Board of Studies

The meeting room.

Our Board of Studies.

It’s just us. The lunatics really have taken over the asylum. The chimps have taken over.

Let’s have a chimp meeting. What would be on the chimp agenda?

Bananas. Inter chimp rivalry. Mating. Eating their own shit.

They only do that in zoos.

Colourful assholes.

That’s mandrills, not chimps.

Why are you lying down, Shiva?

I’m assuming my position on the floor of dread.

Get up off the fucking floor of dread!

Driss, lying on the floor of dread. Barbarossa, lying on the floor of dread. Fiver, lying on the floor of dread.

What is this, some kind of yoga?

Yeah, doom yoga.

Get up! You’re supposed to be chairing this meeting, Shiva. You’re supposed to be in charge. This is the Board of Studies, for fuck’s sake. What have you got to report to us from the Executive Committee? What’s coming down from on high.

I don’t know. I didn’t go to it. I said I was ill.

Ill?!

Mentally ill. Too full of dread.

You told them that?

No, I said I had flu.

You can’t keep giving excuses like that! Not to the Organisational Management Executive! Those guys are serious. They’re world conquerors. These guys are taking over the world. What do you think they’ll do to us if they think we can’t run our department?

Are you actually meditating, Driss?

I’m just closing my eyes.

Well, open them again! My God. And Fiver, leave off the visions for a few minutes. We need our departmental administrator alert! Focused! Writing minutes! Taking down our words of wisdom. The relevant action points.

There are decisions to be made! Things to be done. We have an agenda to work through. Points to address. Action points to tick off.

We’re in Organisational Management now, remember that. They’ll be scrutinising our minutes. Make sure our minutes are immaculate, Fiver. Don’t record anything we say about suicide. Or our drunkenness. Or about throwing ourselves out of the window. None of that! We need clean minutes. Don’t record the swearing. Or the panic. Or the threats of mutiny. We need to appear as a functioning department. And that’s half the battle, isn’t it?

But we’re not a functioning department. We’re not a functioning anything. Of course not! Everything’s wrong with us. My God, look our leader!

Get up off the floor, Shiva. Lead us. Show us the way! Lead by example. You have to be decisive, Shiva. That’s what you’re for. So decide! Cut through the red tape!

I think we should kill ourselves immediately, I say.

Let’s put this to the vote: should we kill ourselves immediately? Just fall on our swords?

We don’t have swords.

We need to be issued with swords! That’s an action point! So we can fall on them! Contact the department of metallurgy. Ask them to make some swords. Tell them our philosophical honour is at stake. The honour of philosophy falls to us.

Furio, plonking a bottle on the table and a pile of plastic cups.

Here’s my contribution.

What’s that?

Lindesfarne mead.

Who drinks Lindesfarne mead?

We do, now.

Pouring cups.

In wine is truth, not Lindesfarne mead. There’s a reason why everyone gave up drinking this in the Middle Ages.

Mead! What was going through your head? Like, ye olde bollocks. It’s rancid. No one actually drinks mead, you know.

I think monks do.

Monks sell it to tourists. Tourists who’ve never actually tasted mead. And never drink it again.

Next we’ll be singing madrigals. Fuck off with your mead.

It won Mead of the year in What Mead? magazine, apparently.

There is no What Mead? magazine. You made it up.

Sure I thought it would make a change. Broadening our alcoholic horizons.

They don’t need broadening.

I bought it at Bedeworld. The mead gift pack. Two bottles.

Did Bede even drink mead? I’ll bet he didn’t. Fuck off and buy some wine. We have to go classy for the Philosophy Board of Studies.

Uh … do we have to kill ourselves or not?

We’ll wait for the swords to be delivered.

Why do we need to wait for swords? We could just throw ourselves out of the window.

But the window doesn’t open wide enough. Have you noticed that?

It’s a deliberate anti suicide measure. Those bastards. It’s prejudice. Against the suicidal! It’s against the Equalities Act! We have rights!

We need an emergency meeting.

We’re already in a meeting.

We need a meeting inside the meeting.

Wow, a meta-meeting.

Press the panic button!

Is there a panic button? Why not?

Phone the police. There’s a crime in progress. An ontological crime. It’s all a crime. The university’s a crime. The university itself!

Calm down! Don’t get hysterical! Driss, slap him!

There’s a planetary crisis. There’s an emergency. Of being!

Is Antarctica on the agenda?

Why should Antarctica be on the agenda?

I want to know what’s been happening there. I have a lot of questions about Antarctica.

You’re no allowed to fly over it, you know. Or go there.

Dave Lee Roth went there. Slept out on the ice, next to the penguins. Said they kept him awake. He’s a great traveller. Motley Crue wanted to play a gig there. I don’t think they did, though.

Did you see that Werner Herzog film about Antarctica. With the penguin? I liked that bit: the penguin just wandering off on its own, in the opposite direction to the sea. Off into the heart of the frozen continent.

Shut up about Antarctica. We need to get back to the agenda. There are things to discuss!

How about pyramids – are they on the agenda? There are pyramids in Antarctica, you know. And on Mars. What does it all mean?

And I think we should have the Sphinx on the agenda. How old is it, really? Does it really show signs of rain erosion?

As Chair of Board of Studies, I forbid any discussion about the Sphinx at this meetings.

Or pyramids?

Fuck pyramids.

And Gopekle Tepe?

I forbid the discussion of Gopekle Tepe.

So what are we going to discuss?

What’s the most anti Board of Studies thing we can think of?

God. Let’s talk about God.

You start.

I think we should use the occasion to have group.

Group what?

Therapy. I think we have deep, deep issues. Especially you.

Philosophical issues? Personal issues?

Personal issues are philosophical issues. The personal is philosophical.

You mean political.

I mean philosophical, fucko.

What does it really say, in the real agenda?

We’re supposed to be rewriting our module descriptors to make their contents accessible to organisational management students.

Fuck off!

We’re not supposed to use the words, epistemology and ontology and metaphysics. We’re not supposed to use the words axiology and deontology and virtue ethics.

And so it begins: the Organisational Management taming of philosophy. The Organisational Management disciplining of philosophy. Making it biddable. Making it understandable to the university authorities.

The fall of philosophy!