Crispin turned up today, looking at the vacant house across the road.

He gave me his final notice speech.
Don't claim to understand it all but here it is ...

Sledge

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"Was auf einer Leiter erreichbar ist interessiert mich nicht".

I shall begin somewhat obscurely but I remain confident that this abstruse reflection will eventually come out in the wash. In an influential lecture on “The World of Science and the Everyday World”, delivered in 1953 — as it happens, not long after I was delivered — the philosopher Gilbert Ryle deals with a problem we sometimes seem to have when we consider ordinary everyday objects — like our desks — from the point of view of subatomic physics. On the one hand a very useful and perhaps even beautiful piece of furniture; on the other nothing more than atoms, electrons, perhaps even quarks and God-knows-what-else, buzzing around each other, fast and furious, but according to calculable forces. Do we have two desks: as it were a “real” physical one and a mere commonsense illusion? Or else a “real” everyday desk and a strange story made up about it by the physicist? Can both accounts of the desk be reconciled so that we become, as it were, at peace with the world again?

Characteristically, Ryle seeks not to solve this problem but to dissolve it. He uses an analogy to do this. I shall extemporise upon it. One day a university student is admitted to the accounts department. He is shown a double-entry ledger. It contains all the University’s incoming monies (fees, grants, donations and so on) and all its expenditures (on books, electricity, gardening, salaries, etc.). The accountant tells him that every aspect of the University’s life is covered here. Not a single activity is missing. But, wonders the student, thinking back to his Anglo-Saxon class last term: “I can find lots here in the ledgers: the books for the library, the salary paid to my tutor, the printing costs for the course materials. So, if I work hard enough, I can find just how much of the university’s income was used to make my classes happen and what profit or loss there was ... but ... that was never anything I was considering when contemplating the beauty of Beowulf or working out noun declensions in The Wanderer. These accounts do indeed cover every aspect of university life, but only in a certain way. How I actually go about being a student, day to day, attending lectures, reading in the library, playing sport or talking to my friends in the ref. ... these things can’t possibly be here”.

So, do we have two universities or just the one? The answer is fairly obvious: we have just the one but under two different descriptions, each with its own interest in “the thing”. Same with physics and common sense: a single world under two different, equally plausible, descriptions. The vast differences between the modes of describing do not affect the number of things we have.

So: getting dangerously close to the point, let’s reverse the analogy. Try to imagine Australian society, say, in a thousand years. The atomic physicists have taken over and rule by a kind of epistemocracy. It is forbidden to think of your desk as Aunt Mildred’s heirloom, the place where you wrote your last great poem, something to be cleaned and polished next Saturday with beeswax. No. It’s a precise configuration of subatomic particles and it’s your job to find out just which ones, just where, for how long and according to what forces and laws. And if it is considered, shudder the thought, as Aunt Mildred’s heirloom, and the rest, then all of these descriptions must be transformed, very precisely, into ultimately physical descriptions. Aunt Mildred is exhumed and her corpse subjected to spectrometric analysis. The printed poem is centrifuged and dealt with ditto. The beeswax is considered only under a scanning electron microscope. The physicists’ world would be the purest of pure micro-management.

Naturally enough, this would be a ridiculous world to live in. Impossible even. But if we come back to the other side of the analogy, we can see that the university today is in a situation where the rather specialist knowledge of the accountant has all-but established its own epistemocracy. And it is equally ridiculous and impossible to live in. There are, no doubt, already attempts in train to ensure that the precise quantum of experience that a student has in, say, Philosophy 101 is costed; that the value of a given library book is measured per check-out unit; that every word of a lecture is recorded and financially evaluated; that course materials are inspected — quantitatively — for “quality” at the point of their submission. All of this is so much easier when the work is (as it increasingly is) online. Simple bit of spyware in each new machine and the micro level of costing goes right down to the keystroke, the mouse-click and the pixel. Accountancy takes another giant step towards fulfilling its physics envy.

To put it shortly, Ryle’s university accountant’s version of the university is now beyond mere ascendancy. We face living with a single description of our very lives.

What Ryle didn’t quite consider is that there can be actual, pragmatic, on-the-ground, battles between descriptions of how the world is, might be, or should be. For us, such battles — I hope — can continue. To quote him at his nearest point to mine:

"One cannot say ‘Bo’ to accountancy, but one can and should say ‘Bo’ to the accountant who leaves his ledgers to edify us with the moral he pretends to draw from his accounts, namely that books are nothing but entries in columns of pounds, shillings and pence".

So much then for the accountant’s version of the university to which I say an unreserved ‘Bo’ as soon as it oversteps its own mark and pretends to tell us something (a moral perhaps?) about the meaning of the university. Does this mean that I’m against accountability?

On the contrary, I’m all for. In the domain outwith the accountant’s grasp, and despite his attempts to enumerate it, in the domain of what I might call ordinary university life, the everyday world of the university, there are plenty of ways in which we account for ourselves. Why else is it called PUBLIC-ation?

I was never cut out for the “corporate”: but it’s inevitable once you reach a certain level of seniority — just as the best nurses are taken off the ward and assigned to the office to make up duty rosters, order equipment and calculate the next year’s budget. It’s probably ultimately not the fault of any local administrator (no matter how senior) — the motto across the whole Australian university sector is: mirror the government’s public service structure or die.

So, you get to a certain level of seniority, take on admin. tasks, start to think the accountant’s description of the university — you have to in order to do the job — and, before long, you’re not an academic any more. This is what happened to me during my nine-odd years of FT admin.

I don’t know when it began. Maybe:
1. When I stopped being “Crispin” and became “s850361a”— when did you first memorise your staff number?
2. When, half way through a one-minute, considered and reasoned refutation of his latest bit of inane policy, a certain ad-minion gave me the netball “time-out” sign from Kath and Kim.
3. When I heard a “Vision for the Future” speech in which a big Professor of Administration in a plastic suit said quite blatantly, proudly even: “We are all salesmen”. The only thing I know about being a salesman is Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman (1949). Towards the end, the dying salesman, Willy Loman says of his treatment by the corporation: “You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away — a man is not a piece of fruit”.

Meanwhile....

At a university in a galaxy far away, it’s careers day and I’m sitting in the audience. An anxious parent asks: “What use are the humanities and social sciences?” (cf. “What use is a newborn baby?”) Jobs? Making a more just world? Feeding the hungry and curing the sick? No: they will make you a better person!

The row of Heads of Department, academics-become-administrators at the back: sedentary, chain-smoking alcoholics, to a man! All well published ... and perished; they looked old beyond their years. At the end, I introduced myself to one of their number. As I offered my hand, he held out his, saying: “Just hold it, it shakes all by itself”. I thought I’d just got a bad bunch on a bad day and chose to ignore the experience. I shouldn’t have! Now I know why they all looked like the gal at the end of the Belgian film Fear and Trembling — humiliated because of her lack of corporate fit and, after many degradation ceremonies at the hands of two-faced bullying bosses, eventually assigned to clean the toilets. Or: why they all looked like scared animals, longing to find a bolt-hole in the country somewhere.

They looked as I feel now: someone who has slowly climbed a tall ladder only to discover one thing: I suffer from vertigo. I should have listened to Wittgenstein when I had the chance back in about 1977. In Culture and Value, appropriately subtitled "A Selection from the Posthumous Remains", he says:

"I might say: if the place I want to reach could only be climbed up to by a ladder, I would give up trying to get there. For the place to which I really have to go is one I must actually be at already.
Anything I might reach by climbing a ladder does not interest me".