At the left-wing festival held annually in our town, half of the booths are in support of boutique sexual identities and another half offers bookmarks, slap bracelets, and other merch featuring either rainbows or the word “change.”
It’s fascinating how this word became uniformly positively coded. The interdisciplinary courses at my university were renamed this year into “changemakers.” Nobody knows what it means and how it’s a synonym for interdisciplinary but it’s about change, so it’s got to be good, huh?
This goes against every human instinct. We all experience nostalgia which is an emotion with which we respond to the loss and pain of change. We know that it’s the unchangeable things that make us happiest. Yet we worship change because we are constantly told it’s the right thing to do.
Change is good when it represents an improvement, but most change these days is just change for change’s sake (aka fixing things that aren’t broken).
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What my department is doing to its poor curriculum comes to mind. We just finished a revision like a year ago, and yet it’s time for another “reimagining” because God forbid we leave our courses alone for one f*cking minute.
I’ve been faculty for 20+ years and a vast majority of that time there has been some construction happening on my part of campus. I wonder if I will have even a year of peace without someone piledriving nearby before I retire.
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Our School of Pharmacy was moved into a brand-new building which the faculty and the students hate. They didn’t want or need it and would have preferred that the money had been spent on filling the lapsed tenure lines. There’s literally nobody to teach. Very little research is being done. But the university splashes on a new building that’s way too large for the tiny number of remaining faculty. My friend was forced to move her lab into a room that’s trapeze-shaped. Her equipment is not trapeze-shaped. No explanation for this design was given. Internet and AC go out on regular occasions in the new building. Faculty have to sit in their offices in fucking hard hats because shit is falling from the ceiling.
So yes, I’m a little upset over it. Just a bit.
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“We all experience nostalgia which is an emotion with which we respond to the loss and pain of change.”
Not a photo of us, but it reminds me of visiting cousins east of the sand hills more than 50 years ago. The flat desolate prairie, and the hair, the wind never stops because there are only a couple of strands of barbed wire between us and the North Pole ;-D
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In SA, there is a lot of nostalgia for the good old days and not just from white people. An important point is that in those days the law was the law.
The basic idea is that hard law is better than no law, which distinguished SA from the general chaos of post-colonial Africa.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-66808346
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