The Dog Ate My Homework: rewriting your dissertation 30 years later.

“I left my essay on the bus and don’t have a copy as I don’t have a computer and the LRC locked me out as I inadvertently threw up one day and forgot to clear up the mess and Ken O’Donoghue could be a real tyrant and they say he could be a real animal on the squash court and actually I don’t play squash which is why I think he threw me out of the LRC which meant I couldn’t finish the assignment even if I wanted to and then the dog ate my homework.  So can I have an extension please?”

The reasons LIPA students offered for not handing in their assignments were magnificent.  They were as wild and diverse as the student body itself and probably haven’t changed from the days when John Lennon was a whining schoolboy, with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like snail unwillingly to school.  We did sometimes wonder in LIPA’s early days whether Lennon would have made the audition cut and found himself as a first-year music student; or whether he would have been too arsey for his own good and been redirected to sort his attitude out and apply again next year when he had some more significant achievements under his belt.  The Quarrymen?  Never heard of them.

The kind of assignments we set had titles like:

1.     Community Arts developed for the convenience of funders  rather than artists or communities.  Discuss.

2.     It is hard to argue for community arts when post-war  practitioners cannot agree on a methodology.  Discuss.

3.     The defining quality of community artists and their companies is that they are interested in process rather than public presentation. Discuss.

4.     The new technologies will change nothing about Community Arts except its marketing strategies.  (Yep, you guessed it: discuss.)

And what is simultaneously alarming and comforting is that those spurs to analysis, thinking, reflecting and imagining are as pertinent today as they were back at the turn of the last century.   Funders still try and call the shots; community arts has reinvented itself several times over; ‘process over product!’ continues to haunt the corridors of co-production and youth voice practice and what were the new technologies then have now passed their sell by date by several years and are now cute artefacts in antique shops and retro gaming museums. 

So, if anyone wants to have a pop at rewriting their essay for 2025, then please feel free. We’ll grant you an extension for as long as you like.