A professor remembers
There’s a quietness to life these days, yet also a lack of peace which buzzes always through waking and sleeping. Perhaps the quietness is really just an un-ease that cannot be articulated. Do you remember when things somehow shimmered? I feel sure they did, but the essence of that shimmer was always indefinable, and now it’s impossible to extract or, really, properly remember.
But do you remember how we used to move through our campuses? We’d rush down to Edgeburn for our 9 o’clock and rush up to Shadowhall for our noon. Then dash out to Holowston for our 3pm. It was exhausting. But it had its own lightness – that sense of place, digital and physical space, purpose, the people in it, the greetings, conflicts, boredom, annoyances and moments of joy. The students back then spoke of belonging.
Some of those spaces still exist, of course. Others have been sold on – people need housing, especially here and now. Nostalgia is pointless, there is only ever change. Yet those places have lost their shimmer. The people that come and go are no longer a body, no-one speaks of belonging, only of transaction. And even the transactions are somehow passive – lazy accumulations of past achievements and captured failings artificially aggregated and paid forward with no action required.
Maybe this is preferable – do you remember all the paperwork we used to have to do? To get paid, promoted, hired, reviewed, measured, celebrated? But what was lost in that dark gap as we – often thankfully – sacrificed agency to give ourselves respite from drudgery? Do you remember what our work meant to us when we had a sense of home? What did we lose when we stopped talking of belonging?
Links
Extreme unbundling (scenario)
Next scenario (Justice-driven innovation)
Higher Education Futures (project page)

