Higher education has been through tough times for the unit of resource before.
When I enrolled onto my Cultural and Media Studies course in the mid-1990s, I was ushered into a lecture theatre to be told all about an exciting new “interdisciplinary first year” that the university had developed.
I didn’t know until weeks later that we were being plonked onto humanities modules with spare capacity being run by staff that had refused to take voluntary redundancy that summer.
It turned out OK – the unexpected first term geography field trip gave me some friends that I’d struggled to make between working and studying, and I particularly enjoyed a random Philosophy module being run by a man who made clear in the first lecture that if we purchased his text book there and then, we were pretty much guaranteed to pass the module. His “assistant” (a PhD student) duly wheeled in the books.
One particularly enjoyable lecture that I can just about remember without the aid of a camera phone or his acetate sheets concerned Theseus’s paradox – which questions whether an object that has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object. In the story, the ship of the mythical hero Theseus is preserved by replacing decayed planks with new, identical ones, leading to a debate about whether it is still the same ship.
