When you are in love, the name, face and stature of your loved one looms up everywhere - in the rustling leaves on the trees, in the sunbeams on your skin, in the clouds blowing by, the people you see walking, the stairs you climb, the posters on notice boards..., everywhere. That's how it feels to me right now, almost like I'm in love with the approaching goodbye. In every nook and cranny, I am constantly reminded that I will soon retire and lose my job forever.
Someone recently wished me "a nice collection of 'last time' experiences". Whether it was meant as consolation, so at the approaching end, I don't know, but I do know that this column can be added to that collection. For it is my last, as Academic Leader of the Radboud TLC.
Leader, well. Leadership, someone told me, is making sure it continues when you get out yourself. That must certainly be true in my case because there will be no new Academic Leader. The structure and administrative embedding of the TLC are going to change, and if that all works out well then the TLC will indeed continue - better and faster and with more impact. Indeed, there is now a solid organisation in place, and in my terms, that means above all that there are a lot of committed people who share the same values and who are eager and passionate about promoting those values. And for each other. Because the TLC is above all a learning community with a strong team spirit. Just read the magazine Insight, which we published in honour of our first anniversary.
Is there another message I'd like to take away from separating the market? Yes, always also see educational innovation as a radical, fundamental task that is not just about improving a course or test here or there. Always also see all those small improvements in the light of the dramatic transformation of our education that everyone is yearning for. Always also see teacher development as an encouragement to dare to think big. Realise that our new educational vision is an appeal to us all to restore academic freedom, that necessary educational space for students as well as lecturers. Because in every discipline and especially between all those disciplines, there are gigantic practical-intellectual, eco-social challenges for all of us.
Therefore, let us please stop thinking that science is a top sport in which it is all about competition and strengthening the knowledge economy. The economy as we know it has had its day. It's the ecology, stupid! It's about the future of humanity on earth. Take another look at Radboud University's latest major corporate communication: the future needs you. We therefore need the courage to free ourselves from the yoke with which New Public Management has saddled us. It is not about returns, not about degrees, not about more publications. It is about having the time and space to reflect together on what our lives are really about.
I am not saying this as an old man at the end of his career wondering what he has been so terribly worried about all this time anyway. I say this from the fantastic and undoubtedly enviable perspective I have on the third phase of my life. I am finally, finally getting all the time I need for learning and development again. I am now really getting the free time that the ancient Greeks called 'σχόλη' (school).
All the best to you!