Which reminded me of something I'd read in my dim and thankfully distant undergraduate past, and I hope there are no psychologists reading this to take issue with my clumsy paraphrasing: Freud somewhere said something along the lines of "what cannot be remembered, cannot be forgotten". If I recall with any accuracy, he was referring to traumatic events which are suppressed by the conscious mind, which need to be surfaced through analysis so that they can be worked through.
Institutional Memory is important. We need to know why we do what we do, so that we can reflect on whether it is what we should still be doing. But institutional forgetting is also important. Practices become policy through repetition, and not always for the right reason.
Institutional Memory resides in all of us. We make it daily, live it and forge it and fashion it all the time. it encompasses that which was not done as much as that which was. Bourdieu spoke of "The Law of the Conservation of Violence" - a kind of sociological karma that cannot be evaded. In order to understand what is happening in our institution, we need to remember where we are coming from and what has gone before, not only the glories which we dust off and hang with the portraits of the past, but also the infamy and the shame and that which we choose not to parade to the public gaze. For as long as it cannot be remembered, and cannot be forgotten, its ghosts will continue to haunt our halls and its karma continue to play out.