It struck me that the old Department of Adult and Continuing Education (the DACE of this blog's title) was a similar collection, though not miniaturised and of university academics rather than exotic beasties: one astronomer, one zoologist, one historian, one literature specialist, one philosopher... It didn't travel around in the same way, although we did run courses across a very wide swathe of the West of Scotland. Like the miniscope we were not cherished by bureaucratic mentalities.
I really liked our DACE Carnival of Monsters and I believe it was very valuable, in a hundred different ways, to lots of people - possibly too diffuse and diverse a range of outcomes to survive now that Statistics has usurped Philosophy. For some decades it was the sort of cabinet that universities thought they should be constructing but that time has passed, for now anyway. I certainly became a rather rare sort of academic world monstrosity while working there; that time also has passed.
This blog was born in a time of change. The original intention was to keep the multi-disciplinary character of DACE alive virtually when it seemed it might otherwise be swallowed up in institutional restructuring. That didn't quite work out but I kept "sounding off about things that amuse me" anyway, Physics and Astronomy among them. However it's become dominated by my attempts to understand what happened to us and why, something I've given increasing amounts of thought to (possibly as the attempts at optimism and the notes of threat became more and more pronounced). Perhaps that will be the main focus from now: my developing thoughts on the value of adult education - no doubt a rediscovery of what clever people already understood some decades ago - and the particular perspective on universities and their purpose that results from that. For other stories, music, science, there's always Twitter. Maybe this will be a different but equally appropriate Memorial to the DACE Carnival of Monsters.
