For most of us, term is well and truly underway. The IN pile is rapidly outgrowing the OUT pile, and this is only Week 2! The old, seemingly unchanging rhythm of Cambridge life has returned.

Change, however, does seem to be afoot, after a week which has seen the revelation that the future of the Graduate Union is in doubt. The GU’s complex history is worth re-examining. Founded in 1954 by the wife of the then Master of Peterhouse College, in the face of considerable oppositon from the university, the GU took its current name and form, after a series of changes, in 1981. Since then, the ride has rarely been smooth.

In 2013, the GU’s constitution was suspended when a subcommittee of the University Council discovered that it had been operating with too few trustees. Several presidents of the GU have faced petitions calling for their resignations. To top it all off, the GU was deregistered as a charity last year as concerns mounted.

What will become of the GU remains to be seen, although the timing of the working group’s reconsideration of its future is not insignificant given the plans for the redevelopment of the Mill Lane site where the GU is currently housed. It would seem that the university is looking to shake things up.

Shaking things up probably isn’t something which springs to mind when we think of Cambridge, an institution which has been dominated by a certain demographic for over 800 years.

Of course, change is what we pick up a newspaper to read about; what is the news but a series of reports describing ever-shifting events? Attitudes and ideas, too, are constantly changing. Even simply saying something like “The news this week that the Tate Modern has announced its first female director in Frances Morris is welcome” seems entirely natural now because we’ve internalised that way of thinking. This is despite the fact that an era in which such a baldly progressive statement would have seemed odd or radical is by no means beyond the limits of living memory for some.

Reading the news (and moderating our reactions to it) is not wholly instinctive. Instead, our thoughts and impressions are shaped (for better or worse) not only by what we read, but also by the trends and patterns we observe in others’ beliefs. As readers become writers – a transition upon which publications such as this are reliant – a feedback loop can entrench certain ways of thinking. Hang on then, whatever happened to change?

While ‘progress’ is often so slow as to be imperceptible, it is only when we reach a milestone that we realise how far we have already come. That is as true of milestones, such as the stark realisation of a historic change like the possible closure of the GU as it is for far more positive milestones (see, I’m at it too now) like another crack in the glass ceiling.

However, if we decide that it’s a good thing, change is by no means guaranteed. Fresh blood and fresh ideas are sometimes necessary if we want to shake things up, to stop things from getting entrenched. That thought may seem to be at odds with the sort of steady ‘progress’ we often have in mind. Perhaps the sort of change we want isn’t so radical after all, and perhaps that’s not a bad thing to realise.