Post #3163012

@kfitz@hcommons.social so... I'm nowhere near an academic expert here, but some causal thoughts (I found this very valuable as-is): In your formulation the important thing to preserve is "knowledge" but I'd differ. To me, the important thing to preserve is "students" or more ephemerally, "processes which produce educated students." I think about the fact that there are aboriginal songs which preserve knowledge about geography from thousands of years ago [1], without of course any super-durable storage medium, and it seems like the success of that knowledge preservation probably stems not from a focus on knowledge itself, but instead from a focus on processes which guarantee the transmission of knowledge. I don't see any reason why that geographical knowledge might not survive another dozen millennia, whereas I find it difficult to imagine that the majority of the various books, discs, and etchings we think of a archives right now will reliably live another 100 years, let alone a single thousand. The university has been an (imperfect, exclusionary, etc. as you rightfully point out) site of knowledge transfer as well as production, and while I think that humans of the future are always going to find ways to produce knowledge, the good parts of the knowledge transfer mechanisms that exist today are to my mind the most valuable things to preserve as universities trend towards collapse. As long as we can preserve both knowledge transfer practices and institutions that perpetuate those practices and sustain the individuals who engage in them, the knowledge itself will be carried forward. If we can't do that, then no amount of writing down or archiving our knowledge will work because it won't even have an interested audience in the future. Along the same lines, when us academics think of our legacy in terms of publications and citations, we neglect to think of the perhaps more important (though much less visible/attributable) impact that our teaching has. For me, thinking about the potential end of my institution and/or my role in it inspires me most to think very critically about how I interact with however many classes of students I have left. Are there things they need to hear that I've been afraid to say because of institutional forces that are going to cast me aside regardless? How can I help equip them best for the endings and new beginnings that are happening now? Thanks for your great and very thought-provoking piece! [1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00049182.2015.1077539