Being a professor living outside my home country, within a diversity of foreign cultures and backgrounds, and surrounded by students who – without hesitation – claim to be way younger than me, I wondered that maybe I should not live alone.
I did live alone for most of the COVID Year No. 1, 2020. In a lovely house in Windhoek, with six rooms, and a garden, and a pool, all to myself. My wife was, and still is, in Finland, as is most of my family and other people that I love.
Being a professor, reading and writing alone as a hermit, was not bad at all. I even managed to write, by online collaboration with my PhD student Ant Cooper, a book on Digital Theology, in this inspiring milieu, no one disturbing or intervening. What could have been, or be, a better place for an academic?
But it is not only that my students need to grow towards what their future would expect from them, but I also have to grow, not only backward, referring to what my students would call prehistory (which is the time that I was their age), or down, but straight ahead and up.
Being a professor (which should by now be clear to all my readers), I started to rethink what a university ideally is. Isn’t it a learning community, a modern mix of home, monastery, college, Bauhaus, or, yes, an African homestead for an extended family where people share life in? A 24/7 Alma mater – a place for exploring and acting together.
So I started to get young(er!) people to live with me. I managed to book one room for myself, and the rest were taken by students. At the peak we were six altogether, the current head or mind count is four. My role is to encourage my minors to grow beyond their limits, get self-confidence, courage and – to some extent – skills, knowledge and wisdom.
Converting into a life-long learner, for me this academic live life is a priority beyond any expectation. The facts that Liesa, the house manager rather than a domestic worker, is taking care of the house, and Shilongo, the gardener is staying on the same premises and solving all the technical problems, and the further fact that all of us are waiting for my wife to join for her occasional stays, gives another momentum for our tiny pop-up university to prepare all its members for transforming our everyday surroundings, not only in the years to come but right now.
Maybe the future of universities is where it all started: people living with each other, building trust, understanding each other, listening more than talking (I am only at the preschool stage in this subject).
Becoming an academic nomad, I hear an invitation to realize the dream also as a mobile academia.
Learning with Namibians 