Alix Green
In my role as an adviser on policy for a university Vice-Chancellor, the UK equivalent of President, perhaps my most important job is to ask our leader to ‘tell me the story’ when he’s consulting me on some issue or another. It seems to me that universities, along with many public sector institutions, are not always able, or inclined, to ‘think with history’ when they’re making the major policy decisions that shape their future. That’s not to say that universities don’t have a powerful sense of history; they do. But so often it seems a burden. History weighs heavy on the shoulders of university leaders, who feel their capacity for action limited by the accumulation of previous decisions that have kept their institutions on a steady course to the present time. Even at a new university like mine, which gained its status as a result of 1992 Further and Higher Education Act, history can be problematic for leaders. As a former Polytechnic, my institution had a history to overcome – or at least to integrate into a new future – as it strived to find its place in an expanded HE sector. Continue reading
As an undergraduate history student, I wrote a lot of essays and exams meant only for my professor’s eyes. Despite the tremendous effort that went into crafting these works, they now exist only as PDFs on my personal computer where I secretly hope some future historian will find them and be fascinated by my analysis of the Chanak Affair or Red Clydeside. The whole concept of creating something useful was foreign to me.