We were encouraged to make great gestures in thought. To issue forth great claims. Without moderation. Without restraint.
Livia wanted to hear categorical statements. Grandiosity. Delusional ravings. General philosophical hyperbole. Absolutism. Fanaticism, even!
We were to range forth across the philosophical landscape. To stomp! To smash! To make our stupid mark, like philosophical King Kings.
We were to see what we could do! Or what we couldn’t do! Mistakes – that’s what she wanted to see. Erring. Great stupidities – not merely minor ones. Nothing finickity, she said. Nothing delicate. What we got wrong we’d have to get Wrong, capital W. We’d have to go entirely off the rails.
Philosophy needed its outsider artists. Its idiot-antinomians. Philosophy needed our crudities and grandiosity. Our distortions and gaucherie.
Where would we lead our students? To make more like us? But they’d never be like us.
They weren’t mongrels, as we were. They weren’t brought up in intellectual crevasses and cracks. They weren’t scrappers. They’d never have to fend for themselves. They weren’t of the proletariat. Or the lumpenproletariat!
They weren’t underlings. They weren’t low caste. Low born. They weren’t impostors in the university. They weren’t vandals. They weren’t running amuck.
They actually deserved to be here. They actually felt confident that they belonged here. or, indeed, somewhere better. They’d only missed getting into Durham by a whisker. Hadn’t the applied for Cambridge! For Oxford! They’d so nearly got into Doxbridge. But not quite!
The university didn’t mind what we taught, not really. The content of modules didn’t matter, so long as there we identifiable aims and objectives. And outcomes! And assessments!
So long as the students graded us well. Gave us good marks on the student surveys. So long as we kept the customers happy. And kept our admin up to date. Filled in the right forms. They’d leave us alone.
And weren’t we entertaining enough to get away with it? Didn’t the students enjoy our working class flights of fancy? Our peasant’s waywardness. Our underdogs’ eccentricities? Didn’t they find their underclass teachers entertaining, in their own way?
We were performing monkeys, essentially. We were the monkeys, and Livia the organ grinder.
It’s not as if anyone cared, not really. It’s not as if anyone expected anything of the humanities. Rich kids’ playground, that’s all. Something for them to busy themselves with in their undergraduate years. Something to keep them amused. Something with which their parents were happy enough. And happy to fund!
With a bit of vestigial prestige. That could maintain the university’s alibi. That would allow the university go on pretending that it was a university, for a while at least.
Work in Progress 