Sold for scrap
The Generic University Experience
They are the shards that glint against the dun of all else.
A word, a digit, a turn of phrase that sparkles like another shard on another dunpile and together reveal a pattern that makes an image, that points to meaning.
We will give students an international experience for less, said generic Jennifer, the new mouthpiece for Generic Canadian University in Newfoundland and Labrador as she explained that the university will sell off the Harlow campus that’s been there since the 1950s.
I had an international experience when I was student, she offered the few people listening to the Toronto Broadcasting Corporation’s Townie Morning on Thursday, as if it mattered she’d had a gap year or took a semester traveling somewhere or other when Harlow was, like the generic university she generically manages, just a meaningless pile that she could and did generically swap out for something else and still think people would or could get the same “experience” differently from it. The different is never the same and an “international experience” is not what Harlow was all about ever anyways.
She said “experience” a lot in a few minutes.
It is a manager’s word. An American manager’s word. An American manager’s popular word that has slipped in everywhere it doesn’t belong because the person using it wants to sound like they have a clue.
A single word. A signal word. I am cool. With-it. Hip to the best because I know the right jargon to say. Not yesterday’s jargon but the new cute word. Skibidi rizz word. Code word. Used to be “strategic” that they yeeted everywhere. Now it’s “experience.”
Not lived experience, out of date now, the redundant phrase already since the only experience we may actually have must be one that a person had themselves, while alive. The unconscious and the dead do not have experience because, by definition, you need to be aware to experience anything. The value of experience is in the doing and how the doing changes the knowing. This experience, the way Generic Jennifer and all the other managers mean it, is stripped of awareness. Of doing. Of knowing. Of living.
There are people at NALCOR Health Management that are in charge of the “patient experience.” If their job is to make the patient experience better, then they suck at their job. Suck badly. Sick people who go to NALCOR Health Management to get better have a suckier experience now than before they hired people to manage the patient experience of dealing with an ever-growing bureaucracy that stands between the people who are sick and the people who actually care about giving them comfort. Bureaucracy kills and no where as often and with such impunity as at NALCOR Health Management. Three hundred plus we know of in one go and countless more since through blind arrogance and incompetence and no one responsible paid a price. That metastasizing mass of middling managers is the cause of the whole health problem in Newfoundland and Labrador.
“Experience” makes it sound like a hospital or a university is an amusement park or a cruise. They are neither. Treating universities as amusement parks and students as customers in quintessentially American. It is as American as the casual racism that comes along with those sorts of colonial ideas, including decolonisation and as in Murica, currently doing business as Moronia, the most racist and colonialist people at our amusement parkaversities are the ones reciting the signal skibidi rizz words anti-racism and anti-colonialism. It is all delulu.
Generic Jennifer talked about a lot of things, including how things she called units currently using the Harlow campus and other assets due for the seller’s block would survive. There was no talk of people. Her level of management, of awareness, of care, was unit. Generic. Not what they did or should do or could do.
Nor did Generic Jennifer tell us why the four properties would go. It was not about the paltry three million bucks in annual operating costs she talked about as a saving. It was about the big spurt of cash that would come from selling the assets off, especially the corner of a foreign field that was for a while Newfoundland. enough to get through another year maybe without having to sell off or shut down other buildings and re-arrange the units in them.
That one-time spurt buys time and nothing more, just like the Andrew Furey Experience spurted announcements for a hospital and a theatre and a sports dome thingy that, as it turned out, never existed but that did manage to buy land no one needed. Hospital theatre sports done that never would exist. Never will exist now that the Pea Seas currently running the place have blown away the foolishness. The Liberals wasted no time in complaining that the guv’mint crowd were getting rid of things that never existed. You cannot make up shit like that but that was the Andrew Furey Experience: shit they made up and still do.
Spurts are like that. There is nothing more. One and done. Onan and out. No substance. No value. No plan. No vision. No life. No soul. That is how the university got into the mess it is in, in the first place. Selling Harlow is like the fishery company with an international reputation, broken up by political petties and graspers among their political friends with all the most valuable things like the English subsidiary and brands and the American arm given away. Hope went with it then. Hope goes with it now.
Harlow was a reminder of when the university was Memorial. When experience was not a title but a thing people felt in their hearts and in their muscles and in their bones. Personal. Intimate. Real. To a time when the university started, full of a people’s hope and ambition for the future not just for themselves but for their homeland and the people who lived with and around them. The care of people for themselves and others, aware of the living ties between people across the ocean and across the harbour and across the street.
The university, once connected to the people and the place, and now unconnected to either. Disconnected from both.
Harlow had to go.
The last reminder of what was hoped and dreamed.
Last link to the past and through the past to a different future.
Now gone.
The rest of the former Memorial may well follow, before too long, off to the breaker’s yard and the memory hole.
