The Rewriting of Campus History

Back when I worked at Sussex University, I sat through a lot of meetings. To relieve the tedium, I used to note changing fashions in language; bureaucratic phrases arriving from other institutions and working their way mimetically through management brains. As I remember it, there was a lot of dizzying movement: many deep dives into data and much drilling into figures; endless circling back, driving forward, and cascading downwards. The contrast with our sedentary laptop lifestyle was marked.