The Weight of Water

October 26, 2023

The rain hasn’t stopped for three days. Not the dramatic, cathartic kind, but a persistent, whispering drizzle that seeps into everything. It mirrors the mood on campus, a damp heaviness that has little to do with the weather. I found myself today, coffee in hand, staring at the old administrative building—the one with the ivy-covered walls and the “.org” domain that has represented this institution for nearly a decade. It looks solid, trustworthy. But I’ve been thinking a lot about trust lately, about how it’s built over years and how it can be eroded, not by a single flood, but by a constant, dripping leak.

My research hit a wall this afternoon. The university’s digital library portal, a resource I’ve relied on for years, was sluggish, unresponsive. A fellow PhD student, Suniti, joked grimly that it felt like we were trying to drink from a firehose of data, but someone had kinked the hose. The problem, it turns out, wasn’t our connection but something about the backend infrastructure. IT sent a vague email citing “legacy system maintenance.” It’s a small thing, an inconvenience. But in an environment built on the free flow of knowledge, any obstruction feels significant. It’s a tiny crack in the foundation of academic trust. We pay tuition, we invest years of our lives here, trusting that the institution’s systems—both physical and digital—will support our pursuit of learning. When they falter, even briefly, it prompts a quiet, internal reassessment.

Later, in a seminar on higher education policy in India, the conversation turned to institutional reputation. The professor spoke about “aged domains” and “organic backlinks” not as web metrics, but as metaphors for academic credibility. A university is like a domain with a long, clean history. Every published paper, every graduated student, every successful research grant is a backlink, a vote of confidence from the wider world. A spam-free record, built over 9, 10, 50 years. But this reputation isn’t a static monument; it’s a pool that needs constant care. One contaminated source—a scandal in research, a failure in governance, a chronic neglect of student needs—can slowly poison the whole pool. The impact isn’t just on the administration’s balance sheet. It cascades down. Prospective students lose a viable option. Current students like me wonder about the value of our future degrees. Faculty face dwindling resources. The community loses a center of research and thought.

I walked back to my apartment through the mist, past students huddled under umbrellas. The rain had created a large puddle by the gate, and everyone was navigating carefully around it. It struck me that this is what impact assessment really is: observing how everyone adjusts their path to avoid a problem they didn’t create. The university’s challenges—budgetary, structural, ethical—are that puddle. The administration walks around it with strategic plans. The faculty skips over it with increased personal effort. We students get our feet wet, hoping our socks will dry before the next day’s lectures. The consequence for all parties is a shared, unspoken expenditure of extra energy, a slight but constant drag on the mission we’re all supposedly here for: education.

Today's Reflection

Neutral observation is harder than it seems. To look at an institution you are a part of and simply trace the effects of its currents, like water finding its level. The “water type” isn’t about a single storm; it’s about the pressure in the pipes, the quality of the reservoir, the slow drip of a leaky faucet that everyone hears but no one immediately fixes. The true measure of this place won’t be in its promotional brochures, but in how it maintains the flow—of knowledge, of resources, of trust—against the constant, quiet pressure of time and expectation. Tomorrow, I hope the sun comes out. But more than that, I hope the systems hold, the paths clear, and the pool remains clean. For all our sakes.