferences, and public events that have brought together some of the most significant critical thinkers of our time. The institution’s first seminar took place in December 2013 with Jack Halberstam, setting the tone for what would become a distinctive approach to collaborative intellectual work.
In April 2014, GCAS contributed to a major conference at the University of Cincinnati featuring Davis, Žižek, and Adrian Parr as keynote speakers. That July, GCAS hosted its first in-person seminar with Alain Badiou in Grand Rapids, Michigan—an event of such significance that Badiou subsequently became GCAS’s Honorary President. Later that year, GCAS held a seminar with Halberstam and Paul B. Preciado at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, marking the institution’s first major European event.
July 2015 saw one of GCAS’s most ambitious undertakings: the “Democracy Rising” conference at the University of Athens Law School. Held at a moment of acute political crisis in Greece, the conference attracted over 1,000 in-person attendees and thousands more via broadcast and livestream, demonstrating both the hunger for critical political thinking and GCAS’s capacity to organize at scale. In the fall of 2015, this conference was transformed into a semester-long seminar in Brooklyn featuring Oliver Stone, Richard Wolff, and Chris Hedges.
In 2016, GCAS partnered with Alma Mater Europaea to host a theology seminar, deepening its engagement with European academic networks. The following year brought a seminar in Havana, Cuba—extending GCAS’s reach into Latin America—followed by an international conference in Slovenia at which Lewis R. Gordon became GCAS’s third Honorary President.
From 2018 to 2019, GCAS hosted a series of week-long seminars and conferences across France, including the Bracha L. Ettinger Paris seminar and a conference in southern France. These events consolidated GCAS’s presence in continental Europe and attracted participants from across the globe.
The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 interrupted in-person gatherings, as it did for institutions worldwide. Yet GCAS’s long-standing commitment to online pedagogy meant it was better positioned than most to weather the disruption. In 2021, as restrictions eased, GCAS resumed international events with gatherings in Mexico City and Bogotá, reaffirming its commitment to intellectual engagement beyond the traditional centers of Euro-American academic power.
The period following accreditation has seen an intensification of GCAS’s programming. In 2022, events in Belfast featured accredited seminars by Jamieson Webster and Barry Taylor, followed by a psychoanalytic workshop in Dublin. The years 2023 and 2024 brought multiple seminars across Prague, Paris, and the Alps, including the Bruce Fink seminars, a Nietzsche seminar, and events led by Peter Rollins, Barry Taylor, Bracha L. Ettinger, and Jamieson Webster.
Looking ahead, May 2026 will see a major seminar in Florence featuring Franco Berardi, Jamieson Webster, and others—continuing GCAS’s commitment to rigorous, globally engaged, and transformative education.
The history of the Global Centre for Advanced Studies is, in one sense, a story of institutional development: from a founder’s vision to a functioning, accredited educational institution with programs at every level. But it is also something more—an ongoing experiment in whether critical thinking can survive, and even flourish, outside the economic and institutional constraints that increasingly define contemporary higher education.
GCAS was founded on the conviction that new institutional avenues were required—spaces capable of supporting genuinely diverse research contexts and breaking the monopoly that cultural elites held over knowledge production. More than a decade later, that conviction has been tested, refined, and ultimately vindicated. The institution that skeptics dismissed as impossible now offers accredited degrees, attracts internationally renowned scholars, and provides a model—however imperfect and still evolving—for what education might look like beyond the neoliberal university.
The experiment continues.
This very brief history of GCAS will be expanded and published in the future.
