Measuring Nostalgia

One of my more precious research interests is nostalgia.  It’s precious because it grows out of some very personal areas of my own life and because it is a core concept in one of my research interests, postcolonial theory.

At its most fundamental level nostalgia is based on the loss of home—either real or perceived.  In postcolonial terms nostalgia could refer to a longing for an amputated past or to the nightmare experience of a missing history. In this sense, nostalgia is very much akin to either mourning or psychosis. The object of nostalgia, like a real lost (or phantom) limb exists in the past whilst the longing for it exists in the present.  The question, of course, is this: is the nostalgia directed toward something real in the past that is genuinely lost? Or is it directed to something that has been unconsciously created in the present and then projected backward into the past?  Not exactly a myth, this desire is for a created narrative, a story that fulfills some kind of psychic need for painful remembrance.  As it were, a present “re-membering” of what is now perceived as a “dis-membered” time.

I’ve been thinking a lot about nostalgia lately as the planning committee begins its task of discussing with colleagues where we want to go in the next Academic Plan.  So far I have been struck by a deep nostalgia for the “old Trent”.  There is a real, substantive longing for a time of community, of belonging, a time when profs and students knew each other’s  names and people took the time to listen to their students and to each other; a time of respectful debate and intellectual rigour.  A time of engagement.  Sadly, many colleagues see this scene as a time long gone, a sepia tinted photo of a time long ago, a lost time to be mourned.

I don’t suggest that this nostalgia is misplaced or that this image of old Trent is a delusion. On the contrary, given that nostalgia can also be a longing desire to re-construct and re-vision the present, I do wonder to what extent our Trent nostalgia provides us with a very clear, unambiguous lesson as to what we need to be most about in our planning. 

Quite simply, our colleagues long for a sense of academic community where everyone belongs; where everyone is present; where respectful dialogue is the order of the day, and where our collective time is filled, not by the relentless pursuit of brownie points, but by a tempered and sober discourse of teaching and learning.  Perhaps our nostalgia is for a time before (or after) competition, a time characterized by collaboration and cooperation.  This desire points directly to the need for an engaged citizenry, an academy dedicated to activism, development, internationalism, and community.

If this is true, then I wonder: do we need to consider our present environment by critically re-assessing the concrete metrics by which we measure and evaluate performance at Trent—metrics which inadvertently create fetishes of personal accomplishment over communal processes, acquisition over intellectual sharing and development?  I wonder to what extent these metrics have generated an enervating nostalgia which we must address in our new Academic Plan.

PS. Working title: Radical Sustainability [Sustainable Radicalism?]: An Academic/Activist Plan created only for Trent University.