From 2011-2014, as discussed in a post on the Liberal Arts College Discount Rate, I was a part of groups trying to define the relevance of the liberal arts and attempting to plan a liberal arts college.
But eventually what rattled around in my head was a quote from my graduate-school mentor Michel-Rolph Trouillot in Global Transformations:
The future as we knew it is now increasingly fractured into two new parts: a near-present that challenges our technical mastery, and an aftermath, out of real time, that our imagination has yet to seize. While the distance between now and tomorrow shortens, that between tomorrow and the long-term becomes increasingly inscrutable. Worse, the exigencies of this near-present now seem to reduce our grip on a long-term forever postponed. The content of that long-term is open to question. This temporality recalls the accelerated rhythms of finance capital but expands way beyond economic life. The need to adapt quickly to tomorrow’s exigencies, yet the inability to envision beyond them, is now part of the lived experience of an increasing number of human beings. (2003, 68; for related discussion see Fragmented Globality: Irony, Paradox, Uncertainty)
Academia should be a place furthest removed from these “accelerated rhythms of finance capital,” and yet, somewhat ironically, more and more college plans became obsolete before they were even deployed. Buffeted by the changing exigencies of a tomorrow that kept disrupting the now–one year too many students show up with too little money; the next year too few students show up but finances are healthy–the long-term and the medium-term could not be grasped while we wrestled with the already out-of-control present. Like a colleague said when I asked if classes were prepared: “Teaching is like stepping onto an already-moving treadmill.”
In fact on the same page, Trouillot wrote that “until recently political science, economics, and sociology basked in the glow of this mid-term [predictability] and related claims of control.” Putting political scientists, economists, and sociologists on the planning committees did not insure predictability, control, or even a mid-term of success.
And this is why, as in the previous post, I followed Tim Ingold’s Making
This is a matter not of predetermining the final forms of things and all the steps needed to get there, but of opening up a path and improvising a passage. To foresee, in this sense, is to see into the future, not to project a future state of affairs in the present; it is to look where you are going, not to fix an end point. Such foresight is about prophecy, not prediction. And it is precisely what enables practitioners to carry on. (2013, 69)
Foresight and prophecy are also all about vision. And here I turn to another favorite quote, from the famous semiotician* C.S. Peirce, as found in Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human
Certainly not a quote you’ll find in many strategic plans, but worth considering as an example of human foresight and vision as we imagine a shared future.