We’ve internalised the judgements. We know what we’re worth, or not worth. We’ve naturalised the rejections. We’re part timers, at heart. We should only ever have been part-timers. We found our level as part timers.
A full time wage: not for us. A full time job: undeserved! Unwarranted! We should have kept to our lane. To our natural level. To our part time confinement.
But Cicero broke us of our pens. From our place in the pecking order. Which was really the natural order.
Didn’t we have lower IQs than full timers? Weren’t we most dysgenic? More prone to mutation? To, no doubt, sterility.
We’d never manage to reproduce ourselves academically: and that was how it should be. There should not be more of our kind: we should never be allowed to supervise students. No postgraduates for us! No MA students! No PhD students. To lead astray! To fill with our dubious ideas!
It’s survival of the fittest, the ablest in academia – and rightly so! The laws of the jungle. Keeping the academic hierarchy as it should be. Maintaining the bottom at the bottom and the top at the top. Preserving the order of rank. The whole academic food-chain! The whole academic chain of being!
The part timer should be sterile. There was a reason why things were as they were.
And weren’t our accents wrong? And weren’t our gestures wrong? Didn’t we deserve a prolonged and systematic campaign of humiliation?
There were norms to be enforced. Gates to be kept closed. We needed to stay at our level. Where, after all, we’d do our best work. Where we’d work to our abilities. Where we’d be happiest!
In our place! In our paddock! Where we’d work under the direction of the full timers. Supervised and indeed closely monitored by full timers. Kept in place and indeed constantly reminded of our place by full timers. As it should be!
We should never have been let out of our cages! Should never have been just allowed to roam! But that’s what Cicero did: let us our of our cages! Allow us to roam!
Part timers, as necessary as bin men. As roadworkers. The world needs its little people. Its chandalas. Necessary! Numerous!
Of course they couldn’t keep track of us, the full timers! Of course the full timers shouldn’t keep track of our names! It was too much to expect.
No doubt to them, we seemed to multiply like flies. Like vermin. Like all the scavenging creatures that reduce a corpse to bones in a matter of seconds.
We were living, no doubt, on the corpse of the uni. On its last remains. And really only completing the destruction. Really only intensifying the decay. We were probably spontaneously generated from the rotting of the university. Of philosophy! We were the flies. We were the maggots.
Disgustingly busy. At it, night and day. Oh so industrious. So willing. So flexible. Ununionised. Unprotected. Out there. Taking on anything and everything. Disgusting, in its way! Desperate! And really only arousing disgust. And really being only repugnant.
Swarming. Regrouping. And busy! Desperately busy! How were they supposed to tell us apart?
We didn’t speak fluent academic. We didn’t pray at the right altars. Genuflect at the right idols. Not proper academic Marxists, like them.
We didn’t virtue signal in the right way. We weren’t appropriately sanctimonious. We didn’t tow the appropriate line. Make the right noises. Follow the latest academic trends and microtrends.
Things move quickly in academia. It’s always about leap aboard the moving train. Becoming au fait with the latest thing. And we were never au fait with the latest thing.
Which is why we knew our place in the whole academic division of labour. Which is why we knew our role was to free things up for those higher up in the food-chain. They needed time, God knows! They had work to do – of course, of course.
Leave it to the part-time wallahs. To the take-your-seminars wallahs. To the bought-with-research funding wallahs. To the academic coolies! To the philosophical wetbacks!
The part time thing was part of the academic sorting device. The academic heuristic. A way of telling what there was to expect of you. A signal of status, so that everyone would know who you are?
Work in Progress 