Maximum effort, minimum result

Most of us enter university expecting learning to be straightforward: studying, understanding, applying. But the times in which we can find a new point of view for our problems are never that straightforward, in fact they are neither straight nor forward at all. They happen when things stop making sense, in the chaotic mess that recognises reality’s complexity; maybe also in the dips of confidence, when methodologies need to be reassessed and modified. When things stop making sense, we might see what we were never taught to look for.

I realise that I was allowed so many more of these points in time – more than in any other project – during my graduation process which, in the Department of Architecture up until this academic year, lasted one full year.

I started in February and in this almost rounded up year I have had a research problem that became bigger every week, conversations that derailed my certainty, texts that refused to make sense, challenging feedback from my tutors, changes of methodology and a long visit to an abandoned building that smelled like a cold wet sock.

To continue after all these events always involved some confusion and took time. And universities, of all places, should protect the time it takes to sit amid that chaos.

What worries me is how the money that does exist is administered

And yet, universities are increasingly shaped by pressures that push them in the opposite direction. Budgets have shrunk, yes, but what worries me more is how the money that does exist is administered. There is no universe in which a smaller budget in a university institution should result in fewer opportunities for exploration, less teaching time, and more pressure for efficient outcomes. Thank God we have new printers. At least at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, this has become a strangely familiar pattern.

What makes this especially ironic is that the world outside universities already demands fast answers, efficient solutions, and productivity, so a world in which universities do the same or teach their students the same efficiency, will only result in the same ideas, products, and technologies. If students don’t have the time to get lost during their studies, then when are they supposed to learn how to think critically about the systems they will later work in? Who exactly will be allowed to imagine differently when the world desperately needs alternatives?

I think about this often when reflecting on my own graduation year. Somehow, I managed to squeeze in a period of genuine bewilderment, where I questioned my methods, assumptions, and occasionally my sanity. It was uncomfortable and confusing but absolutely essential, not only in leading the project along a completely new path but also in discovering and allowing sides of myself that I had not come close to before.

And I can’t shake the feeling that I got lucky and that I entered my final year just in time, before the institutional push toward efficiency would have politely escorted uncertainty out of the building.