It is a long time since I recorded any thoughts on this blog ... I may have more time now that I have finally 'retired'. I am certainly glad to be free of the often absurd burdens of administration in the higher education sector, to be free of its institutional anxieties and tiresome neuroses. On the other hand, I miss teaching, which I enjoyed.
I wrote something for a Guardian discussion a couple of weeks ago, about whether a university can have a soul .... Meanwhile I have undertaken a salutary exercise, copying out by hand a series of recently published papers which I want to form into a book length study of the idea of philosophy and its relation to religion and spirituality.
Once you start to write out what was once a finished piece it becomes fluid again, and you see what was tentative and what was wrong and, occasionally, what makes good sense. The other advantage is that you gain a panoramic view of a set of preoccupations that are not as it were finished with you, you see yourself circling round the same points, again and again, see the same metaphors at work, the same dependence on a key phrase or trope ...
There are six rams in the garden, obligingly munching away at the grass ... three Shetlands, a Texel and a couple of Suffolks.
4 comments:
Glad you are back.
Good you are back blogging
Good to see that you are still blogging, and it must be great to be able to rewrite your work - it almost makes me look forward to retirement!
I had a look at your Guardian piece. I too find the government's agenda on universities unnecessarily narrow, but I think it is probably necessary to engage with more utilitarian language on this if you hope to convince those responsible, rather than appealing to a 'soul'. A narrow focus on 'instruction' does not even make sense in the terms the government cares about, such as economic benefit, let alone in terms of deeper values.
In Buddhist or Middle Way terms, the problem with the soul is that it provides a fixed focus of identity, and your appeal to a soul rather suggests a resistance to change in itself (whether or not you intended this). Universities need to change, just for entirely practical reasons, for the benefit of society as a whole in the long-term - and the issue is how they should change. There is no reason why they should necessarily follow values set in the eleventh century just because of their antiquity.
Hi, Robert, nice to hear from you! I wouldn't myself have used the term 'soul' in the context of a discussion of the university, but I was asked to respond to the question, can a university have a soul ... not sure that I agree that the use of the term suggests a resistance to change. It depends on how you make use of that language. But this is an old story ...
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