STOP MAKING SENSE

Stop making sense? Hopefully not. No, never! Stop making sense of, stop sense making? Not as long as my mind allows it. Recently, Catherine  and I were guests on Bryan Alexander’s Future Trends Forum where Bryan’s opening question as always, was to ask what we were going to be doing in the year ahead. I responded by listing what I would not be doing- running a centre, leading a project, being at the helm of anything. But one thing I wouldn’t be doing is to stop sense making. 
South African universities have a compulsory retirement age, and that is a positive requirement in a shrinking sector.  Of course, the assumption is that older people retiring will bring younger people into the system, enabling transformation and innovation. That is surely a good. The risk though, is that expensive permanent senior staff are replaced by younger contracted staff. Who may indeed change the demographics of the sector, but by virtue of their insecure status are in a weaker position to confront and challenge their institutions.  The available data supports this: in South Africa the number of all permanent staff has been decreasing over the past few years while the number of contracted academic staff has been growing.
So, I am formally retired. Kind of retired. In another, related conversation George S started an important conversation about intergenerational knowledge sharing and solidarity. Because it is not simply a matter of handing over the baton, but of working together to change the sector and society for the better. That one is ongoing, for sure, when there is a very real polycrisis with  so much fake news, so much everything-equitable ‘washing’, so much confusion, and so much to be done.
This blog began with an update to the About Page and look where it led!  *Stop Making Sense of course also dates me to the 1980s concert by Talking Heads. It amuses me that the band’s name was suggested by a friend of the band who picked up a TV Guide and pulled out a style of presentation described as ‘the most mundane and the most informative’. Who would ever have imagined how widespread that style would become online? Writing this also sent me back to listening to Burning Down The House, Life During Wartime, Road To Nowhere…songs that seem both prescient and relevant now. But let me not get too nostalgic for an old American band, whom I am probably getting rose-tinted about because their concert had a great title!