Decolonising our Institutions - A Conversation with Prof. Jonathan Jansen

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

In the back of our minds was the question, how do you keep a radical idea alive? The short answer is with great difficulty, because institutions have been around for centuries, right? And they have found a way in which to temper, to neutralize radical ideas. They're very good at that as institutions.

Hi everyone, welcome back to this week's episode of the podcast. My name is Tim Logan and the podcast is brought to you in partnership with Notosh. What we choose to teach and how we choose to teach it, and in what kinds of institutions we teach and learn, are all crucial questions as we think about the future of education. It was fantastic to be able to speak to Professor Jonathan Jansen as we become more aware of the power structures and institutional biases built into the choices we make about about what we learn and what we teach our young people. Professor Janssen is a distinguished professor of education at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. He's currently the president of the South African Academy of Science and the Knight-Hennessey Fellow at Stanford University. You can find out more about Jonathan's work, his books, and his social media links in the show notes. Sanyam Bhutani: Excellent. Thank you, Jonathan. It's a great pleasure to meet you and be with you there in South Africa. And thank you very much for taking the time to be with us on the podcast. It's a real pleasure to meet and be able to talk. So what I'd love to start with perhaps is what particularly brought me to you and your work was your book, Decolonization of Knowledge. And so I'd really love to speak about that if we can. Also want to acknowledge, I understand your co-author, Professor Walter sadly passed away recently, so I just wanted to kind of acknowledge her legacy and her presence in this work as well. But there is, as I understand it, a lot of it stemmed from the events around 2015 and 2016 in South Africa in relation to the university protests and many calls for kind of decolonization in different ways. And that's part of what I'd love to talk about. But perhaps just to orient the listeners, you might be able to just give a little bit of a sense of what happened there. Why 2015? What, what was the kind of the catalyst that led to those events?

Yeah, that's a great question. Look, there was a lot happening in the world around that time, broadly concerned with issues of social justice. So before and after 2015, with South Africa's student uprising started, you know, there was an agitation around the world, especially among young people, about, you know, the state of education, the state of police violence, the state of, you know, Confederacy statues. And so people were— there was slowly but surely a momentum building up around discontent with the neoliberal state, in my view. And that expresses itself in the mid-2000s in South Africa, in 2015 in particular, around two converging movements. The one is a movement called the Rhodes Must Fall hashtag movement, in which students at one university in the south, that is the University of Cape Town, you know, wanted this very visible monument to one of the leaders of empire in the Cape, Cecil John Rhodes, to be brought down. But they made it very clear, this is simply a tangible, visible form of objection to a much deeper sense of the colonial project expressed in everything from curriculum to, you know, the appointment of whites, the institutional culture, et cetera, et cetera. So package of things that frustrated particularly the growing numbers of Black students at this historically white university called UCT in the Cape Town. Shortly after that, there was a rival movement in the north of the country at a university called Wits University, or the University of the Witwatersrand. And there, the hashtag movement wasn't sort of decolonization, it was #feesmustfall. In other words, the affordability of higher education became an issue. And then These two movements of students then begin to combine around the demand for a free, decolonized education. And that kept us vice-chancellors quite busy at the time, you know, for months on end. Classes were disrupted, university functions obviously went online where that was possible, and a lot of people got hurt., you know, in the process. So I think shortly after that George Floyd happened in the United States, the murder of George Floyd by policemen, and then this thing becomes really visible in the UK, for example, around, you know, the statue of the slave trade in Bristol. Yeah, that's true, exactly. And then for the first time in Belgium, you know, people were sort of demanding that Leopold II's statues come down in Antwerp and other places and so on. So, and then you might recall that at Oxford University itself, you know, there debates about Rhodes' statue, whether it should remain in place. So yeah, so I think South Africa was sort of both a leader in those protest movements as they spread around the world, but also rode on the coattails, I think, of a generalized anger against power and against authority, not just of the state, but of this thing that we love called the universe.

Fascinating. And, and I mean, there's some deep questions in there, aren't there, that I'd love to get into just in terms of like, for example, even those institutional structures being themselves implicated in the colonial project in some ways, but just, I'm just interested, where do you feel the understandings of what this kind of idea of a decolonized university, where were those coming from in the young people themselves and, and also potentially in the faculty? But I suppose part of my question is also thinking about what does that mean to people, right? What is the idea of a decolonized curriculum or decolonized university actually mean? Because clearly, it's not just about taking down statues. There's something much deeper in terms of the work involved and the understandings involved.

Yeah, no, I think that's correct. Um, but one of the things that I think drove or animated much of the student protest around the first set of issues, which is decolonize institutions, was the feeling of alienation. So you imagine here's a growing number of Black students, not yet at the time the majority, coming onto historically white campus and feeling quite alienated from the place. What they see is white professors. What they hear is the English language. What they read is texts which, in their view, you know, lean towards European constructions of knowledge, etc., etc. And so there is this question among many of them, but wait a minute, it's been 20 or whatever number of years since the end of legalized apartheid. Why are we still feeling so out of place, you know, within this kind of institution? And I think that's where it came from at a very localized level. And then of course the debate spun much broadly to, you know, how knowledge is constructed in these universities. You know, shouldn't we have— and these are debates, as you know, from the '60s and '70s— shouldn't we have an Afrocentric curriculum rather than a Eurocentric curriculum? In this part of the world, etc. Now, I, as you can imagine, in our books on this subject, we were a little bit more critical of those simplistic constructions of knowledge and power. But nonetheless, the students had some very real issues there about content, what are we being taught, agency, who is teaching us, location or place, as they say in this literature, where is this happening, how on earth is it happening. In an African context when its predominant form appears to be European and North American and so on and so forth. And so that lay behind a lot of the anguish, the anger, and the alienation.

Yeah, no, interesting. I mean, yeah, that makes a lot of sense in terms of just that, as you say, that kind of visceral response to seeing the visible power structures almost of the colonial project very visibly in front of people as they're coming into the university. Do you feel, and I know this is something you've written a lot about, that the structure itself, in a way, the, the university kind of institutional concept has been exported, imported with the colonial project kind of wrapped around it? So do you feel that, I suppose there's a question there around, is it possible to fully decolonize an institution like a university with all those kinds of all that heritage from the colonial project? You know, so is it about the content, as you say, and the faculty, or is there something in the kind of, in the very epistemological structures of the university, of the institution itself?

Yeah, you know, it's a fact, of course, that our institutions are products of colony, products of colonial. I believe that in and of itself is the dilemma. You know, our churches, for the most part, except for the African traditional churches, indigenous churches, are products of, you know, the European imagination. That's true for our museums, that is true for our parliament, that is true for the judiciary in a place like Zimbabwe, where in a country that claims to be socialist, which of course it never was, you have judges coming in with these wigs, you know. So, no, that isn't debatable.

Yeah, exactly.

Our institutions, including our universities, are products of the colonial imagination, and indeed in some cases of colonial rule itself. I don't know if that in and of itself therefore dismisses the concept of university. It doesn't, because for me, in many ways, remember, the first universities were not established in Europe at all. You know, they were established in parts of the Middle East, uh, and so on and so forth. So the concept of university isn't uniquely a Western concept, but we are products of colonial rule, in South Africa's case of settler colonial rule, and the more classical model in Mozambique and Tanzania and other places. So, that's indisputable. What I think gets missed in the protests is then to reduce every existence within these universities, South Africa's 26 public universities, as simply a reflex of colonial rule. I think that's nonsense. You know, if you look at most South African curricula today, you would be surprised to find how much of the content is actually derived from the African context, speaks to the African condition. I just taught at 8 AM this morning, I can be hard-pressed to find anything there that could be described as colonial because I link thinking, I link curriculum theory very much to what emerges from the African condition. Now, I understand politics, of course, having been a student activist myself. You exaggerate, like you. You want to make your point known, I get it. But you also have to be intellectually honest in those kinds of movements and sort of say, you go to university like UCT in particular, its entire archaeology and architecture curriculum is African in every sense of the word. Having said that, I don't believe you can in the 21st century cloister yourself or cut yourself off because knowledge doesn't respect borders, right? Knowledge—

Yeah.

Where its very production happens within the context of collaboration. Within— that's as true in Europe and the OECD as it is true in Africa and SADC in this region. But take something like as powerful— and we've written a book about this, by the way, that just came out— take something like COVID-19. You'd be really foolish if you think that a virus and discovery with respect to viruses happens only within Europe. And North America. It's just nonsense. In fact, South Africa discovered the Omicron variant, just to give an example, here and in Botswana. It caused such a furore in the world because, you know, Africa is the departure point for disease, for ignorance, for poverty, not for discovery, right? And they were so shocked in the West when this happened that they banned us from flying out of South Africa, not understanding that that virus was probably somewhere else in the world, as it turned out to have been. Yeah, think of the heart transplant, think of advances in stroke medication, think of the SKA, the Square Kilometer Array, and the discovery of new galaxies and so on. That comes out of Africa, you know what I'm saying? So the students, of course, drew this picture of a very powerful West, right, that does research in Africa. Let me just use this continent as an example. They reduce people like me and everybody to research assistants to professors and scientists from the West. Who then go and publish the work from Africa in their own journals or something. That's just bullshit, you know, let me just tell you. It's an insult actually to African ingenuity, to African agency, to the African imagination. So one of the reasons we wrote the book is to both acknowledge the inequality in terms of resources and production of knowledge, that's not disputable either, but also not to reduce yourself as an African, someone without agency, someone without authority, somebody without the ability to lead and produce research. And so, as you know, for many of us it was about saying two things at the same time: the world of knowledge production is unequal on the face of it, but that's not the whole story.

No, I hear you in the sense that inadvertently by describing the inequality, you, there is a trap there to kind of perpetuate the idea that that is the case.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. But it's in one of the things I really appreciated about your Decolonizing Knowledge book was the idea that a radical, almost like a virus, like a radical idea. How does it continue to stay alive through an institution like the university? Because I think in a way, very kind of like death by a thousand cuts, the kind of bureaucratic processes within the institution. For example, if you take the idea of a curriculum, you know, all the different people involved in writing the curriculum and then checking it, or, you know, implementing it in, in all sorts of ways. There's so many places at which what starts out as quite a radical idea can end up becoming watered down or kind of stripped back into a very generic and almost co-opted back into the institutional kind of idea. So I guess one of the things I'm interested in is the idea of a decolonised curriculum or decolonising knowledge. It somehow feels like an alive process that has to stay alive despite all that kind of potential pitfalls of the bureaucratic institution in which it is housed.

Yeah, and that was indeed one of the reasons we wrote the book was in the back of our minds was the question, how do you keep a radical idea alive? The short answer is with great difficulty, because institutions have been around for centuries, right? Universities have been around for a very long time, and they have found a way in which to temper, to neutralize radical ideas. They're very good at that as institutions. And as you know, in our book, we actually showed how that happens in very systematic ways. And it's not like there's somebody sitting somewhere high up in the ivory tower and saying, let's see how we can outflank these kids. I don't think it's that. It's just in the nature of institutions to normalize things, to make sure that historical processes of administration, of bureaucracy, and so on continue to run according to the rules, right? I mean, that's what institutions do. So you'll see it now on university campuses across the world that just for students to organize a protest against the genocide in Gaza, There's all kinds of institutional rules about where and where you may not hold the seminar. Are you nuts? You know, it's also ridiculous from having been a university vice chancellor before. And yet those are relentless processes. Now, of course, in the nature of student protest, it happens and then it's done, right? And my fear was that the message around the decolonization would be lost if we as academics, for example, didn't keep it alive through seminars, through debates, through new curricula, through appointments of people who are outside of the box, so to speak, when it comes to the regnant ideology, the academic senates and so on and so forth, you know, is to keep it alive. And it turns out it's really hard to do that, but I already knew that. But secondly, you can keep it alive on the margins. It does mean you won't get centralized funding. It does mean that every now and again somebody will try to block an appointment. It does mean that you'll be put away in a small little you know, room with gender studies and African studies.

Yeah.

In a basement somewhere, if I may exaggerate, but you know what I mean?

I do.

And so I have colleagues right now doing a book on the margins, you know, about radical initiatives on the margins. They've got a lovely term for it. Yeah. So, you know, students graduate, they go and get most of them well-paid jobs and they forget what they started, you know, and I thought what they started was noble, was important, but we've got to figure out those of us who work in universities to keep those ideas A lot.

Yeah. And it, it's, I mean, in a way, just hearing you speak there, it's, it's tempting to just dismiss some of that process as just kind of bureaucratic process, but there are very clearly, very definitely power structures embedded in those processes.

Yeah.

Right. Which I think is just important to just kind of call out that it's not just, you know, it's not benign bureaucracy that we just, you know, we don't like doing paperwork and we don't, you know, it's, there's as a social technology, it's been built in a particular way that has power and bias built into it, right? As you say, in order to keep certain ideas marginal and to foreground and center certain ideas which are less confronting or, you know, or whatever it is.

No, I think that's absolutely correct, you know, and because it doesn't always have an address on the door, you know, you don't know where to fight, right? But it's relentless. Just think of the regulatory apparatus for approving a new curriculum. You'll be surprised at how a whole lot of people who don't even know about each other, right, in the university work together to make sure that it is very, very difficult for that radical idea to get approved. But again, there's no sort of, you know, demon sitting there in the Senate who's saying, let me, you know, figure that out to collapse, of course, yeah, a student movement. That's not how it works. This notion of self-preservation is built into the regulatory process, the rules, the rituals of the modern university. Yeah. And given their origins, what it then protects is the imperial model, you know, yeah, so the knowledge production and so on and so forth. And that is true. However, again, as I wrote in the book and subsequently in a book that we're just busy finishing up right now, we must also not make these things too easy. Understand or too easy to think we can overcome it, you know. And so part of our role, Cyril and I, in that book that you quoted was to reveal how power works. Yeah. So that from a strategic point of view, with the next round of protests and revolt and so on, you sort of know where to go, you know. In other words, you don't fight with the baasjars, that person has no power and no interest and so on. You go and say, what are the rules What are the strings that all gather down, you know, and begin to pick at the strings. That it is difficult and a long-term process, and you might never quite get there in terms of fullness, that I take for granted.

Yeah.

And I've done this over the years, you know. So, a simple thing like having a core curriculum in a university so that every student is exposed, regardless of their specialisation, around some basic issues of social justice, law, decency, etc. And I got it right when I was a Vice Chancellor at the university. I'm right now, I can't because I'm not a Vice Chancellor, but I've been supporting moves to do that.

Yeah.

And again, I don't think we're going to succeed on this one because they simply pull the budget. They'll tell you with a straight face, we like what you're doing, and then they pull the budget. Yeah. So that's how institutions work.

Yeah. And just, you know, for context, one of the reasons I'm particularly interested in this is I work in the K-12 education space globally, you know, with international education. And there's, there's a lot more conversation around decolonizing curriculum in, you know, K-12 schools, uh, particularly with the International Baccalaureate and how, as you say, it's not, you know, incredibly difficult process. There's a lot involved in it. But I think one of the things that struck me reading your book was that it is a process and you use that word as well. And, you know, almost meeting the bureaucratic process with this other process of something more kind of liberatory or, or decolonizing. Rather than talking about getting to a destination of having decolonised a curriculum, if you know what I mean. It felt about process much more than it did about getting to a destination where we just, we know we've finally reached a decolonised curriculum.

Yeah, no, it's very difficult, you know, and it's in the nature of universities, as you know. I mean, if you have 120 academic departments, there's no way in a place that prides itself on its relative autonomy, There is no way you can tell a professor in chemistry how to teach or what to teach. It's extremely difficult to do that. And therefore, as a Vice Chancellor, you know, you learn very quickly how little power you have. You know, you might have a sense of self-importance and all of that, but actually you have very little power when it comes to issues of knowledge and authority. And so what you can do, of course, is set a framework for how people should think about change. Is to introduce, as I said, where you do have power, like the core curriculum. But that assumes that you have a leadership in that institution. I don't mean one man or woman, a collective leadership where you make these academic policy decisions that is determined to drive the change. But I was very clear, you know this, where that kind of leadership personality exists.

Yeah, I can imagine.

Because remember, their primary concern is sustainability. So they think of university in financial terms. They would talk in those terms. They would, they would send academics out and say one-third of your salary must be generated through commercial connections or contract research and stuff. So, so those systems are really against a radical form of knowledge in the curriculum.

Yeah. And it, yeah, it came to mind actually earlier when you were talking about that, just the, the role of the market and the commercialization of education in that sense. Yeah. Because I think that it's not just about isolated bureaucratic institutions now, is it? It's, it's very definitely about how is this financially, economically sustainable and competitive and selling the product to the students and to the, you know, all of those dynamics that also work in other ways, but in, in kind of de-radicalizing ways.

Exactly.

Interesting. I wanted to ask you about language. Where you mentioned it earlier on, but It was one of the questions I wanted to ask you because it feels, you know, reading different authors about this and Mary Batisse talking about cognitive imperialism, the idea that language clearly is a very important way that we frame ideas and what we make possible to think and not think. What's the role there in that kind of decolonizing process of multiple languages or, you know, how does that kind of show up?

Yeah, you know, it's actually, we just talk about the South African dilemma here. In the first place. You know, you sound quite politically advanced and progressive if you say we should teach at universities in the African languages other than English and Afrikaans, and we should promote students based on things like writing their dissertations in Tsikasa or Tsizulu. You know, I get that. I get that at a very deep level, the affirmation of one's own identity. Through language and all of that. But I also have been on this planet for too long to think that this is going to actually change things at all, because your major languages in the world, as you know, English, and to some extent French. And I haven't been to a university in China where they don't speak English, or university as part of the language of, of reproduction of knowledge, of journal of teaching to student audiences that are increasingly international. And so I don't think in a place like South Africa that is going to— we've lost that debate a long time ago.

Okay.

In part because other institutions have normalized English as the mechanism of exchange. So if you go to a South African parliament, you don't hear Sesotho or Isizulu, what you hear, or even Afrikaans, France, what you hear is English. So for me, in a country like ours where children in school are doing badly in any language, even when you test them in their home language, they're doing badly, that suggests to me the problem is conceptual rather than understanding because of a different language. It's not. In South Africa, I've got good evidence that's not the case. So now you say to yourself, the kid's in school for 12 years and university for 3, 4, or 5 years. Do we have these debates that then further disadvantage them? Or do you say, let's make you all English competent as soon as possible so you can get a good job, you can travel around the world, you can, etc. So I'm a pragmatist when it comes to those kinds of things, but I recognize that politically, I can tell you this on a podcast, I'll be eaten alive in some places if I said that on a public platform because of this deep emotional investment in cultural goods like language. It turns out in a country where racial essentialism, you know, was our reality for 3 centuries, it doesn't always mean that because the person says they speak indigenous languages, they really mean an opening up of languages, right, for the full range of human potential. It very often means I as a Zulu want to speak my language as opposed to Yes.

Okay. Interesting.

That's good.

Yeah, that's fascinating. That's really fascinating because I mean, pragmatism was the word that came to mind as you were talking in terms of, you know, obviously there is a pragmatic stance of, you know, yes, English is the language of the world of business and academia, et cetera. But I want, and I totally hear you. I think that's really interesting point about the kind of almost oppositional identity holding, cultural identity holding. But at the same time, I still, I still wonder, like, for example, this morning I was listening to a lecture by the anthropologist Wade Davis about the ethnosphere and just, you know, we talk about the biosphere, losing the biodiversity, but we're also, we're losing the cultural diversity and language is obviously one of the key parts of that. And it just strikes me that there's also this kind of at the meta layer of the importance of deep cultural diversity, because otherwise we end up with a pragmatic English-based monoculture. And I worry about how the conceptual landscape is impacted by that. You know, what it is possible to think in English, I think is probably quite different to what it's possible to think in Zulu or, you know, for example, in more indigenous languages, which are more verb-based. For example, rather than noun-based. I don't know what you think about that. I just— those are the questions that I have around it.

Yeah, I hear those arguments a lot and I understand them, and to some extent I even accept them, you know, as a potential loss to our culture, our global culture. Yeah, but if you grew up in South Africa where, for example, Zulu-speaking men in Soweto would stop dark dark-looking brothers and sisters from other African countries. And the way they decide whether they're going to kill you is to ask you a question in Zulu, and God help you if you respond in English or in Swahili or something. It's the end of you. So I come out of a reality in which there has always been a very close connection between language and the sort of essential identity, you know, that I don't know how to do this what you're talking about when there's so much danger attached to language identity and culture on the one hand, but also where the middle classes have long abandoned that. I mean, the way to change this is to make sure that the Black middle classes like myself, right, I can speak two languages and that's about it, but the Black middle classes then engage each other, engage the, you know, the intellectual world through languages other than English, but they don't. Okay, because as I said again, there is so much to lose if you go that route. I mean, you're not going to get up in Washington, D.C. and make a major speech on your research in Zulu, right? You're just not going to do that. No, of course. Similarly, in South Africa, in a country with 11 languages outside of sign language and so on, English has become the sort of— you've seen us use this device in the book— a settled language.

Yes.

You know, with both its meanings, you know, this is the neutral language, so to speak, in which we don't have to fight about each other's languages. Let's just agree that all of us communicate. And that's why you'll see at the historically Afrikaans universities, the white Afrikaans universities, when they fought tooth and nail to keep Afrikaans as the medium of instruction, it was Black students who said, but we gave up our language so that we can have common language in English, and now you want to hold on to the only other official language that ever existed, which was the language that caused people to die in places like Soweto in the '70s and so on. So the politics of languages end up— it will probably play out differently in Canada, you know, when you're dealing with Quebec and other states. So it pretty much takes its direction, I think, from the history and the politics of languages in particular national contexts, you know, and, and that's what's, what's happening here. But you're absolutely correct. I mean, we've already lost indigenous languages of the Khoi and the San in some parts of, of Southern Africa just by not paying attention, you know, to the loss of languages. Now, at the moment, I also have to say, apart from the intellectual world, it is true that we have radio stations in almost every language in South Africa. It is true that we have pop concerts that cover all of the range of languages. And so it's not like the languages, the other languages are dead. It's just that in the public sphere, such as, as I said, the Parliament and in places like universities, there is almost an— let's get into this. We're struggling so much with backlogs even before COVID in learning and so on and so forth. Let's just at least get the kids to pass, to go to to get a degree, to get a job, and so on. So that's the pragmatic argument. So given that we all have limited energy, that is not a battle I want to take on with all the other battles that keep me busy.

Of course, you got to, yeah, you got to pick and choose. No, I hear you. I mean, it's deeply problematic, but very interesting. No. And could I just then ask you about the, you mentioned the no fee or reducing the fee kind of question. Is that this kind of economic question also that intersects with some of this? Because I think one of the things that struck me as I was reading was thinking about, you know, is there a certain amount of perhaps privilege even in being able to have the conversations about decolonizing curriculum? Because in some ways, as you say, the other protest is just basically about getting access to the education. We're not even talking about decolonizing, we're just talking about, because economically we just don't have access to that level of education. So let us in. 'let's talk about the fees and the economics of getting into the institution' rather than— I don't know whether you feel there's a kind of an interesting dynamic going on there and how that played out. How did the kind of different student protests interact almost?

That's a very good observation. So let me tell you why decolonisation only happened at some campuses, and Fees Must Fall mainly happened at other campuses. So decolonisation has a moment happened mainly on the historically white English university campuses. Yeah, because those universities were sort of emphatically colonial in its culture, in its professoriate, in its rituals, in its academic content. That was the perception. I think to a large extent that's true. It never happened at the historically Black universities, even though they too are products of colonialism. Right, yeah, colonial imagination. No university was set up here by an African It is a product that mimicked in many ways the white colonial universities, et cetera. So, but there the students had exactly as you say, a different set of concerns. How do I even get in?

Yeah.

You know, forget the curriculum. I just wanna get through the gates here and be able to afford coming to university so that I can get a degree and a good job and all of that stuff. And so it's not a surprise that much of the fees must fall element of the protest happened on Black university campuses where material need was much more immediate than the symbolic.

Yeah, no, it makes sense. I suppose if I could, just to finish, maybe one of the things that also was an interesting thing that came up for me was thinking about this intellectual process of decolonizing. So we leave aside the finances and the economics of it now, but back to the kind intellectual exercise of decolonizing curriculum, but also it just, it struck me that there's a kind of a, an emotional disorientation as well as an intellectual one in some of this work. Like in a way it's back to what we were talking about, about the kind of that process of meeting the bureaucratic process. But I don't know, there's something in there about how do people, human beings show up emotionally in relation to some, some of these dynamics of power and each other. And like, as you say, identity.

Opposition.

And there's this— I don't know, there's something there for me around what's the emotional dimension of this process of decolonizing.

You know, in a place like South Africa where people get emotional very quickly around whatever their cause might be, this was a moment that I think frayed the nerves for a whole lot of academic teachers, researchers. There's no question about that. But also on the part of the students. So, you know, some of them actually did a little bit of a study, I think, on the emotional impacts of that moment, 2015 to about 2018, on students as human beings, you know. And yet I don't know whether these things can be neatly separated, the emotional, intellectual. Of course, yeah, it's true, it's true. We are same beings, you know, etc. Yeah, and I think people eventually got so exhausted just from the, you know, protest and then feeding this huge thing called the institution pushing back without a face, you know, pushing back against any disruption of what is regarded as settled. And that takes its emotional toll.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I guess I suppose the reason I bring it up is the— I completely agree with you that those are inseparable, but I think sometimes there's a conversation about the bureaucracy and the institution and the Yeah. Things that feel a little bit more rigid and cold, but actually a lot of what this is is about emotional responses to injustice or, you know, deep kind of felt experiences that I think if we don't at least bring up to some extent explicitly, then we're missing part of what's actually happening in the dynamics of the swirl of the protest and all of the conversation.

Yeah, agree.

Well, thank you, Jonathan. It's, um, um, hey. I know you're busy and I really, really appreciate you taking the time to share. I think your work is— I really, really appreciate it and I'm very happy to be able to make more people aware of it. Thank you very much for sharing about it.

Thank you. And thank you for sharing our work more broadly. I appreciate it.

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