Quest University Canada and Counter-Hegemony in Post-Secondary Educational Design

In this paper I argue that relationship-driven education, de-departmentalization, and self-authorship are keys to an alternative formation of andragogy that centres questions instead of answers and social responsibility over self-interest. The experimental liberal arts and sciences university Quest University Canada (Quest hereafter) championed these innovations from 2007 to 2023 in British Columbia. Alternative Post-Secondary Education (APSE) has a long history of offering non-traditional, experimental, mission‑driven education that introduces new ideas and forms of academic life often towards progressive ends.[1] Recently, APSE is facing unprecedented challenges in marketization and political pressure.[2] In the fight for social responsibility, justice and peace, universities still hold a radical potential.[3] Eric Gorham, a founding faculty member of Quest, argues that the political drama of the university seminar allows students to practice their engagement in broader civil society.[4] In an age of simultaneous polarization and depoliticization, the university remains a site where students can be challenged and empowered to speak for themselves and to others such that they must also respond to the impact of their opinions and ideologies. The time is now to preserve the promise of the university and cultivate radical innovations to respond to what Henry Giroux often calls the death of the social.[5]

Academic activity reduced to its fundamental nature consists of individuals coming together to ask questions, seek wisdom in archives, and otherwise understand the conditions of their reality better than those before them. This fact of university life makes the institution inherently threatening to authoritarian regimes and oppressive forms of organizing human activity. It is no surprise, then, that the rise of autocratic far-right politics has also coincided with a claw-back of academic freedom and funding for the most critical of disciplines.[6] Even prior to these developments, however, the established PSE system was, and still is, crippled by neoliberal logic, disciplinary siloing and a divorce of relationality that fundamentally depoliticizes and alienates the educator, the pupil, and the academy alike. The inherently transformative nature of education is seldom felt by undergraduate students in large, traditional, universities. The lecture hall in its asymmetry, physically manifests what Paulo Freire called the “banking” model of pedagogy, where knowledge is possessed by the expert and distributed to the learner.[7] For the purpose of this paper, we narrow our focus to the counter-hegemonic potential of the university and in particular the innovations of Quest.

On this view, the university has a dual potential: it can continue to function as part of the dominant hegemonic apparatus that normalizes existing relations of power or it can be reoriented into a counter‑hegemonic institution that cultivates organic intellectuals capable of reshaping common sense itself towards more democratic and egalitarian social relations.[8] Quest University specifically exists in a long tradition of self-described “liberal arts” institutions, the likes of which have marked the North American PSE landscape since the founding of Harvard College in 1636. Liberal-arts scholarship defines itself as an educational philosophy centring broad interdisciplinary study for civic engagement and complex, critical thinking over technical skill acquisition.[9] Quest innovated in three distinct ways that set it apart in its counter-hegemony.[10]

The first innovation came through Quest’s emphasis on de-departmentalization. In the structure of faculty relations and in the curriculum, Quest eschewed the department and discipline as an organizing principle. Echoing analyses from Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams, Quest’s founder David Strangway (former president of both the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto) and founding faculty members understood disciplines and departments to restrict objects of study and the capacity for collaborative solutions to real problems.[11] Quest had one program of study that lead to a bachelor’s of arts and sciences ending in a capstone project. In the first two years students took mandatory subjects across the disciplines with specific courses in key areas of each discipline. The idea was to develop a core understanding of the approaches to knowledge production in each discipline and to develop a foundational grasp of how each tradition contributes to one’s engagement with the world. This “foundation program” was anchored with 3 interdisciplinary courses called Cornerstone, Rhetoric and Question. Cornerstone was intentionally co-taught between two randomly assigned faculty and covered the epistemology of philosophy, anthropology, physical and social sciences and literary studies. Rhetoric was a course in media and digital literacy which centred the critical evaluation of persuasive (often political) language. At the end of the first two years of mandatory multidisciplinary courses, students took Question. In Question, students work with their cohort and faculty supervisor to ask a Question which will define their concentration study during the later two years of their program.[12] The inquiry-based and intimate supervision of the Question course and subsequent concentration years will be a focus in the later section on self-authorship. For the purpose of our discussion of the curriculum, it is enough to highlight how Question intentionally promoted interdisciplinary thinking, to start with problems and develop a path of study to address them. This was one of the ways Quest innovated in counter-hegemony and produced more organic intellectuals.

De-departmentalization also served to cultivate organic intellectuals in the faculty body. Faculty offices were on the top floor of the round academic building. Faculty were assigned an office that they had to share with someone from a different discipline and rotated through the offices periodically throughout the year. The idea was to encourage faculty to speak with folks trained in other disciplines and learn from them. This turned out not to be a gimmick. Two faculty, Marjorie Wonham (Marine Biologist) and Curtis Wasson (Spanish Studies) were assigned to share an office and ended up creating an innovative course called “The Biology of Poetry”, during which students wrote and appreciated poetry about the natural world while engaging with it scientifically. Inductively observable phenomena like the interdependence of an ecosystem or the vastness of a mycorrhizal network are rendered intimate, accessible and irreducible through literature. Courses like this would not occur without the physical de-departmentalization of Quest. Faculty were encouraged to co-teach and co-supervise, with rewards and other incentives promoting these activities. There were no lecture halls and exams or tests were strongly discouraged. This meant that faculty from traditionally “top-down” disciplines would have to innovate in their instruction. While some struggled with the seminar and breakout-room style of Quest’s academics, most thrived in the active intensity and authenticity of its andragogical relations.[13] Democratic structures were also reflected in the university’s academic governance, with one central academic council responsible for curricular matters. Of course, as the university’s financial situation worsened and faculty numbers shrunk, the number of innovative course offerings or collaborative opportunities decreased. Many compromises had to be made in the name of survival.[14] However, some colleagues of mine resent the direction Quest took in its final years, arguing that it lost its innovative edge. Despite this, de-departmentalization stands as one of Quest’s critical innovations. One which I will move on from after a final note on its effects on the student environment through a personal anecdote.

I had joined Quest as a self-described science student. While having disparate interests in other disciplines, I had had intended to pursue cancer research through molecular genetics upon graduation. This all changed when a senior student who concentrated primarily in philosophy challenged the epistemic foundations of my thinking while I was walking past his table in the cafeteria. Quest students, as remarked many visiting faculty, were uniquely willing to engage one another in critical dialogue. This student asked me if I thought science could make truth claims. Of course, I said. He then shared with me Hume’s problem of induction which shattered the trajectory of my academic career and ultimately my life. De-departmentalization embedded itself in the student body. There were no “science students” or “humanities students” at Quest. Everyone shared equally in curiosity, inquiry, and personal improvement. One could not hide behind methodological limitations or scope, if there was an implication of one’s work or idea one had to speak to it. The relationships cultivated at Quest were another key innovation that practiced counter-hegemony.

From advisors to mentors and intimate in-class instruction, Quest was characterized by a relationship-driven andragogy. From day one at Quest students had a one-on-one faculty advisor with whom they would speak regularly about their interests, course performance and academic plans. Always on a first name basis as a matter of policy, faculty and students lived on the same campus, ate from the same cafeteria and met for 3 hours everyday in seminar classrooms capped at 20 students. During their Question course, students would design an academic plan around their problem of choice and defend this plan against a faculty panel including a chosen mentor. For the last two years of their program Quest students worked closely with their mentor to design and conduct the research project of their choice, culminating in a capstone deliverable that took many forms. It is hard to quantify or otherwise give an account of the value of relationships. Quest’s design reduced the potential barriers students sometimes face when speaking with faculty or engaging in class discussions. Symbolically, the familiarity with which faculty related to students signalled an equality integral to Quest’s philosophy and to its counter-hegemonic practice. The organic intellectual community must be one of peers. Never did I feel at Quest that faculty (who all had their doctorates, I must note) were essentially different kinds of people than myself or my fellow students. The personalization of knowledge and scholarly pursuit brings down the arcane theory to concrete faces and voices. The ivory tower crumbled not under the weight of a theoretical intervention in pedagogy but through casual conversations with a professor about Kant on the couch over coffee. Such were the pedagogical relations at Quest. Faculty were given absolute freedom in how to run their classes and fulfill their mentorship obligations. This freedom was a major strength and a limitation when it came to the cultivation of counter-hegemonic relationships.

Only one faculty member, in my experience, structurally engaged the community through his classes. Eric Gorham (cited earlier) required his students to volunteer for a local non-profit organization as part of his democracy and justice course, a mandatory component of the Quest foundation program. This course connected theoretical study with lived contact with political issues as experienced by people in the community. However, for the most part, Quest faculty focused on their students only and not how their class conversations or research connected to the outside world. While a microcosm that was generative in many ways politically, the Quest seminar was largely divorced from the social realities and challenges of the world that undermined the sense of urgency much of the subject matter demanded. The absolute freedom of interpretation also meant some visiting faculty took to the innovative format differently and not in the positive direction of active and interdisciplinary pedagogy. Further, when it came to mentorship, the quality of one’s engagement with one’s mentor depended wholly on whether that faculty came to the relationship positively. I had encountered horror stories of faculty mentors stonewalling students they simply did not like through conversations with peers in preparation for this paper. Notably, these limitations were known to the faculty and leadership. Nobody was more critical of Quest than those who were a part of it, all in the spirit of continuous improvement and democratic participation.

Ultimately, however, the intimacy of relationships in the classroom and mentorship, as eluded to earlier, left nowhere to hide. On-campus living was mandatory. Students at Quest had to respond to questions and to others with whom one found oneself in relation constantly in class, breakout rooms, residence or library. Depoliticization was structurally unlikely and students practiced holding a position and defending it from the onset. The counter-hegemonic value of this exposure is not to be understated. To be anonymous and complicit allows one to view horrors and look away. The thoughtlessness of Eichman depended upon a certain distance. At Quest, you were responsible for your engagement with the community, your arguments and your values. In a traditional undergraduate experience (in the first or second year), you are lucky if your professor reads anything you have written. It is not until upper undergraduate seminars that you might practice engaging in a learning community. At Quest this was a guarantee from day one. Further, the lack of departments meant one could not shield oneself behind the language of techne or the epistemology of science to wave away ethical obligation. One had to, as a student and professor, contend with all the sticky problems associated with collective human life.

The final structural innovation of Quest to be broached in this essay is self-authorship. By self-authorship I mean the process by which students position and articulate themselves, their opinions and values in response to traditions, archives, or received wisdom from the world and its many cultural apparatuses.[15] Undoubtedly significant in higher education, the traditional undergraduate degree seldom centres the student’s emerging voice in a wholistic manner. At best, the student is encouraged to write essays in their own words and to articulate an apparently original position given a relatively narrow prompt. Quest places self-authorship at the very centre of its entire program.

Quest centred inquiry and academic accountability that facilitated transformative learning towards ethical and innovative relationality. The question course asked students to pose a question that replaces the traditional major.[16] Instead of selecting from a set of disciplines within which you try to find a niche for yourself, the question in lieu of majors approach allows problems to organize one’s scholarship instead of the other way around. This system has the remarkable effect of placing the student, quite early in their academic careers, to put themselves and their ideas in a position where they must respond to the world. Students had to chart (and defend) an interdisciplinary plan of study to address their question during their last two years at Quest. The demand to respond inquisitively that a question-based approach facilitates practices what Katja Castillo and other educational theorists identify as a core component of ethical subjectivity. A world mise en question (to put into question) deposes received wisdom from disciplines and academic traditions and forces the student to learn to ask good questions that reveal difficult problems without reduction. Castillo argues that the practice of putting oneself, the world and ones relations into question helps setup the pupil for a more ethical and response-able way of being.[17] Ryan Derby-Tablot, a former Quest faculty member, argues that Quest’s question design reorganized the whole university around uncertainty and supporting students’ genuine inquiry in a way that engaged the seldom nurtured ontological dimensions of transformative learning.[18] Through the process of sitting with the difficult problems of contemporary life and not allowing oneself to acquiesce to the easy answers provided by culture, technology or society, the student is transformed in their educability, or, their capacity to learn. Exposed without intellectual guardrails, the Quest student had to make their way and learn to speak with their voice in response to the difficulties they see in the world. If the university is to live up to its democratic potential and respond to its responsibilities in this current historical moment, it must learn from APSE institutions like Quest in its unwavering commitment to inquiry, relationships and interdisciplinarity. Universities should centre problems and allow themselves to be organized around their associated questions, not historically contingent disciplines echoing age-old traditions and arcane epistemological arguments captured by political and economic interests.

Much more can be said about Quest and its innovative experiments in higher education. Future directions should aim to chronicle Quest’s founding and suspension of operations, but more importantly, articulate and reflect upon its experimental design and outcomes. Yet little research has been published in this area. Ultimately, this paper has argued that Quest University Canada should be understood not as a failed experiment but as a partially realized counter-hegemonic project whose design illuminates what remains possible for higher education. Its commitment to de-departmentalization, relationship-driven andragogy, and self-authorship demonstrates how universities might be reorganized around inquiry, responsibility, and ethical response rather than market logics and disciplinary reproduction. If the contemporary university is to resist authoritarian pressures and reclaim its democratic function, it must learn from experiments like Quest—not by replicating them wholesale, but by taking seriously their insistence that education is most transformative when it begins with questions, is sustained through relationships, and demands that students and educators alike speak in their own voices in response to the world they inhabit.        

Works Cited

Baxter Magolda, Marcia B. “Self-Authorship.” New Directions for Higher Education (New York) 2014, no. 166 (2014): 25–33. https://doi.org/10.1002/he.20092.

Castillo, Katja, Jani Kukkola, and Pauli Siljander. “Conserving the Dignity of Teaching through Ethics as ‘Mise En Question.’” Journal of Philosophy of Education 56, no. 2 (2022): 318–28. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9752.12626.

Chisholm, Mervin. “Developing Counter-Hegemonic Pedagogy in Adult & Higher Education.” Paper presented at Adult Education research Conference. 2015 Conference Proceedings (Manhattan, KS), 2015.

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[1] Despite their disruptive power, few have managed to sustain themselves. From the original New School supported by John Dewey to modern experiments in Canada and the United States, alternative colleges and universities have struggled to manifest formations that facilitate social change that persist in their mission. See Warren, “When Innovative Institutions Fail”; Higginson, “When Experimental Was Mainstream.”

[2] Quest University suspended academic operations after years of financial pressure whereas New College of Florida did not close but was instead transformed under the direction of a republican Governor. The New College of Florida is now unrecognizable in its Christian and conservative ideology.

[3] Giroux, “Neoliberalism, Corporate Culture, and the Promise of Higher Education.”

[4] Gorham, The Theater of Politics.

[5] Giroux, The Burden of Conscience.

[6] Rippberger et al., “Targeting Higher Education Is an Essential Tool in the Autocratic Playbook.”

[7] Freire, “Chapter 2 from Pedagogy of the Oppressed”; Hooks, Teaching to Transgress; Clark, “Critical Pedagogy in the University.”

[8] Mayo, “The ‘Tun to Gramsci’ in Adult Education: A Review”; Manojan, “Capturing the Gramscian Project in Critical Pedagogy”; Valeriano, “The Concepts of Ideology, Hegemony, and Organic Intellectuals in Gramsci’s Marxism”; Chisholm, “Developing Counter-Hegemonic Pedagogy in Adult & Higher Education”; Chisholm, “Counter-Hegemonic Pedagogy: Activism and the Life of the Organic Intellectual.”

[9] Godwin and Altbach, “A Historical and Global Perspective on Liberal Arts Education.”

[10] I use the word counter-hegemony, following Gramsci, to describe those cultural and pedagogical forces that undo the so called common sense that functions to support autocratic imaginations and bring people to greater clarity regarding the conditions of their material, often oppressive, relations.

[11] Williams, “The Future of Cultural Studies”; Hall, “The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities”; David Helfand, “Designing a University for the New Millennium”; Lewin, “David Helfand’s New Quest.”

[12] Wonham and Derby-Talbot, “Questions Instead of Majors.”

[13] Thomas et al., “Navigating Pedagogical Innovation in Higher Education.”

[14] Warren, “When Innovative Institutions Fail.”

[15] Baxter Magolda, “Self-Authorship”; Pizzolato, “Assessing Self-Authorship.”

[16] Wonham and Derby-Talbot, “Questions Instead of Majors.”

[17] Castillo et al., “Conserving the Dignity of Teaching through Ethics as ‘Mise En Question.’”

[18] Derby-Talbot, “Learning That Matters Is Messy.”

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