Amid the wilderness of jargon deployed in higher education circles today, ’future-proof’ takes my personal biscuit. If you’ve yet to make its acquaintance, the phrase most commonly refers to the skills and qualities our graduates are thought to need to survive in a world where there are no safe careers, where IT is constantly evolving, where we are all players in the global knowledge economy (there goes a second biscuit). But it doesn’t stop with students: some departments and universities are now believed to be in need of future-proofing.
There are sound reasons why. Most of us admit to anxiety about our students’ employment prospects, about our institutions’ long-term health (especially when the sole Conservative Party contribution to the HE debate is a policy document called Sink or Swim?), and, since the future of the great globe itself is also at stake, about our place on a warming planet; most of us want to do something to help. But ’future-proofing’? It reeks of retrenchment, of panic; it breathes the fear we associate with unimaginative parents or some manual for survivors of nuclear devastation. Ostensibly a signal that we prepare our students for an uncertain working life, the phrase asks them to assume that their futures will be hostile and crisis-ridden. Imagine Kipling’s ’If’ recast for the ’future-proof’ generation: ’If you can multitask while all about you …’ What’s wrong with giving them a more fundamental, nourishing sense of the hope that comes of curiosity?
Such thoughts came to mind as I was listening to Ronald Barnett at this year’s Higher Education Academy conference in Manchester – in fact most of my title is borrowed from his. A wide-ranging thinker about universities who dwells on pasts and futures with a freedom we could wish on all vice chancellors, Barnett emphasised the Heideggerian ’being’ that is the university, perpetually evolving and alive with possibilities and differences. In Barnett’s narrative, the ’metaphysical’ university born in the Middle Ages has spawned the ’research’ or scientific university, the ’entrepreneurial’ university, the ’therapeutic’ university and the ’corporate’ and ’bureaucratic’ universities. Each paradigm overlaps, coexists with the others, so that the idea of a university, with all due respect to Cardinal Newman, is an impossibility – where universities are concerned, ’being’ means ’becoming.’
In Barnett’s view, such dynamism gives grounds for hope: it means our future is in our hands and we should fashion it to create a new kind of ’metaphysical’ university. Leaving aside the suspicion that such futurism seems a little nostalgic, why (I asked) should we be optimistic? Universities may be able to exercise a measure of control over their futures, but that may only mean having the freedom to make bad decisions that help to create bad futures. Precisely because of the losses Barnett identified – academic community, the use of space that underpins it – the ’metaphysical’ university might well resign itself to resting in peace beneath the feet of entrepreneurs and bureaucrats. ’Have hope’, was the essence of Barnett’s reply. ’Give me some future-proofing,’ I mused.
Studies of morale indicate that it fades the further your working thoughts stray from your immediate circle, so it’s hardly surprising that the hopes we treasure for our students can dim to extinction at the sight of the next set of Senate papers. But, in an important sense that no amount of phoney mission statements can diminish, those we teach are our institutions. Our best chance of shaping the future of our universities is to fill our students with a sense of possible futures that draw on real pasts: of the multiple layering of metaphysics, research, therapy and enterprise that continues to characterise the part of institutional life called English Studies. In the adaptability of our subject and its students there is, after all, hope.
Asked to envisage English Studies in the universities of the future, some academics might tell a grumpy, lapsarian tale of students doomed to read, listen, punctuate, browse and attend less but Google, Twitter, plagiarise, pay and complain more (for such dystopian visions, read Frank Furedi’s column in the Times Higher). Maybe, but there are other futures, ones that, right now, are digging deep into the past with new and exciting tools: modules on book history that ask undergraduates to do their own research in EEBO; students creating multi-media commentaries on canonical poems; linguistics projects that use the latest software to track neologisms. These, and many more examples, show us how the future we are already busy inventing with our students has begun to enrich not only our understanding of our core business, the written text, but of the way texts and readers might interact in decades to come. If that’s the future, I for one would rather not be proofed against it.
