You are asking me to imagine 2029. I am sorry. I can’t seem to get past 2019.
It is not a typo. It is a confession.
You asked me to think big, far and wide, all the way to 2029. I did. I let my mind travel as far as it could.
Then you invited me to sit with others who imagined similar futures. You asked us to walk back to 2026 and consider what we needed to do now, tomorrow, and the day after to get there.
We put our thinking caps on. We drew on our talents, experiences, successes and failures, wisdom, memories, and connections.
We put pens to paper, Sharpies to Post-its. Lines were drawn, connections forged, steps identified. Ideas became plans. Plans became pathways. Pathways became commitments.
I left excited, reenergized, rejuvenated.
Then the next day arrived.
I looked at my notes, our charts, our grand plan, our next steps.
It all seemed familiar. Doable. Not particularly daunting. A tweak here, an adjustment there. Nothing radical, transformative, or revolutionary. Just sensible, incremental improvements to the world as it is.
Suddenly, I realized I was no longer looking at the future. Or even the present.
I was looking at the past.
At what I could have done differently, had I known then what I know now. At missed opportunities and connections, untried ideas, battles I might have fought differently. At a world I knew, institutions I understood, people I had worked with, the norms I followed.
Perhaps it has something to do with who was in the room. And perhaps even more with who wasn’t.
It reminded me of a problem we have been grappling with in our faculty meetings for years.
How is it that thirty or so of us, brilliant and accomplished in our respective disciplines, cannot persuade even thirty students to enroll in our interdisciplinary degree programs?
Every year, we ask ourselves what we should do differently. And every year, we arrive at some version of what we already have. A little adjustment here. A rearrangement of words there. A newly packaged version of something familiar.
And when enrollment disappoints again, we wonder why students aren’t choosing what we have thoughtfully redesigned.
But the students whose aspirations, hopes, and concerns we aim to address aren’t in the room.
Perhaps the same is true of science’s future. We keep asking ourselves what it should look like, drawing on everything we know about the institutions we have built, the people we have worked with, and the policies we have pursued.
And perhaps, without realizing it, we keep imagining a better version of the past.
But this was not supposed to be about the past. Or even about now.
You are asking me to imagine 2029.
I am sorry.
I can’t seem to get past 2019.