Sheltering from the wind.
Our PhD students are turning blue. They want to warm their hands.
Passing them the hipflask. Giving them a nip. That’ll warm them up.
You’re representing us at the Organisational Management Christmas party, postgraduates, don’t forget that! There’s to be no Organisational Management merriment. You’re to regard the enemy with suspicion! Dislike!
Just because we’re fraternising with the enemy doesn’t mean we can let down our guard.
The postgraduates are miserable. The postgraduates need a pep-talk.
Don’t weep, postgraduates! You won’t fall as far as us, postgraduates! You won’t be as abject.
We’re defeated, postgraduates! Cosmically! Actually! But you … you still have hope. You have to have hope. Just as we have hope, but not for us. But for you, postgraduates! For your nobility! Your incorruptibility!
What are you favourite Christmas carols, postgraduates? What warms your postgraduate hearts? Belt them out! Silent Night! The Christmas Song! The messianic expectation of Little Drummer Boy. Nothing more moving.
No, we mustn’t let them freeze to death.
The most painful thing in the world: having your PhD student die before you. No PhD supervisor deserves that.
PhD students are our future. They’re supposed to outlive us, live beyond us. Reach farther. Achieve what we’ve never been able to achieve.
We’re their Doktorvaters and Doktormutters, as they say in Germany. They’re our Doktorkinder … what’s the plural of Kinder?
We’d sacrifice ourselves for them. We’d lay down our lives for them!
We have to live to pass on our wisdom. What we’ve learnt. All that we’ve done. Our own work … they can carry it forward. They can quote us. Remember us. So that it will not have been in vain. So that we will not have been in vain.
Our academic careers … will have meant something. Because it led to them. It bloomed in them. It reached full flower in them.
Our Doktorkinderen. Fruit of our academic loins! Suckled on our philosophical teats!
Work in Progress 