Legacy at Durham

By Avesta Afshari-Mehr

I think about legacy a little too much.

Maybe that is an odd thing to admit. Most students are busy thinking about deadlines, dissertations, nights out and what they are going to do when the three or four years of university finally come to an end. I have spent rather too much of mine thinking about what will remain when I do.

Because student life is strange. We arrive knowing almost nobody, inhabit the same few streets for a handful of years, and then, almost overnight, everyone scatters. The rooms are cleaned. The photographs disappear from noticeboards. New names appear on society committees. Another generation learns the shortcuts through campus, falls in love, falls out of love, complains about the library and wonders why the hills are so steep.

We all leave.

But for the past few years, I have tried to leave something behind. Sometimes that has a lasting, beneficial impact on the society around us. When racism and anti-Chinese prejudice became impossible to ignore, I helped campaign for change, including a petition that gathered more than 1,500 signatures. The year before, I campaigned to preserve the Bill Bryson Library’s opening hours during funding cuts, with more than 2,000 students signing a petition that helped secure the continuation of 24-hour access for years to come.

But for the past few years, I have tried to leave something behind

And then sometimes it has been considerably less serious: walking up to the Principal of Stephenson College and asking for a photo, while I was dressed up as Perry the Platypus; carrying 25 bananas around campus while dressed as a banana, in an attempt to convince people that Durham really did need a banana society.

Who, five years from now, will walk into the Bill Bryson Library at three in the morning and know that its lights being on are, in part, the consequence of students who once refused to accept that they should be switched off? Who will know that it took thousands of signatures and a total of 736 leaflets spread around campus (much to the frustration of the university cleaning staff) to enact such a change?

Who will remember the student societies we all poured evenings into, when there will be another committee, another president, another group of strangers sitting around the same table, less than a year later?

Who, five years from now, will walk into the Bill Bryson Library at three in the morning and know that its lights being on are, in part, the consequence of students who once refused to accept that they should be switched off?

Honestly? Probably nobody.

That is the uncomfortable truth about university legacy: we are remarkably easy to replace.

There will be another person in my room. Another name as President of the University Iranian Society (my child!). Another student campaigning about something they believe desperately needs changing. Another group laughing in the same bar where we once laughed. Durham will continue, largely indifferent to the fact that any of us were ever here.

And that is why legacy can feel so frightening. We all want permanence; want evidence that our years mattered; want some little plaque in the architecture of the future bearing our name. But universities are not monuments to the people who pass through them. They are living things. Every generation inherits them, changes them and hands them onwards.

We are remarkably easy to replace

So it’s likely we have misunderstood what it means to leave a legacy. The student who fought to keep the library open does not need the student studying at 3 AM in ten years’ time to know their name. They only need that student to have somewhere to go. The person who signed a petition against racism does not need their signature remembered. They only need someone who might otherwise have felt unwelcome to find that Durham is a little kinder than it once was. The ridiculous banana procession does not need to enter the history books (although I personally think it should). I guess it is enough that, for one afternoon, 25 bananas made strangers laugh.

I may well be forgotten. You probably will be too. Ten years from now, the vast majority of our community will not remember our names, our campaigns, our ridiculous costumes or the nights we thought would last forever.

And that sounds unbearably sad. But there is something beautiful about it, too. Because we do not have to be remembered for our lives to have mattered. One day, someone sitting in the library early in the morning, surrounded by books, may never know who fought for the privilege of being there. They may never know my name. And that should be okay.

For a brief moment, they will simply have a little more time to learn, to dream, to become whoever they are going to become.

Perhaps that is enough of a legacy; and the greatest thing we can leave Durham is not a memory of ourselves, but a place that is fractionally better for the people who come after us.

Image credit: Yiyang via Unsplash