There was no party to begin the academic year with, nor was there a celebration to mark its end. There was no money for that kind of thing anymore, not in this place, a strange department….demurely set within a neo-classical, neo-fascistic building and housing the most diverse assortment of academics, so diverse that any point of commonality between them was quashed immediately in the name of a kind of vulgar essentialism. This department prided itself on hostilities, on living out a kind of antagonistic practice of everyday life, a kind of impersonal fellowship that survived on exacerbating frustration and anger between colleagues. But, at the end of a semester, and with the dawning realisation in most academics minds, that the onslaught of the summer months ahead held some promise, there was a lapse in the barriers of defence, and when the time came to gather in the seminar room for the upgrade papers, the academics seemed more relaxed. Having spent the year frittering between departmental meeting after departmental meeting, delivering lectures written hastily the night before, hating each other and their students because of the workload, the idealisation of the summer and the prospect of ‘getting down’ to writing revealed itself as a symptom, a way of coping with the pressures of academic life, and feelings of well being towards the book chapters that could now be written or articles finally edited for publication. The promise of writing allowed a kind of nostalgia to be generated between colleagues about their efforts that year. Academics may work hard, but they also grumble hard too.
Upgrade papers were rituals, an opportunity to present the shimmer of a research project, the glimpse of a much bigger thing. Members of staff were in attendance. Some would come along for the whole two days, others would sneak in and out of the seminar room intermittently, occasionally raising an eyebrow in recognition of those colleagues that stood as firm allies, showing to each other who was with who, and what it meant to proclaim allegiance to a disciplinary camp. Those who stayed for the duration paid attention, concentrated, phrased their questions carefully and tactfully. They were invested. In those moments, one could catch onto the vibe (often lost in the muddle of bureaucracy, of form filling and protocol) that some academics felt committed to their apprentices. But emotions run high in these spaces, and more often than not, each kindly response was met with a counter-attack by someone else, and not just by qualified academics.
It was the worst department on campus. Financial difficulties, hostilities between disciplinary camps, self-seeking academics in the guise of managers allowed to run freely between budget after budget, filtering and pillaging numbers. It wasn’t so easy to lay the blame for the circumstances were more complicated than that. But this didn’t stop the act of blaming playing itself out, from hour to hour, year to year; the desire for someone to be held accountable, responsible for each downfall, each minor glitch.