I’m currently reading “The Good University” by Professor Raewyn Connell. Like all books, they come to you just at the time you need them. For me, this book has been a good stock take on what universities stand for, how they have changed, and where to from here. Yesterday, I learned that the infamous jacaranda tree in the main quad at Sydney Uni died in 2016. (I somehow missed this piece of news, being in the thick of raising four children while working within the toxic expectations of academia that I was yet to learn would not be recognised or rewarded anyway). I put the book down to let the machinations of my nostalgic mind follow their wondrously non-linear train of thought.

In the book, it talks about how that tree was used in corporate imagery to create this illusion that students still sit under it and learn but that actually they weren’t allowed to do that anymore. I only just scraped in! That rule obviously came into effect after I left because I did run my tutorials under that jacaranda tree. It was where my ‘teaching with no shoes’ thing began. We all sat in a circle - true yarning style before I knew what that was - and shared our power. I still had more - I was the teacher, but our physical positioning and barefoot groundedness to the earth were important lubricants for what I believed education meant - truth-learning, truth-speaking, truth-sharing, truth-listening, truth-defying, truth-discomfort, truth-despising, truth-growing, truth-transforming, truth-embracing, truth-reconciling, truth-irreconciling, truth-sitting. I did these things implicitly, unconsciously, without thinking it through. When I was forced to stay in the classroom because I needed a TV, computer, whiteboard, or projector slide, I still did much of my teaching sitting down cross-legged. By Week 2, it wasn’t even a thing - students just knew I would take my shoes off before giving my lecture. I did this across 20 years.

Last year, I began giving keynotes barefoot too. It was then that my understanding of my behaviour grew further texture. As I was growing into myself, my voice, my place in the world, I began to see more clearly that it was not just about power and truth, it was also about resistance to how an academic should look and dress. In education, the words that come out of a person’s mouth will always be the most important thing. Not how they looked, not where they published, not the gothic architecture of the buildings around them. Higher ed has lost its way. It has a long journey ‘home’.