The future

It's foolish to worry about the future. It doesn't exist.

But we can definitely think about how we'll deal with the present as it changes over the next few years. The most immediately pressing job was to get the new DACE programme out. If you're not one of the lucky people with a personal paper copy it's available, as always, on the website. All of us are really happy, first that it exists at all, but also that there are as always things in it we're excited about: novelties in teaching, unusual mixes of disciplines and so on. Maybe I'll mention one or two of my own here over the next couple of weeks. We're hoping for lots of enrolments!

In the longer term we'll be looking at a new future situated (at least administratively) in the centre of the University. We'll certainly be looking at new kinds of job. We'll have new challenges to meet (not least a financial one) but possibly new opportunities also.

In a time of change, a newly fluid situation, it's interesting to look at other organisations. Perhaps there will be new ideas for how we should look, or indeed confirmation that other universities find something like us useful. So today I was fascinated to look at the website of Cambridge University's Institute for Continuing Education. I found a unit similar to DACE with subject academics, active in their own disciplines, delivering a range of courses of various lengths, academically sound but widely accessible, lots of possibilities for mixing disciplines. This blog from their Director (a scientist, someone whose research papers I can understand) gives a nice example of this inter-disciplinarity - as well as reminding us that Cambridge has quite a heritage to draw on. Of course we have some heritage ourselves (as Dave Clark, for one, will show in his day school on Astronomy in Glasgow over the centuries).

The next few years will be interesting, that's for sure. We'll certainly be keeping core activities going but there will equally certainly be changes and it seems likely that some at least will be surprising. As we think about our own possible futures it's reassuring to know there are examples like Cambridge out there.