Everybody’s Monkey

You know their type, I said. Brooding, resentful, middle aged, their too-large bodies shifting in their chairs, their fat necks in collars and neckties. You know the old style bullies, great, lumbering, stupid beasts who have had years of sabbaticals and research leave, who were promoted on the back of a mediocre book or a clutch of average articles. You know them, I said, gas-filled and stupid, with stupid blank eyes that search the horizon for new objects of resentment.

You know them, you suffered from them, you were directly oppressed by them when they employed you to cover their teaching for free (‘it’s great experience’) or organised large conferences without credit (‘don’t you take a summer holiday this year’). Yes, you know them, shambling from one international conference or another, professing from lecterns from Sydney to Seattle, surrounded by a little cloud of academics who want favours. You know the ones I mean, I said, writing on Marxism while they employ you on a part-time contract to do their teaching, their administration and their conference organisation. You know them, I said, filling the committees and the Q.A.A. panels.

You remember what they confessed to you that day in their office, when puffed-up with power, chest pushed outwards they boasted they could destroy a department if they wanted to and that no one could escape their grasp. You remember being told your career would be destroyed, I said, that they would destroy your career, that wherever you went you’d be in danger, I said. You remember them telling you to run upstairs and fetch their printing, I said. You remember being led round the canteen like a shire horse, like a tamed dumb beast.

You remember having to kow-tow to idiots, I said, to speak the language of idiots, I said, to speak idiot-speak when they asked you questions after your paper, I said. You remember being told how important it was to impress them, I said, these idiots I said and how you went cap in hand to their great offices to ask for a little more teaching I said. You remember, I said, as a part-timer having to attend the lectures for which you were to provide seminars, having to attend team meetings and quality meetings and, to impress the department, to attend and be an active member of the Research Seminar, I said.

You remember them whispering in corners I said, scheming and plotting in pubs, I said. You remember them as transmitters of gossip and rumour, I said. You remember when they favoured you with a conversation, I said, and they led you like the lumbering beast they had brought under control from this corridor to that, I said. You remember calming them down after their tantrums, I said, and all but wiping their brows. You remember how they told you teaching 4 hours a week was difficult, I said. You remembering being advised to attend their postgraduate courses even though you had your doctorate, I said, to get into their good books, I said.

You remember their idiocies and lies, I said, and smiling at their idiocy and laughing at their idiotic remarks, I said, and feigning to admire their power, I said. You remember indulging their fantasies, I said, of letting them wallow in their sense of their importance, I said. You remember telling them how much you enjoyed their book, I said, and how much you looked forward to their reckoning with Bonhoffer, I said. You remember them telling you about the good old days, and how it didn’t used to be so hard, I said.

You remember them, I said. The memory is burnt into you, I said. Because you have been everybody’s monkey, I said, everybody’s jester, I said, the bells of your cap jangling as you passed down the corridors, I said. Because you were everybody’s carthorse, everybody’s houseboy, the slave who danced in his chains, I said, the dancing bear and the grinning court dwarf. You were the department idiot I said, the department ape and buffoon. Of what did you dream, I said, but of becoming the confidante of the manager, her favourite. Of supplanting all the other rivals in her affection, I said. Of being the most docile seminar-wallah, the best listener-wallah and the most loquacious flattery-wallah, I said.

How you loathed it, I said. How keen you were to escape, I said. ‘No one would believe what goes on here’, you said to the other monkeys. You longed to stand upright, I said. You longed to have the blinkers removed, and your iron collar unlocked, I said. And you longed for the bit to be removed from your mouth. To speak, to stand, to see at last.

There he is in his velvet cowboy hat, I said, the puffed-up mediocrity, I said, the editor of several publishing series and a prestigious series of edited collections, I said. Cultivator of admirers and dependants, I said. Like the lord of a little feudal town, I said, throwing gold coins to the peasants just to see them dashing about and then tipping their caps. ‘Bless you guv’nor, god bless you’. 

The Vice-Chancellor is in her suite and the lecturers in their offices. The desperate ones are wandering the corridors, officeless and baseless, writing on films they cannot afford to pay to see and on books they cannot afford to pay to read. The desperate ones, I said, wandering the corridors for years, pitied by all and despised by all (‘why don’t they just give up?’) because they see in you the truth of their own condition, its disgusting price.