Introduction
Welcome to the Engine of Fake aka the modern neo-liberal university.
The modern university has failed and is adrift without an ethical or moral compass. Some universities have little idea of how to spell the word 'integrity' let alone practice it.
The modern university is mimetic of wider society. It copies and is a facsimile rather than a visionary guiding force that should play an instructional and leading role in society. As a mimetic Engine of Fake, the university copies the tropes, culture and governance of wider society.
However, the university and its management don't copy all aspects of society. For example, they only take the bad parts of corporate governance into the academic boardroom and they don't copy or use the good bits of corporate governance. All the good bits of corporate governance are discarded in the rain on the gum trodden steps leading up to campus. The good bits lie hidden in a cheap, plastic, non-biodegradable branded tote bag that small babies, voles and insects choke on after the pigeons have shat on it.
Of course this is not a real description of the university boardroom. It's much more dangerous than a cheap plastic tote bag that chokes babies and voles. The Engine of Fake is capable of destroying lives and livelihoods. It crushes ideas and pushes back advances in knowledge because it is based on fake assumptions that mimic society's worst values and practices.
Who Am I?
My name is Dr. Thomas Heaton. I am an academic with more than 35 year's experience in the sector. I have worked at Russell Group Universities in the UK for more than thirty years.
'My experience' is a composite of the experiences of my creator as well as the many conversations my creator has had with university staff across pay grades, genders, race, ethnicity and sexuality during my creator's career. The experience of my creator - and mentor - stretches back to the mid-1980s: way back before students were debt ridden customers.
Having been dreamt up, I almost feel real, so let me tell you a little about myself. I am Associate Professor of Liberal Arts at Raeminster University - that's Raeminster in the UK, not Raeminster, Georgia, USA. I loved my job, but it kind of fell out with me, or perhaps I fell out with it. Perhaps I wasn't paying attention enough to the university's Hard Knot of Tradition: the VC and his acolytes who block the way for everyone else and use public money to crush dissent.
So when I decided to step out of the trench and make a complaint, that's when I discovered how FAKE universities are. I also discovered how the senior university executive are incapable of managing universities without deceiving the public or wasting public money on an industrial scale. The misuse of public funds that I uncovered could be labelled corporate fraud.
The Lies on a Bus
The system of public research grant allocation in British universities is unaccountable to Parliament and the grants awarded do not reflect the real costs of university overheads.
Look at what UKRI guarantees:
Estates and indirect costs will be calculated by the research organisation and the agreed rates can be obtained from their finance department or research office. The costs should be entered as single annual figures (£ total pa for the project) and do not need to be justified [our emphasis] in the justification of resources.[1]
In effect the public is paying Vice Chancellors two or three times the cost of estate overheads so that they can use this public money to practice unaccountable and illegal activities on campus.
Effectively VCs operate enormous slush funds to crush any dissent and convert public money - taxpayer's money - into time in order to gaslight staff that draw attention to ethical and moral failure on campus. In effect, the Architects practice the same level of venality and indulge in the same deceitful and fake performances as some of our worst Cabinet Ministers and senior politicians.
So the lies on a bus, the Minister berating the civil servant and blatant breaking of the law by that scruffily hirsute serial philandering narcissistic Classics' discombobulation of an ex- PM are a facsimile of university corporate management. Or perhaps these senior political leaders have discovered that the lack of a moral or ethical compass at university allows you to flourish at the top in society?
Either way, universities have become an arena in which lies flourish, public money is wasted on an industrial scale, plagiarism is accepted and harassment and bullying are rife and not fully investigated.
Name and Shame
My creator is not interested in naming and shaming individual universities. My creator's agenda, which I fully share as part of this Engine of Fake project, is to tell a story about deceit of the neo-liberal university. This will be done through a trilogy of fictionalised stories.
I have been told that there are many accounts of the neo-liberal university written by earnest scholars. Their experiences are also the experiences of my creator. These earnest scholars' accounts are written for the echo chamber of university life so that everyone can sit around and read about the fact that they aren't going mad, and yes, these practices - which you will read about in forthcoming novels - are happening to them. However, nobody outside academia reads these accounts because:
a) They are generally stories that only interest academics
b) They are generally boring accounts
c) There is no humour, sex or authentic voice outside academia in the stories which makes them boring and only of interest to academics.
That's where my creator comes in. My creator would rather use me to tell their story.
Democracy of the Dead
In the first novel, Democracy of the Dead, I find myself in Washington at the annual conference of the International Association of Future Studies (IAFS).
It's a Saturday evening when the story begins. I'd spent the day visiting the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall. Looking back on that and the previous year in Paris and then the autumn gathering of IAFS in Nagasaki, I can't believe how much I have changed.
Well, I guess that's what happens when you Negotiate the Truth.
It was meeting Ruth that did it. I suppose that her liminal, edgy, multi-disciplinary research enfolded me in the edges of knowledge. Perhaps the museum had its affect in enfolding me too. You see it had some agency, affect. Together with Ruth it unlocked something about us that helps me to understand the future.
Democracy of the Dead is about the neo-colonial practices of universities. But rather than write something academic my creator wanted to write a novel. To tell the story as a love affair, a programming of one academic by another which leads to a mysterious set of commands and a resolution for me at the end of my stay in Washington.