The direction of time is a mystery we still don’t fully understand. In everyday life, we think it's easy to say what comes first and what follows. You're born first, and only later do you die. First comes a budget, then the annual report showing how well you stuck to that budget. Sometimes this is a bit more vague and we realise that the budget had to be adjusted due to unforeseen circumstances. According to the rules, you start with a strategy, and then move on to its implementation. In practice, however, the strategy is often invented afterwards, once the results are in. Causal relationships, then, don't always align neatly with the passage of time.
Besides linear time, there are also cycles, like the seasons, or periods of economic boom and recession. Periods of greater and lesser support for science and education also come and go. You can practically set your watch to the idea that better times will follow the current dip in higher education funding. Unfortunately, the short cycle of annual budgets and year-end reporting, with its rigid accountability, does not align with those longer rhythms.
Now that we're working on the faculty budget, we feel the pressure of time’s direction breathing down our necks. Meanwhile, elements that are normally neatly ordered in time, like budgeting, results, strategy, and policy, are all bleeding into each other. It’s a bit like the film Everything Everywhere All at Once, which Wikipedia categorises as an “absurdist action comedy and drama film.”
Three years ago, my first grandson, Mees, passed away just before he was born.
Sometimes, you wish you could turn back time.
