Work in Progress

This is the grove of the postgraduate soul. In the former postgraduate halls …

They’ve made a clearing.

They’ve lined it with books – humanities books. All the humanities books.

What is this? A ceremony? The rite of postgraduate spring? But it’s not spring yet. It’s the depths of winter. It’s the postgraduate dance of the shortest day. Of the longest shadow. The opposite of midsummer! The dance of midwinter. The most sacred of the postgraduate festivals.

The postgraduates wanted to show us this. They wanted to express … what? Gratitude?

They wanted for us to see how deeply they felt it – the chance to study. They wanted to share their joy.

We’re touched. Moved. What a privilege.

It’s like Footloose, but for postgraduates. Kick off your Sunday shoes and so on.

Their yearning … It’s beautiful.

This is how the postgraduates dance in secret. We’re very lucky to be admitted here.

Did we used to dance like this?

I can’t remember. Were our memories wiped?

Why are they letting us see this?

They’re dancing for the Rapture. They want the postgraduate Rapture, where they just disappear. Where they’re beamed up to … a better universe. To sit at the right hand of God, or whatever. To join the postgraduate angels, up there in heaven.

The last postgraduates are dancing. Look at them dance! Look at them whirl! What joy is there in them.

Almost inscrutable, their dancing. There’s no mourning in their dancing. No regret. No sense of lastness. It’s not eschatological, their dancing. There’s no sense of doom.

There should be a part time dance, too. We should dance our part-timism.

It’s too late for that.

We should dance the memory of our part-timism.

I don’t think we can remember. Not now. Not as full-time lecturers. We can’t think our way back. We can’t feel our way.

Of course we can! Our five-year sentences – out there. Eight years, in Helmut’ case – out there, in the world. Years of soul-crushing. Of soul-distortion. Years of thwarted hopes. Of part-timer’s glut. Years, when the supply of our kind exceeded demand …

We should dance our passion of part-time dancing. The saddest dance. The deepest dance. Having been shown the academic world, and then left it behind. Having experienced academic delights, and then left them behind.

Postgraduate sadness is always only ever wistful. The postgraduate has escaped the world – there’s joy in that; even in postgraduate despair. The postgraduate knows they’ll likely have to re-enter it, the world. That they will be lost out there anew. But the part-timer is actually out in the world again, exposed to the cold winds of the world. The part time is exposed to the worst elements of the world.

We should do part-time butoh. Expose the heart of part time darkness.

Fiver’s part time-butoh. Nobody does it better.

Slow agony. The refinement of indignity. Dancing in his chains. The humiliated dance. The broken-one dance.

He’s dancing self-disgust. And auto exploitation. It’s beautiful. It’s disgusting – both at once.

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?

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!