As I write, the unions representing the academic staff at University are involved in an industrial action over the new collective agreement. The problem seems to be that the financial package offered to academics by the employer is quite unacceptable.

I certainly won’t abuse this space to push for something in which I have a personal and direct interest. There are, however, two things I would say. First, I trust our students, and especially the groups that represent them, will understand that a devalued University ultimately means devalued degrees.

Second, it would be unfortunate for this turn of events to cast a shadow on what is among the more exciting times of year for us. The end of the academic year means exams and masses of paperwork, but it also brings with it the satisfaction of watching another group of young men and women beat the system.

Most of them manage to do so admirably well. One of the bits of nonsense that regularly comes up when people discuss students is that they don’t make them like they used to. The wisdom goes that in the past, students spent their time reading books and writing essays in impeccable English; nowadays they’re more interested in using the internet to cobble together coursework by numbers.

The value of that judgment is about zilch. It is, of course, true that every period has its own contradictions and difficulties. I happen to think, for example, that students today do too much part-time work, and that this threatens to spoil the University experience. Especially in the humanities, free time is as much part of it as attending lectures and sifting through notes.

Still, exam time reminds me just how far students can travel in three years. I had the pleasure to read and grade eight dissertations this year. The range of topics was impressive and I cannot think of a single student who did not give the task their full energies.

Our external examiner, a professor from Brighton, told us that meeting our students and discussing their dissertations with them had been the highlight of her trip. (This, by the way, is peer review, not a post-colonial hangover.) She didn’t just mean that many of them turned up for their viva-voce exams impeccably dressed and groomed. It was more that their scholarly passion matched their sartorial application.

My patch being the Faculty of Arts, a good chunk of the content of our student dissertations could be classified as useless, Grand Academy of Lagado territory even. For example, it is not immediately apparent how a study of the soundscape of festa might equip its author for a real career.

Only it did. The student in question went on to study at a top British university. I believe she also joined the Royal Navy for a while and did a million other things, to the extent that I couldn’t quite keep up with the news. The last time I heard from her she was busy celebrating the 4th of July in Washington DC. Career? The young lady has a good dozen of those spread out before her.

I’d scream the last paragraph out loud across the rooftops if I could. For two reasons. First, I’m fed up with people talking about how University is out of synch with the ‘world of work’ (‘id-dinja tax-xogħol’, cringe and then cringe some more). Second, there is no such thing as the world of work anyway – at least not in the way we usually mean it.

The worst thing that could happen to a university is for it to become an extension of the job market. That would reduce it to a technical college which also happens to grant degrees. And, since Mcast is doing such a splendid job on that front, it would also make University pretty much redundant as a separate institution with its own raison d’être.

Which is not to say that University shouldn’t also be a place where students gain specific and technical competences. I don’t just mean the obvious, as in learning how to do a dental filling or to calculate the strength of concrete required for a bridge. I mean also things like learning how to access and use archival materials, how to design a survey questionnaire, and how to make sense of Petrarch.

Only it is the mission of any worthy university to go beyond that. Put simply, the production of ‘useless’ knowledge is what gives a university its essence. Nor is it simply a matter of useful vs useless disciplines. The humanities are the usual suspects in the second category. Only every time I talk to a colleague from biology or even engineering, I realise that much of their work has no obvious application.

The worst thing that could happen to a university is for it to become an extension of the job market

That’s exactly as it should be, because the key to a productive university is for it to be creative with knowledge. Which also means we (I mean both academics and students) often end up working at the very edges of what is considered useful. Call it Lagado if you will.

This brings me to my second point. I said earlier that the ‘world of work’ does not exist. I should have said ‘pre-exist’, in the sense that the job market and job opportunities only exist inasmuch as people make them. The good news is that our graduates do not just go on to fill slots in a market. Rather, they have the freedom and hopefuly the creativity to create new ones.

Take what one might loosely call ‘culture’. Twenty years ago, most of the jobs in that field simply didn’t exist. It would have been mad, back then, to limit university courses to the ones that did. Thankfully the rector at the time had the good sense to unleash the madness and let a hundred new markets develop.

The result is that we have a film festival, a thriving art restoration sector, a group of highly competent people dreaming up ideas for Valletta 2018, and so on. We also have scores of people earning their living in those fields.

Every year around this time I get a procession of students fresh from their exams, asking for advice on the job opportunities they might have. I also daily meet people toying with the idea of joining our faculty, possibly in the new ‘flexible learning’ courses that are being offered for the first time.

When I happen to be in a bad mood I take them through the various options and explain how best to explore them. On a good day I tell them it’s up to them really, and proceed to talk about their latest reading.

mafalzon@hotmail.com