Why I Like Our Logo

Most universities with two or three letter abbreviations on their official logos use capital letters. We used to, too, until about five years ago, when we swapped to a logo that uses small letters. I like the new logo better than the old logo. The main reason is historical. Those Roman capitals look very bold and impressive and lots of universities use them. They are used in pretty much all the languages of western Europe. Why? Well, the Romans had a lot of good qualities, but basically, it comes down to violence. The Romans went around conquering people, so that if they wanted to get ahead in life they had to learn their language and write it their way. Behind fonts like ‘Times New Roman’ and ‘Trajan Pro’ there are treacheries and massacres and cities plowed and salted and the ghosts of a hundred lost languages that never got to be written down. The memoirs of victorious generals and the triumphal inscriptions on monuments and the death warrants of uncounted multitudes were written in letters very like those.

Now, the letters our new logo is written in remind me very much of the first lowercase scripts. Letters that were invented in the ‘Dark Ages’ by people concerned with preserving knowledge. Behind them I feel the presence of millions who lived and died in a tradition of scholarship, of self-sacrifice, of hospitality, and keeping out of the way of the barbarian hordes. They are entirely appropriate for the logo of a university, as the sort of letters used by the people who established the first universities.

Then there is a modern reason to prefer small letters: in common discourse today, capital letters are RUDE. They are IN YOUR FACE and commonly indicate that THE USER IS AN IDIOT. So in general, small letters are more fitting for humble scholars.

And our new logo makes us much less likely to be confused with other places.

And I like the colour. It reinforces, whether it was meant to do so or not, the vision of the university as a place preserving learning against an age of darkness, with that fine monkish gaelic green surrounded by black.

Divestment Speech

I wanted to speak against the fossil fuel divestment motion at the meeting of the NTEU (National Tertiary Education Union) in September 2015, but was unable to attend the meeting due to sickness in the family. To assuage my conscience, I wrote up a little speech saying what I wanted to say and sent it to the local branch organiser. But I thought I would go one step further and post it here. So here goes:
 

Around the world there are over a billion people without access to electricity. These people disproportionately die of avoidable respiratory conditions caused by smoky cooking fires. They disproportionately die of water-borne diseases because they cannot boil water as readily as we can. Of food-borne diseases because they cannot store their food as safely as we can. Of every sort of communicable disease, because vaccines cannot be stored as easily without electricity.  They do not have the access to communication and education that we do - the access that we know is the single greatest factor for the empowerment of women and improved opportunities to be anything other than subsistence farmers.

 

These people are our equals. We have a moral duty to work towards a world where they have what we have. Their governments have this same moral duty. All over the world, governments are seeking to improve their citizens’ access to electricity. They are seeking to do this as economically as possible. In the real world, this still overwhelmingly means by generating electricity using fossil fuels.  Coal is still the most economical way to provide electricity. Providing electricity in a more expensive way means less of it is provided. If less electricity is provided, more people die, and more people live without access to educational and economic opportunities.

Globally, the majority of fossil fuel is produced by the private sector, rather than the public sector. This is because they are doing it efficiently. Producing fossil fuel efficiently means electricity can be provided more cheaply and fewer people die. Yes, there is significant environmental degradation associated with extraction of fossil fuels. Yes, there is exploitation of workers and their exposure to unsafe conditions. Governments have a role in ensuring companies behave themselves. The Media has a role in ensuring companies behave themselves. And, historically, shareholders have a significant and disproportionate role in ensuring companies behave themselves.

 

These people without electricity are reliant on burning locally-sourced biomass for cooking and heating and as such contribute disproportionately to deforestation and land-degradation. Two-hundred years ago New England in North America was almost entirely deforested. Fifty years ago South Korea was almost entirely deforested. Both these places now have very extensive forest cover, despite large increases in population, because their populations are no longer reliant on locally sourced biomass. Yes, if we continue to burn fossil fuels, it is likely that many habitats will be degraded in a hundred years. But if we, through some evil miracle, stop the private sector from producing fossil fuels, it is certain that those habitats will not be there at all, because they will have been destroyed by people desperate for food and fuel.
 

I do not have any fear of this apocalyptic vision coming to pass, because it is vanishingly improbable that our divestment from fossil fuels will bring the private sector to its knees. Divestment is not a strategy for effecting global change. What it is, instead, is a futile sentimental gesture that can only diminish the environmental and social responsibility of fossil fuel producers, by reducing the influence of environmentally and socially investors on their boards.