Friday, June 14

Irma worked from home today so I got up, had breakfast, and left like the kind of burglar that wears a stripey jumper and a black mask that conceals next to nothing.

I wore a shirt and proper trousers today for two reasons. The temperature had dropped in the last couple of days and, as yet, showed no signs of rising. The student graduation ceremony will take place this afternoon.

I had a very interesting conversation with Tomas who arrived soon after me. He showed me a copy of the Lonely Planet Guide to Micronations and explained about the NSK State in answer to a question about whether or not any micronations see themselves as social experiments in culture and democracy.

I opened up Amazon and bought myself a secondhand copy, which I arranged to get delivered to Sundö, since it will take two or three weeks to arrive.

I then sat down to think through yesterday’s news. Just before I left work I received an email that told me that the University of Helsinki had decided to accept me for a second doctorate. It told me that

The Doctoral Education Committee has, on June 11, 2019, granted you the right to pursue a doctoral degree at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki (Doctoral Programme in Social Sciences, Doctor of Social Sciences).

Your supervisors are Mats Bergman and Risto Kunelius, and your responsible teacher is Risto Kunelius.

The research area that I proposed involves cultural democracy in the face of Big Digital and their version of social media, and the use of Charles Sanders Peirce as a lens through which to view this. I will now need to spend some of the summer working out how I will approach this practically, given that my purpose in applying for the doctorate centred on bringing things together rather than creating extra work for myself.

At 12:30 I went to a meeting to launch Arcada’s proposal to establish a system of Principal Lecturer Emeritus, to enabled keen retirees to continue academic research.

At 14:00 the graduation ceremony begins and Jutta and I go onto the walkway to watch it. This year an unusually large amount of students will graduate, and we have an unusually large amount of online media students among them. We also seem to have a stranglehold on the stipends for outstanding performance.

I will return to my desk and email an acceptance for my doctoral place at the University of Helsinki. I will email everyone at Arcada about it because I want to.

The ceremony will take a long time and eventually, at about 16:15 we will go downstairs to toast the students, talk with their parents, and make ourselves available for conversation with anyone who fancies talking to us.

At 17:15 I will go back to my desk, post this, and leave. Irma and I will have heard nothing about the financing of our India project but we will decide that we don’t mind.

Time for the weekend!