‘What dumbfounded him was the prospect of reciting the title of the article he’d written. It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article’s niggling mindlessness, its funeral parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems. Dixon had read, or begun to read, dozens like it, but his own seemed worse than most in its air of being convinced of its own usefulness and significance.’
Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim.
As the cricketer who had managed to get most of the Yorkshire cricket club dismissed was himself charged with antisemitism, as he continued to charge racism and at the same time abjectly apologise for his own racism, the Cultural Revolution dynamics reminded the Secret Professor of the time that he himself, as Jewish, had been charged with antisemitism.
The charge had hung on his quoting the Palestinian critic Edward Said in his lecture to first-years on ‘What is Critical Thinking?’ He had made no mention of Jews, or indeed Israel. He had only shared with the first-years, who looked even more like rabbits caught in the headlights of the opportunity to think freely, his favourite quote of the Palestinian critic: ‘The purpose of education is not to accumulate facts or memorize the “correct” answer, but rather to learn how to think critically, for oneself.’
The student had heard the word ‘Palestinian’, and she had rushed to Wikipedia and found Said’s page, which was full of misinformation. So much for critical thinking. Within a few hours that evening his inbox was buzzing with emails like angry wasps. She had reported him to the module leader, the head of school, and the head of teaching. They would have to investigate the charge.
It was the first time that he’d been grateful for video capture of his lecture. The mandarins yawned their way through his spiel, replaying the allegedly offensive part like instant replay in football. Or cricket. But did cricket have those moments? He couldn’t imagine. He’d tried to watch it with his father as child. He’d almost rather watch himself lecture.
The mandarins determined that the allegation was unfounded. The student was informed that she’d have to apologise to him. He tried to pre-empt the apology with an invitation to dialogue – he was in fact working on a dialogic project between Muslims and Jews; did she want to join him? But she wanted no challenge, no change even, to her beliefs: to her memorization of the ‘correct’ answer. Her email apology to him was abject enough to be transparently unmeant.
It was this lack of dialogue that made him more depressed than the charge. What had he said? He’d only said the word, ‘Palestinian’. To use the word ‘Palestinian’ was, for some students, to be anti-Jewish. Just as to use the word ‘Jewish’, for other students, was to be anti-Palestinian.
Every autumn at Freshers Fair the Jewish students at JSoc and the pro-Palestinian students at the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign faced off against each other on opposite tables on the main thoroughfare of the campus. The ‘Palestinian’ students had the better cake; the Jewish students the better teeth. One group spoke about the ‘apartheid’ of a distant country, little recognising their own apartheid from the students opposite; the other group refused even to acknowledge the existence of the others, opposite or, mostly, in that distant country. The batters or the bowlers. The home team or the away.
His error, he realised, was not to quote more of Said.
‘There isn’t a healthy exchange between “self” and “other.” I think that’s disappearing. And I think that the real problem today is that there’s no mediation between these two extremes. Either there’s homogenization or there is xenophobia, but not the sense of exchange.’
Nothing was cricket anymore. Even cricket wasn’t cricket.
He had the urge to squash his nose right up against the window panel in the door. He had already knocked and waved politely, so that the young lecturer who taught in the same room just before his own seminar would know that he was waiting and that it had, as happened every week, gone past the hour.
As he told his own students and adhered to in all his binary rigidity, the deal was that sessions ended at 5 to the hour and began at 5 past. This allowed 10 minutes for changeover; for the ebbs and flows of staff and students between lecture theatres and seminar rooms. During the pandemic, it was also supposed to allow cleaning between groups. Guns of purple or green antibacterial/antiviral purple fluid and paper towels were in good supply for this purpose.
The young man showed no signs of stopping talking. Some colleagues found their own teaching – themselves — so interesting, he thought. But he had to admit, behind the glass the students looked positively rapt. Each week as he approached, he heard them talking to one another animatedly, often even laughing.
He was reminded of the beginning of a Woody Allen film – was it Bananas? Stardust Memories? – in which Allen is stuck on a train carriage full of miserable people. Allen is also miserable. Through the window he sees running parallel another train carriage, this one full of folk throwing some kind of party: champagne, frocks, laughter etc. Desperate to switch trains, Allen bangs on the window and tries to persuade the conductor to let him change his ticket, to no avail.
It was now 5 past. He had had enough. He rapped on the door twice, marched in and pointed to the clock. It took all his restraint not to pick up the gun of purple fluid and aim it at this earlier version of his self.
From the Matrix came the instruction that from hereon in they should all state their preferred gender pronouns in their email signatures. The University was accused by a +++ internal lobbying group of having ‘a deeply entrenched culture of transphobia’. The withholding of pronoun preference was seen as creating ‘a hostile environment’ for trans people — staff and students. He read of plans afoot to make the ‘sharing of gender pronouns’ obligatory in all meetings, staff committees and student seminars.
Share was one of those words the New Climate had made him hate. It never meant what it used to. Authentic and voluntary give-and-take. Companionable conviviality, as in the sharing of a sandwich, a park bench, a problem over a coffee; a lifetime. Sharing now meant imposing a buffed-up version of yourself on a defenceless audience. Sharing had become naked self-exposure, photoshopped.
This requirement for sharing pronouns was likewise an imposition. Commandment number 11: Thou shalt SHARE thy GENDER PRONOUN.
‘Thou’ was a pronoun that he couldn’t in fact find among the list of possible pronouns in the ‘Gender Pronouns Resource Centre’ (actually a website) that went up soon after the edict. The Matrix required them all to engage with the Resource Centre as part of their ‘cisgender privilege training’.
He looked down the list of unfamiliar terms: Ae, e, ey, ve, xe, tey, sie, ze, zie, per, fae. He had just about managed to school himself to use ‘they’ for nonbinary students when requested. It had taken him years to overcome his qualms about exchanging plurals for singulars. But these terms: were they in fact words? Or cries of pain and abomination?
So much for the subject pronouns. The range of object pronouns – em, xem, zim, tem, ter, ver, zir, vem – put him in mind of childhood rhymes and chants. De dum, de dum, tiddley pom, tiddely pom. Fee, fi, foe, fum. Do, re, fa, so, la, ti, me. If Winnie-the-Pooh and Julie Andrews were indeed shaping trans policy at the university, at least there would be an aptness.
He scanned through the other pages of the Gender Pronouns Resource Centre. ‘How to respect people’s pronouns’. Demand that they declare them, he thought, was definitely the wrong answer. ‘What if I make a mistake?’ In his own transition, there had been a period when others didn’t know what to call him. His parents had very lovingly – and with a sense of humour relieving for all — called him ‘it’. If others ‘made a mistake’ – and as he was indeed gender ambiguous for a period, he couldn’t think of these moments as mistakes – he gently steered them towards himself. He didn’t berate them. He didn’t cry ‘phobia’. He didn’t even think of himself as correcting others. He himself was navigating new territory. How could he expect others to be where he was not? They all then accepted that language could never fully encompass the myriad subtleties of mind and body.
On the Gender Pronouns Resource Centre, you, he or xe could download an ‘App for Pronouns Practice’. The App was a game that required matching pronouns into what he thought of as suits – ve and vem belonged to the same suit, for instance; and to distinguish between types of pronouns – ve being the subject and vem the object pronoun. Genderfuck Candy Crush, he realised. Except easier than Candy Crush, which – if his aunt’s sharing of her tips and scores on Facebook indicated — he could never figure out. Or was he getting confused with that game where you requested a chicken?
Right at the bottom of the Gender Pronouns Resource Centre, in small type, a link to another page: ‘What is a pronoun?’ it asked, belatedly, cautiously.
His students had long since been unable to distinguish subjects from objects, and sometimes even nouns from verbs. Well, if the Gender Pronouns Resource Centre was a way of teaching basic grammar, he decided, even he might ask students to play the odd round of Gender Pronouns Candy Crush.
**
From the top drawer of his desk he retrieved one from the 30 or so name badges discarded from his smiling duties at Open Days past.
Unsmiling, under his name and title, ‘Professor in . . .’, he wrote, in neat, angry capitals:
PREFERRED GENDER PRONOUN: YOUR HONOUR.
Meanwhile, on another campus:
Another professor of philosophy who believed, versus Gender Trouble, that ‘sex matters’ (the name of the campaigning group that would later rally round her) was being targeted by the very embodied protests of her students. He’d read none of the persecuted prof’s books and had no intention of doing so. He’d ‘done’ with gender, he thought, having written a book on transsexuality three decades ago during his own transition. The prof’s own GT seemed to be because she believed that penises and vaginas do still matter, and that toilets and changing rooms should be sex-specific.
He looked up her sole published book, where she wrote emphatically in support of trans rights. ‘Trans people are trans people. We should get over it, They deserve to be safe, to be visible throughout society without shame or stigma, and to have exactly the life opportunities non-trans people do.’
If GT swallowed its own words, the sex literalists liked to repeat them and say everything twice. Men are men. Women are women. Trans people are trans people. He couldn’t help rhyming this last tautology with ‘Pans People’. If trans people really were Pans People, it would make for a much a kinder, happier world, he thought.
But as he followed the news stories, he became increasingly disturbed. He read that she had to walk through a tunnel to get to her office and found the walls plastered with flyers declaring [Her Name] Out!’, calling for head as if she were a dictator. The main walkway of the campus was lined with students waving placards shouting ‘‘[Name] Out! [Name] Out! [University] enables transphobes!’ In his day, at least the slogans at student protests had scanned.
In the videos the students looked sinister. They had coordinated black hoodies and black masks. Immediately he thought of the Blackshirts, the British fascists of the 1930s, who called for ‘Jews out’. Decades ago one of his friends – they had transitioned and eaten pizza and watched New York noir films together – had warned him about the rise of ‘Trans-fascists’. He had thought his friend was being funny-extreme.
But here they were, the Blackshirts of Trans-fascism, dictating what could and couldn’t be said and thought. They were now the Masters and Mistresses of the Uni-verse.
Or should that be Mestresses?
His continuous interest had been memoir – reading it, studying it, writing it – but of late he had become interested in autofiction. When he first heard the term, he had scoffed at his young creative writing colleague, who was moving from writing poetry to what she called autofiction. Wasn’t autofiction just coy memoir, he jeered? Wasn’t it like wearing sheer? You wanted to show your nakedness, but you pretended your see-through whatever counted as clothing. Cake and eat it, he had thought. Emperor’s new clothes.
But now that he was actually reading some of it, and seeing that women did autofiction best, exceptionally well, in fact, the subtle differences between memoir and autofiction were gradually reshaping his calcified opinions. The self in autofiction is not the author, he realised.
He read Deborah Levy, in what she called her ‘living autobiography’, responding to readers’ questions about who she was in her books:
They wanted to know how I set about constructing a voice for the narrator, who is myself but not quite myself. I told them I reckon the narrator had to do something that is tricky in life, never mind in a book. She must not make herself too big or too small. That is to say, she must not constantly undermine herself in order to beg readers to like her, nor must she make herself grander on the page than she actually is in life. It is hard to claim fragility and strength in equal measure, but that mix is what we all are.
He had never been good at equal measures of anything, his mixes tending to one thing or another. In his mind, sheer couldn’t be anything except feminine. He would never obtain subtlety. He was a man who sometimes wore stripes with stripes – working in different directions against each other.
The funny thing was that he used to be the E&I person in his department. E&I Rep, they called him first. Then they made him establish a committee, a subcommittee of another committee, and they promoted him – I.e. gave him a shitload of more targets to meet and forms to fill out — to E&I ‘Officer’.
He thinks he was asked to take the role by his then Head for two reasons.
1. He was deeply sceptical about the public discourse over E&I, which he thought managed to be both self-flagellating and self-congratulatory. He believed his Head to hold the same view.
2. He was many things that counted under E&I as ‘protected characteristics’, the markers of difference that were now considered personal accolades and worn by students as badges of honour.
He was not fully white and he was of minority faith. He wasn’t what students now called ‘cisgender’, though the fact he always had to look up what ‘cis’ meant suggested he may as well have been cis. Only the truly non-cis know what cis means.
He saw no contradiction between being considered an E&I champion in his history and looking through narrowed eyes at the new climate of E&I. The new climate, inevitable, doomed destruction of all independent and intelligent thought, had come upon universities like climate change. Anyway, he could manage contradiction. He prided himself on thriving on contradiction and complexity – unlike E&I-think, he noted.
But there were many contradictions in himself that he was not yet aware of, though others could have pointed them out, and this was the biggest contradiction.
‘I am trialling a new approach to inbox management to reduce the culture of urgency. I shall respond when I have the time, instead of contorting my life (and often my bladder) in the struggle to adhere to your sociopathic expectations that I respond yesterday.’
(For Judith)
A short story is pub closing time when you’ve not finished your drink.
A short story is very distressed, very expensive jeans.
To state the obvious, a short story is shorts. But it is not a crop top. It is something sexier and less obvious, a backless dress.
A short story is an amuse-bouche. A collection of short stories is nouvelle cuisine.
A short story is a dead loved one returning fleetingly in a dream.
A short story is a firecrest.
A short story is when you almost come but not quite.
A short story is a bonsai.
It is a single, beautifully groomed mini-schnauzer.
In all cases, you want the story to go on.
The online health & safety courses the University required him to take or retake each year were multiplying as fast as the rabbits on campus.
There was the online course that told you how to arrange the pencils on your desk in relation to your monitor in relation to the course of the sun. There was the online course on which fire extinguisher to use on which kind of fire. (Even on immediately finishing, he could never remember.) There was the course telling you not to spend too much time online. It was online, of course; it took a good hour; longer if you succumbed, as he did, dizzy with courses, to longeur.
Now the courses on online behaviour were themselves multiplying. There was a course on data protection. (Delete everything but absolutely don’t delete anything if you’ve done something wrong; totally counterintuitive, he thought.)
And there was the course dedicated to ‘good password management’.
Last year the University had introduced ‘dual authentication’. This was during the pandemic, so he wondered if it was the equivalent of a vaccine for computer viruses. Dual authentication meant being asked to do two totally contradictory things at once. It meant that whenever he wanted to log on, he had to fly down three flights of stairs, rummage through several half-unpacked bags and find his smartphone in order to tap an app with the smiley face that said, ‘Yes, it really is me.’ All of this had to happen before his computer gave up on him and he gave up on his computer, forgetting whatever it was that he needed to log on to do in the first place. Each time, he was in a race against the effects of ageing.
On top of dual authentication, the course on password management imposed an additional layer of security. He – and the surprisingly large number of people whose passwords he knew by heart – would have dismally failed the test questions at the end of the course.
Everyone he knew wrote their passwords on post-it notes and stuck these somewhere accessible (normally their computers). (Question 1. ‘What’s the worst thing you could do to compromise your own security/the future of the planet?’)
‘Availability; confidentiality; data quality; secrecy; integrity.’ (Question 2. WTF is information security anyway?) To him, the answers sounded like an ideal relationship, only without the sex.
Question 3. ‘You use unlicensed stock photography in your lecture. Do you:
a) Acknowledge that it’s unlicensed and apologise.
b) Whoop out loud in your lecture when you show the photograph.
c) Say nothing. You know NOTHIN’.
d) Wear dark glasses and a sleuth hat to your lecture, like Inspector Gadget.
e) You’re far too smart ever to use unlicensed anything.
f) Wonder WTF is unlicensed stock photography.
The biggest potential pratfall came in relation to animals again. Everyone he knew used their pet’s name in their password. As did he, albeit jiggled up with exclamation marks and asterisks added each time he was locked out, could no longer remember his password, and was told that he needed to create a new one. As the passwords became ever longer, they became ever more unmemorable. His passwords were becoming protected even against him.
He reached the final question. (And on this question, honestly Inspector Gadget, the SP has changed NOTHIN’):
‘On a night out, Kofi is approached by someone in a bar, who introduces himself as Stefan. Stefan explains that they met once at work a couple of months ago. Kofi isn’t sure if he remembers Stefan.
The conversation continues, and they get on well. They talk about where they went to school. Stefan then asks Kofi about childhood pets: “We were a big dog household. Our first was called Shandy. How about yours?”
What should Kofi’s answer be?
a) “I had a few pets myself. It’s been so long, I can’t remember I’m afraid.”
b) “Mine was a rabbit called Holly. That was back when I lived on Watts Road.”
c) “I think her name was Holly. She was great but grew up to be massive!”
d) “Did your dog eat rabbits, by any chance?”
Ok, this last response was not actually on the test. But the scenario seemed to him so bizarre, as imaginative and sinister as the opening to any Poe short story, it was impossible not to develop and speculate from it.
Was Stefan really Stefan, or was he someone else in disguise? Did he come from a household that liked big dogs, or did his household keep dogs of any size? And what was with the size thing, anyway, big rabbits versus big dogs? Were these guys sizing each other up and the animals were euphemisms, or were the rabbits and dogs code names for something more menacing — Russian nerve agents, perhaps?
Above all, the premise that, on your night out in a bar, someone could come phishing for your University password by having a friendly chat about where you used to live or past pets seemed to him excessive and unrealistic. Excessive and unrealistic, that is, until his partner Ariadne reminded him about a phishing scam that had gone round on social media a few years back.
The scam involved an app that enticed you to enter the name of your first pet and the first street on which you lived. In return, it combined the words and rewarded you with your ‘porn-star name’.
Dickie Wiener. He had totally fallen for it.
But if he ever got locked out of the University systems permanently, at least he had a name and the idea for an alternative career
‘Dear Professor. I am sorry I did not make the tutorial this morning. The problem is I don’t do mornings. Could we reschedule for tomorrow afternoon?’
The chutzpah reminded him of Gertrude Stein’s response to the philosophy exam on William James’s course.
‘She sat down with the examination paper before her and she just could not. “Dear Professor James,” she wrote at the top of her paper, “I am so sorry, but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy today,” and left. The next day she had a postal card from William James saying, “Dear Miss Stein, I understand perfectly how you feel. I often feel like that myself.” And underneath it he gave her the highest mark in his course.’
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
The obligation on them to provide ‘pastoral care’ was so emphatic he truly believed it was in danger of usurping teaching as his primary function. Pastoral care was gospel. It was the higher truth, widespread, unquestionable, hieratic.
He resented the Gospel of Pastoral Care for a number of reasons.
1. He had been born angry, angsty and at an angle to the world. His moments of greatest difficulty had been his greatest moments (correction: only moments) of creativity. He expected students to suffer and struggle as much as he had. No more; but certainly no less.
2. He had never been offered training for tending to others’ pastoral care. His apoplectic rage during his morning swims when overtaken by the guy who insisted on wearing thongs provided ample demonstration that he hadn’t managed his own pastoral care.
3. He suspected that the very concept of pastoral care was deeply and inextricably Christian, thus gospel was the right word to describe its sacrosanct status. In Christianity, he understood the priest was supposed to be a kind of pastor or shepherd, the congregation the flock to be tended, and the community or diocese the pasture or field.
While he loved sheep, and now found them much more beautiful and intelligent than . . . than they’d been made out to be, he had never regarded students as his sheep. And even if he was made jobless (as he suspected was increasingly possible the more he wrote this blog), he had no plans, yet, to become a shepherd.
If personal tutoring was being immersed (baptised?) in Christianity, he thought that — in the interests of inclusivity — he should at least float alternative models of personal tutoring that might be drawn from other religions.
With the intention of sharing these with the PTPC – the new Personal Tutoring Policy Committee — he jotted down some ideas in his notebook:
Submit. Get on the floor and prostrate yourself. You may or may not get your reward in the hereafter (you may get a 1st/2:1), but don’t question our higher powers.
Sit. Breathe. All problems are appearances to mind. We are sorry we can’t help you. Your own actions are responsible for producing your results.
Stop breathing! Your very existence is the cause of suffering, your own and others’. Here’s a broom. We suggest you sweep very carefully on your way out.
Put this dot on your forehead. Find a statue – an elephant or a monkey are ideal — and chant a few pujas. Your problems won’t go away exactly, but you’ll soon forget what you came for, or even that you ever arrived.
Oy, you think YOU have problems?
— No, not this last. He must be serious. This last should go —
Take one sheep, scatter its entrails in a tent, preferably underneath a pillar of fire. Everything will be a bloody mess, but this is a great ritual for appeasing anger, particularly if you’ve no idea why on earth you caused it. Said sheep must be unblemished.
He sighed, put his pen down.
In the end, there was no getting away from the sheep.
He suspected his response to pastoral care suggested that he himself should be put out to pasture.
His stalker was back. This time, though, she had upped the ante by emailing his department, including the poet laureate, colleagues who had retired about twenty years ago, and even some who had died. This was the first thing the SP noted. Her research skills were as appalling as he remembered them.
What she had emailed as an attachment was the worst piece of writing he had ever read. And that included all the angsty creative writing drafts he had been subjected to over the years, plus his own adolescent outpourings. Entitled ‘The story between [the Secret Professor] and myself’, her account read like a pulpy mulch of misery memoir, regurgitated Mills & Boon, and really, really bad TV psychodrama.
Reading her ‘story’, he was disappointed to realise that it was too bad – or was that good? — even for him to satirise. It was beyond satire. It was better than anything he could make up.
When I came to the stage in the final poem, his eyes were fixed on me, following every step of mine. . . . He ignored me and asked again and ignored me again. . . . . I told him I fell in love with him. . . . I was angry he did not come up with some suggestions but focused on the past. “Go ahead.” He sensed my mood and stood beside me, lowering his head, crossing his arms. I ran away when he shouted. . . . I did not realize such email might make him sensitive about the relationship between us. . . . Although later I discovered my behaviour was of a naive girl. . . .
The plot, such as it was discernible, involved a naïve Chinese student attempting to seduce her older English male professor, who was ‘shy’ and reluctant. This was why she could never refer to his ‘thrusting thighs’ and ‘smouldering eyes’, though these tropes haunted the text, her writing a palimpsest. What was striking was that she was choosing to play the doomed heroine in a story of unrequited love. His character was a pawn, a mere reflection for her own vanity and narcissism.
He noted that she had now written a good deal more about him since she graduated than she had ever written on anything for her entire MA degree. There were surely easier ways to earn an MPhil, he thought.
He half-jokingly said to his partner Ariadne that anyone who fell in love with him obviously had a mental health problem. (He noted that Ariadne didn’t exactly disagree with this.) But the SP’s brother, a psychiatrist, confirmed there was indeed a psychiatric condition, erotomania, in which the patient develops an erotic fixation on an unattainable and inappropriate person. As his brother listed famous cases of these unfit objects of desire – Prince Charles, George V, Ronald Reagan, the has-been singer from the Moody Blues – the SP was affronted to be in such dismal, ragtag, right- wing and royal company.
What he found most deeply disturbing, however, was the quality of the student’s writing – the form, not the content. That was the most shaming thing in its circulation to his colleagues. They would wonder if she had been taught anything at all during her MA in Creative Writing. How could the University have let her graduate with any kind of English degree?
At least other academics – James Lasdun — had stalkers who could write, who could in turn become good copy for these professor-writers as they wrote up their stalking stories into bestsellers.
The SP thought the best response to the email circulation would be to grade the attachment and red-pen it before returning it to his inarticulate and incoherent stalker. Fail.
The buzzword was resilience. As personal tutors they were told to ‘develop students’ resilience skills’; as lecturers to ‘embed resilience in the curriculum’. ‘Resilience literacy’ was the new measure of a slightly previous buzzword, ‘wellbeing’, and — given that it was largely about not feeling things so deeply — the opposite of the buzz-phrase of about twenty years ago, ‘emotional literacy’. A new ‘toolkit for developing resilience in students’ had been created, as if students were cars needing to be fixed or flatpack furniture put together. From what he could see, the toolkit consisted of PowerPoint slides with words like utilize, which Orwell said you should never use when you can use the word use, and images of people meditating in mountains. Looking at the slides would mean that students would precisely not be meditating in mountains.
He suspected the Gospel of Resilience had come to them from other institutions, and particularly from the economy. Wasn’t there some formula about the balance of ‘resilience versus risks’? Or perhaps it had come from car suspension. The word made him think of the German ‘vorsprung durch Technik’, the slogan on those Audi ads from his childhood. Whenever he came across the word resilience, he heard again the clunk the Audi door made when it was closed.
The association was not inapt. Literally ‘to bounce back, jump back or recoil’, resilience derives from the Latin verb, resilere. According to dictionaries the word first described the ‘capability of a strained body to recover its size and shape after deformation caused especially by compressive stress.’ Had it really come to this, that university education was equivalent to straining a body with deformation through compressive stress? More broadly, he read, ‘resilience has historically been defined as the ability to return to the status quo after a disturbing event’. The broader definition added to the problem. Was university education meant simply to maintain the status quo or return the graduate to it? Didn’t the arts and humanities exist in order to challenge the status quo? To take his subject, you read English in order not to join institutions; and in the old days universities were not considered institutions. Treating students like the economy and tooling them with resilience now signalled the opposite.
And yet, he had to acknowledge, as he read up on some of the latest statistics, there were real problems with students’ ‘emotional wellbeing’:
Anxiety in students caused the most anxiety in himself and colleagues. As they were asked to do more and more things, for which they didn’t have training, to support students’ mental health — to schedule extra pastoral care tutorials; to monitor student attendance and report non-attenders; to arrange additional meetings for non-attenders who would continue not to attend – anxiety was spiralling. Was there a toolkit for lecturers to acquire resilience skills to deal with students’ lack of resilience skills?
With targets and toolkits and measures and evaluations and assessments, it seemed to him hardly surprising that students’ mental health problems were getting worse. For engineers he accepted that resilience was probably needed to design a suspension bridge, or a building that could withstand an earthquake. What, though, he wondered, had happened to pleasure, to joy — to losing then finding then losing yourself at university — particularly in the arts and humanities?
He remembered his own time at university as one of pleasure and indulgence. They weren’t assessed until the final 3 weeks of his final year. He never got feedback on a single essay he wrote. Lecturers had good biscuits and the time and energy to chat about books over them. And classes were much, much smaller. He was largely left to his own devices to read whatever he wanted, as long as he read. Very different from school, it felt not so much like learning as falling in love. You gave yourself over and you succumbed to each new encounter. A good book changed you irrevocably; it didn’t make you ‘resilient’.
Behind all this was the fact that back then, university was a privilege (no fees; a maintenance grant), not, at least in the arts and humanities, a factory equipping future workers with tools for the workplace. It was a time for putting off getting a job. His subject was considered useless by his lecturers, and valued because of that, because it couldn’t be ‘utilized’ in any toolkit. He and his fellow students were thin and thin-skinned, they got drunk and partied and worked hard, read and wrote a lot, and they idealised Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Keats, Morrissey and Kathy Acker — none of whom could be called resilient.
He thought his subject of English wouldn’t exist if resilience were its gospel. He wondered if they could market literature as a pleasure toolkit.
‘It was the best of times, it was the f*cking worst of times.’
‘Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the f*cking flowers herself.’
‘Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don’t f*cking know.’
‘To be, or not to be? That is the f*cking question.’
‘F*cking call me, Ishmael.’
‘Mr and Mrs Dursley of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly f*cking normal, thank you very much.’
‘As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic f*cking insect.’
‘Reader, I f*cking married him.’
‘My kingdom for a f*cking horse!’
‘<Exit, pursued by A F*CKING BEAR>’
‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own f*cking way.’
‘Romeo, where the f*ck art thou..?’
‘On Monday he ate through one apple, but he was STILL F*CKING HUNGRY.’
The Secret Professor 