Connie Gillies and Martin Compton

It was a privilege to offer reflections at Professor Cathy Elliott’s inaugural lecture, Rewilding the University recently. Her lecture was more than a celebration of an academic career: it was also a call to action. A provocation. A gentle but insistent reminder that education (and nature and the world!) does not need to look the way it does now. A packed lecture hall listened intently to Cathy’s arguments, ideas and jokes: it was a tough act to follow. Cathy said she hardly ever lectures but a skillful lecture is a thing of joy and is utterly compelling and we were lucky to witness one.  Here we share some reflections on Cathy’s ideas and how they have helped shape aspects of our own. 

Cathy made clear that rewilding is not a metaphor of neglect or abandonment, but of restoration, connection and flourishing. It recognises that overly managed systems, whether ecological or educational, can become depleted, homogenous and fragile. In both cases, monoculture and rigidity are warning signs: what Cathy referred to as ‘command and control’.  The invitation we heard was to value and support diversity, likewise in both nature  and education, to value what is often dismissed, and to allow for the possibility of unpredictable, unmeasurable growth.

This vision has shaped how we think about education and how we’ve each worked together with Cathy. Our own relationships, as a fellow academic (with similarly unconventional paths to current roles) and as a student (who had been disillusioned by educational experiences to the point of encountering Cathy’s course), and now as authors, as collaborators, is a component of the network that Connie has described as mycelial: Like subterranean fungal connections but nourishing ideas, allowing knowledge to travel, and making future growth possible. Like mycelium in forest ecosystems, these relationships and ideas remain largely invisible to the untrained eye, but they are foundational. They remind us that learning does not happen in isolation, but in intricate, collaborative webs.

When students sign up for Cathy’s Politics of Nature class, they often don’t fully grasp the lasting impact it will have on them. A friend once told Connie, “A Cathy Elliott module will change your life,” and while the statement may seem grand, it’s not far from the truth. For many, this course didn’t just teach content; it reshaped our approach to thinking, learning, and even our careers. Cathy’s teaching blends critical rigor with intellectual play, making the class a rare space where students can be both creatively curious and academically rigorous. Most importantly, she empowers students to discover their unique intellectual passions, encouraging them to contribute perspectives no one else could, simply because they aren’t anyone else.

Education, when rewilded, becomes an ecosystem. A space where mutual dependence is generative. A space where difference is not simply tolerated but required. It is through this lens that we’ve come to understand projects like ungrading, student co-authorship, and the politics of belonging, not as reforms, but as regenerative acts. These are not surface-level interventions, but shifts in the soil.

One of the most notable aspects of Cathy’s work is her broad intellectual curiosity. She’s not confined to any one field of study — from politics and nature to democracy, development, gender, race, disability and sexuality, Cathy’s academic interests are as diverse as they are profound. In an academic world that often pushes students toward ever-narrower specialization, Cathy’s approach encourages students to break free from this limitation.

Cathy’s teaching has long enacted this ethos. She nurtures students not through control but through trust. Her pedagogy invites learners to bring their whole selves, to make connections across disciplinary and personal boundaries, and to treat knowledge as something to be inhabited, not merely acquired. She encourages risk, slowness, reflection, and relationality which are qualities too often sidelined in institutional discourses of impact, efficiency and performance.

The dandelion is another metaphor Cathy draws on frequently and one we were also drawn to in our appreciation. Often dismissed as a weed, the dandelion (The French is ‘pissenlit’ which really does say everything about its reputation)  is in fact a profoundly restorative plant. It detoxifies soil, strengthens roots and nourishes ecosystems. It grows where it is not wanted and flourishes nonetheless. To children, it is a source of wonder, blown seeds, floating wishes,transformation, softness at one time, vibrant yellow before. But to adults, it is a nuisance to be removed. Cathy’s work, like the dandelion, asks us to reconsider who gets to decide what counts as valuable, as beautiful, as worthy. We need to ask ourselves to what extent have we constructed educational systems that we want to be like perfect lawns- predictable, clean, neat and each blade of grass much like the others. Cathy says: ‘don’t cut the grass and plant wildflowers instead!’ This is a literal and metaphorical phrase we can get behind!

This ethos extends into her work on gender, race and sexuality, which consistently challenges the structures that exclude some or  may diminish the presence or experience of others. In classrooms, in curricula, in institutional policy, she reminds us in her work that exclusion is never accidental, it is designed. But that also gives us pause for positive reflection: this means they can be redesigned. 

What we’ve come to understand through Cathy’s influence, and through our ongoing partnership, is that rewilding higher education is not a metaphorical indulgence, it is a pedagogical imperative. It calls us to rethink the terms of participation, the assumptions of merit, the rituals of assessment, and the conditions under which learning takes place. It also calls for attention to scale: recognising that large transformations begin with small shifts, relationships and new practices. 

It felt fitting, then, that the very day after Cathy’s lecture, a special issue of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education was published. Co-edited by one of us and containing a piece co-authored by the other, the issue is seeded with many of these same ideas. It features students and a Vice Chancellor; early career ac academics and emeritus professors, reimaginings of assessment, and reflections on academic community that echo and extend Cathy’s provocations. The special issue is a timely continuation of many of the conversations we have had with Cathy, who, unsurprisingly, also has a paper in the special issue and was part of the King’s/ UCL editorial collective. 

We both have very different careers and are at very different ends of them! But we share the sense that the rigid, often foreboding and frequently distrustful academy could be rewilded. It doesn’t have to be this way; more importantly, it could be otherwise.