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
Imbibe, motherfuckers!
If only we could stomach it, this wine … If only we could keep it down.
Poison knew itself in us. Lies knew themselves in us. Poison and lies cried out, in us. Poison that doesn’t want to be poison. Lies that don’t want to be lies. In us! In our torsion! In our truth telling – because that’s what it was: truth telling. Because we told the truth, in our own way. We were the only ones who told the truth. Because lies were intolerable to us! Because poison was always too much!
Self-disgust – that’s what we’re supposed to feel. Disgust at ourselves for being dependent on this. For being subject to it all.
The purest self-disgust. The strongest self-disgust. Self-disgust become a superpower. But a superpower for what?
For world-hatred and self-hatred.
Work in Progress 