Never let a good crisis go to waste: an unfinished timeline of the university

This article is written by Gillian Russell and Frederick Lesage, co-directors of the Imaginative Methods Lab. The Imaginative Methods Lab is a methods incubator dedicated to the design, analysis and deployment of research methods for collaborative imagining, prototyping, and experiencing different understandings of the present. At our 2-day symposium, Reimagining the Public University in a Time of Polycrisis, they displayed Never let a good crisis go to waste: an unfinished timeline of the university, an art installation that is now on display at SFU Harbour Centre.

As part of Reimagining the Public University in a Time of Polycrisis: A National Dialogue, CERi invited a team from the Imaginative Methods Lab (IML) to design an interactive installation that would deepen participants’ engagement with the themes of the gathering and open space for creative, reflective inquiry.

The IML specializes in these sorts of interventions. It operates as a methods incubator dedicated to the design, analysis, and deployment of approaches for futures-making that enable collaborative imagining, prototyping, and experiential exploration of alternative understandings of the present. We work with individuals, communities, and organizations around the globe, to develop tools and practices that prompt people to question the worlds they inhabit, make visible the ideologies shaping their experiences, and cultivate the critical literacies needed for co-creating more just and sustainable futures.

For this particular project, we quickly settled on using the format of a timeline as a method for animating how the very concept of crisis has been historically embedded into the conceptual architecture of the university. Timelines are not neutral records of events but an active technology of world-making. In Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste: An Unfinished Timeline of the Canadian Public University, we use this technology to challenge the assumption that universities evolve through steady progress or periods of stability. Instead, the timeline foregrounds crisis as the defining condition of the institution. Economic downturns, political upheavals, technological disruptions, and cultural shifts are not interruptions to an otherwise stable system, they are the very mechanisms through which the university is continuously remade. By arranging these crises not as isolated events but as overlapping and recurring forces, the timeline resists a simple linear narrative of “problem then solution,” and instead reveals a cyclical and contested process of institutional transformation.

Bringing together six typologies—crises of knowledge, massification, marketization, restitution, geopolitics, and technology—the timeline constructs a layered account of how the Canadian public university has been shaped by competing pressures and values.

By placing these overlapping crises at the center of our definition, we show that: 1) changes in geopolitics have repeatedly forced the university to renegotiate its role in relation to the world, revealing its deep entanglement with power, conflict, and responsibility; 2) enduring tensions over what constitutes legitimate knowledge—practical or theoretical, political or neutral—have driven both the expansion and destabilization of academic inquiry; 3) the massification of higher education has expanded access while producing new inequalities, prompting ongoing reflection on who the university serves and why; 4) moments of restitution and accountability expose the gap between institutional values and lived realities, compelling the university to confront its own complicity in injustice; 5) pressures of marketization and technological change continually redefine the conditions under which knowledge is produced, valued, and disseminated.

Our approach demonstrates that what the university “is” at any given moment reflects what it has been forced to respond to and prioritize. For instance, the expansion of access (massification) redefines who the university serves, while marketization reframes education in terms of economic value. These shifts are not merely historical markers; they actively reshape the boundaries, purposes, and publics of the institution. In this sense, the timeline becomes a tool for making visible the contingent and political nature of the university, rather than presenting it as a fixed or inevitable form.

Importantly, the timeline is deliberately unfinished. This openness invites people to participate and speculate, asking them to engage with crisis not only as something to be analyzed but as something to be worked through imaginatively. By selecting and combining different crisis typologies, we encourage participants to envision alternative futures for the university—ones that might emerge from, rather than despite, crisis. This participatory element underscores a key premise: that redefining an institution requires rethinking the social worlds that sustain it. The unfinished timeline therefore operates not only as a historical account but as a collective exercise in possibility, where crisis becomes an opportunity to reimagine what the Canadian public university could be.

The installation is currently open to the general public at the main entrance of SFU’s Harbour Centre Campus in downtown Vancouver.