Author: Lars Iyer

Gazelle, on the final pages of her Susan Taubes study. Gazelle, putting the finishing touches to her Susan Taubes study.

A genuine scholarly monograph. To be published by a decent press.

One of the first of its kind on the work of Susan Taubes. All but cornering the market of Susan Taubes studies. Making herself a person to invite to conferences on the work of Susan Taubes. She’ll become one of the Susan Taubes people.

Of course, that wouldn’t satisfy Gazelle. She wouldn’t want to be just a Susan Taubes scholar. A philosopher: that’s what Gazelle wanted to be. Not some historian of ideas. Not some intellectual biographer. A philosopher in her own right! Like Susan Taubes herself, in her prime!

Not just a Susan Taubes expert! Not merely a Susan Taubes aficionado! Gazelle, who will probably be promoted ahead of us. Gazelle, who will make senior lecturer before us. Reader! Gaelle, who’d even be Professor Gazelle before too much longer. Showing us up.

And to whom will she dedicate it, her Susan Taubes study? Will she credit Livia? Will she thank us in the acknowledgements? Will she name us individually?

Of course I’d like to take myself as seriously as you, philosopher. I’d like to have all the dignity that comes from an ancient subject area. Antiquity! Profundity!

There are no organisational manager Platos and Aristotles, who sit at the foundations of Western thought. There are no ancient Grek and Roman style busts of organisational managers – not yet. There are no old master’s paintings of ancient organisational managers in some Athens agora. No Organisational Management Hobbeses or Rousseaus opening up entire fields of study. We organisational managers don’t have anything of the prestige. Poor old us. But we cope, philosopher. We do just fine, on our palatial campuses. The pendulum’s swing in our direction now. D, do you think it’ll ever swing back?

We’re in mourning for the old elite education, right! For actual clever people. For really educated people. For properly cultured people. For people who knew things.

We’re morning the time before the mass expansion. Before the polys were turned into unis. Before mass higher education! Before grade inflation! Before student centred learning. Before fees. Before rankings. Before league tables. Before the managers took charge.

There was slack, back then. There was Time. A whole milieu of the humanities. Wonderful. Intact.

Back when the likes of us would never have got to the uni. Which is as it should be! When the doors would have been closed to us. And a good thing, too! When our sort wouldn’t have dreamed of an academic life. Perfectly appropriate!

The old times! Those postwar decades at the great redbrick universities. At the old civic universities. Staffed by Oxbridge types, parachuted into the provinces. By fee paying school students types. Who could keep the standards up.

And only the best of the grammar-schooled working class types. Only the brightest from the council estates. Dennis Potter and that lot. The Angry Young Men types. Up at Oxford! Up at Cambridge!

When there were Standards – imagine that! When there were Heights to aspire to! When Brilliance was allowed to be called Brilliance! When Genius was a thing! Before Stupidity hadn’t yet become the rule.

When even Livia was contained. Before the university could become a place of her mad fantasies. Let alone the scene of our paranoia. Our masochism. Of our strange fantasies and over-investments.

Before our kind were raised too high. When we would have found sour role as porters, and the like. Waiters and waitresses. Humble types, knowing our station. Doffing our caps. Bowing our heads.

Mass higher education is at an end. Is that such a bad thing? But we’re the product of mass higher education. We’re what happens when you have mass mass higher education. When you let just anyone in.

A cautionary tale: that’s what we are. A relic from the time when 50% of the young were supposed to go to uni. When higher education grew like Topsy. When higher education lost the run of itself, and filled itself with our kind. The talentless kind! The watered-down kind!

The old Theology Department – long closed. The old Religious Studies Department – decades gone. The old Philosophy Department, shut down in the ‘80s.

All the scholars of yore. All the graduates. Students who passed through here. Through these corridors. Through the higgledy-piggledy of an unplanned campus. Through the Victoria buildings and the Edwardian ones and the ‘60s ones – monstrosities, of course. What else? But there they were, the staff and students of the humanities.

And this is what’s left. This is what it came to.

As the university sinks. As the humanities capsize. Goes down. As the humanities buckle. As the humanities earthquake.

They have no use for us. They have no use for what has no use. The uselessness of the humanities: they don’t need us anymore.

The old world. The world that made sense. In which we could hide ourselves. When the light wasn’t turned on us. When we didn’t stand, blinking, in the universal light. Where we were allowed shadows. Allowed to skulk.

The beneficent university. The kind university. The university of welcome. That allowed us to enter. To cross its threshold.

The university that opened itself to us. Its doors. That gave us a place. We who never thought we had a place. We who were excluded from all other places.

People even recognised us. Nodded to us in the corridors. Fellow academics even greeted us!

Our recovery time. Our rehabilitation. Our hospital – because wasn’t that what it was: a hospital. For our convalescence. From life! Our recovery from life!

We were allowed a few years out. From the world! From the logic of the world! We’d been allowed to lie in a hammock, of sorts. The humanities hammock, in the humanities sun. In the old university sun.

We’re the remnant.

We have old souls. Old campus souls.

Remembering. Our first days. When we first arrived. When Cicero showed us our offices. Our eyes full of wonder! We were naïve back then. We were unworldly. We wanted to forget about the world. We’d spent too long in the world