Reflections through the mirror – enabling organisations to navigate the cadence of crisis and reset their equilibrium

Since 2024, I have been writing a series of essays entitled ‘The Mirror University’. These long-form research essays are deep reflections on the fabric and connective tissue of modern higher education practice and structure. The series interrogates the existential and epistemic challenges confronting contemporary higher education. My aim in writing the series has been to articulate some of the inherent tensions that are exerting pressure on institutions (as with any large social purpose-oriented organisations) as they navigate complexity, crisis and the management of realised or unrealisable expectations.

Drawing inspiration from the ‘Mirror Universe’ trope in Star Trek, I have used the ‘Mirror University’ as a speculative metaphor – a parallel institution that retains the structural, organisational, and cultural features of the traditional university but subverts its ethos in line with what I posit to be the best (utopian, perhaps) that a university should or could be. This construct is not a critique of any specific institution or managerial paradigm but rather a lens to examine the contradictions and crises embedded in the modern university’s identity and operations.

The central thesis of the first installment, The Cadence of Crisis, is that universities have become habituated to operating within a perpetual state of crisis. As a framing tool, I have used Reinhart Koselleck’s (1986) historical analysis of the term ‘crisis’. His work describes a crisis as a decisive moral juncture requiring resolution (life or death, salvation or damnation – all very prescient in a modern global crisis ecosystem). Koselleck argues that the term has since been diluted and generalised, and encompasses any moment of uncertainty or disruption, regardless of its moral or existential weight. I have interpolated these shifts in the nature of crisis into the modern higher education context, arguing that institutions have shifted from responding to crises to structurally embedding them into their operational cadence. Crisis is no longer an aberration but a normalised condition that drives decision-making, productivity, and strategic behaviour. In effect, universities have had to adapt their management stance to be more aligned with what Gordon Brown et al., (2023) have labelled permacrisis (a state clearly evident in 2025). I have labelled this embedding and sometimes ennobling of crisis as the cadence of crisis.

Crisis has become the norm state in higher education. We trigger our reactions to the next crisis before the immediate impacts of the last crisis has subsided and before staff and students have had time to recover and reflect on what they have collectively experienced. The cascading waves of crisis leave lasting scars on the people and the structures which weaken institutions for the next crisis. More importantly the idea of rolling crises diminishes the institutions capacity to be proactive change agents, enacted through driving the significant, existential understanding and skills uplift that is necessary to respond to the challenges that are facing us square in the face (sustainability, responsibility, equity, inclusivity, inequality etc).

There is an affective toll of working within a policy, political, managerial and regulatory system that simultaneously demands innovation and enforces conformity, that celebrates diversity while reproducing exclusionary practices, and that espouses social good while commodifying education. Working in an environment in constant crisis produces a form of existential fatigue; a sense of being caught between what the organisation claims to be and what it actually does. Whilst the essay focuses on higher education, I think there insights here for organisations in other sectors. There are ideological fractures that can occur as a crisis demands actions, behaviours and productivity beyond what might be considered normal and in timeframes and activities far exceeding the ways in which we worked before the crisis. 

To try and locate the impacts of these ideological fractures within an historical context, I reference A.R. Keppel’s 1942 address on the crisis facing Christian universities during World War II, which identified the existential threats to the academy’s moral and intellectual foundations.

For today in this chaotic world delirium in which we find ourselves, the educational institutions of our land…face responsibilities which are nothing short of baffling, most overwhelming, and seemingly paradoxical in their demands.

* The task of interpreting truth in a time when ingenious, vicious, poisonous propagandas – the world over pose in garments of truth.

* The task of teaching life when the prevalent world philosophy is seemingly a philosophy of death.

* The task of building a cooperative commonwealth of nations, when, as in no other time, the world’s peoples are torn asunder by suspicions and hatreds and atrocities. (Keppel 1942, p.80-81)

Keppel emphasised moral clarity, institutional responsibility, and the university’s role in safeguarding democratic values. His framing of crisis as a moment of profound responsibility and moral reckoning contrasts sharply with the sometimes opportunistic marketisation of crisis management, where leaders enable safe harbours of stability for precarious and frightened staff, through the assurances afforded by investments of security, time and resources. Keppel viewed crisis not merely as disruption but as a decisive moment demanding ethical leadership and transformative action. He used the notion of life-building, not ship-building to describe the need for education to offer capabilities that extended beyond the narrow confines of critical skills relevant to the crisis, but into the processes necessary to recover, rebuild and reimagine after the crisis has subsided.

In 2025, we face a different cadence of crisis: continuous, normalised, and often instrumentalised unwittingly. Rather than catalysing moral reckoning, crisis today is frequently absorbed into strategic planning, risk management, and performative innovation. Keppel’s call for principled and resonant responses to crisis contrasts sharply with the crisis fatigue and strategic whiplash that we are all feeling. Keppel reminds us that crisis should not be a permanent operating condition, but a moment to realign with foundational values and societal purpose (a case also made by Brown et al.)

I end the essay with a call to reimagine our relationship to crisis. Rather than accepting crisis as a permanent condition or using it as an instrument or context for incremental change, I advocate for a deliberate disruption of the cadence of crisis, however persuasive, addictive, pervasive or habitual it might feel or become. This involves reclaiming our aspirational identity—not as a nostalgic return to a mythical past, but as a forward-looking commitment to values-driven transformation. The essay is a positivist call to arms for Business Schools, for universities and for any socially response organisations to decouple themselves from the opium of crisis stances and crisis inculcation, and find transformative, human-centred cadences to redefine strategic action, pedagogical change and student engagement and co-design.  

Read more: The Mirror University I – The Cadence of Crisis by Professor Peter Bryant