This used to be postgraduate town. But there are no more postgraduates coming through.
What’s a university without postgraduates? The humanities?
It’s like Children of Men. When there’s no more youth in the university. When there’s no more youthful joy. Where’s no longer the passion of postgraduate ardency. When the postgraduate knife-edge is no longer held to our throats?
You can actually feel it: the absence of postgraduates. All the empty study-bedrooms. The empty communal kitchens. There’s no postgraduate laughter. No merriment in the courtyard.
There was postgraduate joy here, not so long ago. Postgraduate friendships – very intense, burning into the night. Postgraduate romances. And study – deep postgraduate study. Days and nights of study.
But there are no postgraduate passers-through, not anymore. No internationals, from all over the world. No one to inhabit the study bedrooms in the postgraduate halls. The communal kitchens! No one to play flamenco videos in the communal area!
The empty corridors. The empty study bedrooms. As if an entire civilization had vanished. The whole postgraduate Marie Celeste.
This place doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’s intolerable.
Won’t the university just tear it down? Won’t they just sell the land and let it be torn down. Redevelopment! Anything’s better than letting it stand here, haunted by the ghosts of postgraduates past.
The hollowness of a university without postgraduates. The cold wind blowing through. Howling through.
Where are the young? Where is the youth of the humanities?
All that’ll happen is that the humanities will get older and older. More and more senescent. And more and more irrelevant.
The aging humanities. Without fresh blood. Without the postgraduate transfusion. Without the lifeblood of the university.
It’s querulous side! Its questioning side! Its gauche side. It’s not yet professionalised side! Its exploratory side! Its tremulous side! Its still-at-stake side! What is a university without the postgraduate question mark?
And now? Why do they want to have a party here? The last party, with the last postgraduates?
Work in Progress 