The Organisational Management campus.

We didn’t ask to be brought here. Could we have been left to expire in some corner?

This isn’t for us, this place. We don’t have great ambitions. There’s not much to us. We wanted to get by, that’s all. An academic job … that was enough … To be able to teach … To pass on what little we knew …

Couldn’t we just have been quietly let go? Couldn’t our department have been simply dissolved? Couldn’t we just have been taken aside and shot, God knows …

Why did they bring us here? Why did we have to be remade?

 

What we are, what we do: a symptom of the dying of philosophy. Of the humanities. Of the liberal arts.

Our gloom is the glom of philosophy. Our despair is the despair of the humanities.

 

The humanities in decline – that’s all we are. Nothing else. We’re easily explained. Easily diagnosed.

The agonies of a dying tradition. Of a defunct subject area. Of a way of life. A way of study.

Paideia in decline. In agony. In self-torture. In self-rending. As it tries to justify itself and fails. As it endeavours to sell itself and runs aground. As it tries to hold itself together and fails. As it attempts to give good reasons for its existence, to justify itself in its enemies terms and fails. As it is entirely infiltrated by analytic philosophers …