My institution is in process of drafting a Strategic Plan. There has been consultation thereon (and I use that precise kind of passive construction in the same way in which it appears in this plan, and in other institutional composition).

Being a naive, hopelessly hopeful, and possibly foolish sort of person I like to think that the institutional heart is in the right place, and that there is good will and a true desire for my favourite feminist anarchist c-words: consultation, consent, consensus, collaboration, and community. (For more on them and some sense of where they’re going, see posts tagged The Consent Project.)

The Plan is interesting as—amongst various things and diverse alarums—it includes potential for radical systemic change that could be revolutionary social justice (a.k.a., in The Plan’s thematic terms, inclusion) and for, in the proper full sense of the word, innovation. (For more on what that word means, fully, see this old post here.)

As a philologist I am, as apologetically but tediously ever, equal parts horrified and mesmerised by some of the uses and abuses of language; with several of them, I’ve simply circled them in red without further comment. The way in which the word “vision” is used is quite fascinating, and I need to think about it more.

A “visioning exercise” is, however, probably not intended in the sense that would be recognisable or meaningful to any visionary, speculative fictioneer, or intellectual-worker-cum-imaginative-artist.

More about The Plan and links: here.

O’Brien annotations are here, with apologies for the raw appalling handwriting: I first marked up the PDF in iBook, which then lost everything on p. 1-26. I had forgotten that iBook is a dread disaster. I don’t know why I didn’t just use GoodNotes (where I continued after the tragic loss) in the first place. Mea culpa, errare humanum est, stultorum eventus magister est (and if that’s not transformative experiential learning I don’t know what is).