It’s marvellous, I said, universities now employ administrators expert at translating poorly written funding proposals into sleek and efficient funding proposals. They get paid more than us, I said, and rightly so. They’re doing the real work, I said, and can only approximate the officialese at which they are so adept at writing, I said. It’s only right they get paid more, much more than us, I said. They are the translators of academic funding proposals into the terms Capital can understand, I said, which is to say they translate everything into nonsense, I said, but officialese nonsense, written in that non-language that laughs at us, the poor academics who have yet to upload ourselves into the movement of Capital, I said.
Academics are the dross of the university, I said, but never mind. Microsoft will roll out the great teaching Encarta soon, I said. They’ve spent billions on it, I said. Billions, and they feel it is pure philanthrophy. And after Encarta, what need will there be for lecturers or seminar leaders?, I said. Research will survive, I said, but only the universities far sighted enough to employ administrators who can efficiently translate the poorly written funding proposals that come to them from academics, I said.
In the end, a new breed will appear, as I said, as it is already appearing: the administrator-academic, the all-purpose university robot, I said, adept in the languages of funding proposals and quality management. Fluent in all the tounges of Capital, I said. Ready for all weathers and all terrain, I said. With little caterpillar tracks instead of feet, I said, rolling around from here to there, I said, efficient and ever ready I said. We’ll keep them in empty lecture rooms, I said, switching them off at night and on in the mornings. And they’ll roll about, I said, ready for every challenge, I said.
I have happy memories, I said to H., of that Away Day with the Quality team which we took in a room of the Houses of Parliament, I said. We rented that room at a discount, I said, and it was our room for the day. What a bonus for us academics, I said, to be treated to lunch at the Houses of Parliament, I said. And what joy it was to be joined by the imperatrice of Quality, that marvellous individual who instructed us about branding and how we should be proud of our university! Every module outline should have the university brand on it, she said. You should be proud of working for the university, she said. But then she said, ‘as the university should be proud to have you’.
It was the run up to our QAA. As a Lecturer on a one year 0.5 post, earning a full £9,000 in the Home Counties, it was clearly important that I attend such meetings. I was to be trained in matter of quality, and I gladly received that training. I listened to the imperatrice of Quality with great concentration. Yes, I should think about university branding, I thought, and I should think about personal branding, too. How was I to brand myself? How to develop my own personal brand? What did I stand for, after all?
That year, I told H., I was given an office in the former stables of the house in which an American senator lived during the war. I had my office, but no keys to the office, so I could never get into it. It was designed thus, I found out. There was no need, after all, for me to have an office. On the other hand, somewhere on paper, I should be seen to have an office.
Even if I had got into the office, there was nothing there. A few rotten mattresses were all I could make out through the windows. And some mould on the wall. Effectively, I had no office. Instead, I rented a room from the university, a little room in which I could stay in the evening so long as I cleared it out every morning. I would take my personal effects to the porter to look after, I said, and then wander around the Senator’s former mansion, up the stairs and down the stairs, and then around the courtyard and past the old greenhouses. The campus was mine, I said, because it was no one’s.
I had no office and no computer, I said. The little campus was mine, however. I wandered about the campus in the evening, I said, where there were no bars and nothing to do. There was the library, I said, so I went there. I went to the library and photocopied books. I abused my privileges; I still have piled-up photocopied books in my filing cabinet I said.
They let me teach Husserl, I said. Husserl, but not anything after Husserl. ‘My supervisor warned my about Merleau-Ponty’, said the Head of Department, ‘and he said he was dangerous. I’ve never read him’. Often, I would wander into the Philosophy corridor and gaze in admiration at the clippings from the newspapers stuck to the walls. They included the piece in the Guardian published just after Deleuze’s death, where he is impugned for his intellectual impostures. Then there were carefully photocopied paragraphs from other lofty newspapers on Derrida and others. ‘Pure bunk’; ‘arrant nonsense’. Finally, there was a glass case containing the lofty publications of the philosophy department themelves. How busy they had been! How ambitious they were! Photocopied front pages of their articles at jaunty angles were arranged beneath glass panels on the wall. I marvelled at their industry.
Truly I was among giants! I was a fool, a dwarf among giants! They were taller and better than I! I was a skulking thing, half-dead, wandering in obscurity around the campus! I was a skulking disgusting thing who could never think of anything to say in the long Research Forums where visiting academics, some from Oxford and Cambridge, would give not one but two papers, with dinner at a local restaurant in between. Not one but two papers. Two papers on the Philosophy of Mind. Two papers on why it was wrong to stick pins in babies. What joy it was in that dawn to be alive! What joy I experienced among the men and woman of Oxford and Cambridge who came to visit us!
The academics drove round in their cars and I walked on my poor feet. The academics lived in the surrounding towns and I lived in a rented room on campus. They passed me and I waved. Had they seen me? In the evenings I wrote a flood of poor papers and by day I received a flood of rejection letters. I received a Bad Writing award and the academics drove around in their cars. I was a Bad Writer, but their careers were like their cars, large and established. On they sped. It was good and it was right. I was base matter and they were the gods.
What will happen to them now, these lofty academics? What resistance will they put up against Microsoft and its minions? Because I know they are the old breed, the dying breed and that for all their strength and magnificence, they will fail, I said. Better than me, stronger than me, but rather like the boastful tree in the children’s story, the tree which said: I am stronger than you, grass, but was felled in a storm. But I am not grass, I said, I am something which will survive the death of grass.
Crawling through the grass are the survivors, I said, those degraded creatures who will survive all disasters. They are waiting for the disaster, and out they will swarm, I said. I am not one of these creatures, I said, but the scum that grows on their chitin, I said. I am a little patch of sickness that grows on their hard black casing, I said. I am not a survivor, I said, but the scum that grows on the backs of survivors. For there is something knowing about me, I said. I have learnt bitter lessons and live from bitter lessons. I am adjusted and ready for the disaster, and I am even looking forward to it, I said. I dream feebly of the great takeover when Microsoft rolls out its educational software and people like me will move from university to university, slaves to the great servo-mechanisms of Capital.
The grass will be dead and the earth singed and the great beasts with whom I used to work will have starved to death. Their cars rust by the roadside; pages from their articles blow in the wind. Meanwhile, I will be one of the technicians of learning appearing in a 2 inch by 2 inch window on your console, having been brought in by Microsoft to deliver what will pass for teaching.
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