Academic landscapes

At Fulford, three and a half weeks before the Battle of Hastings, an Anglo-Saxon army defended York from a large Norwegian force. Forewarned, they waited at a deep stream: flanked to their right by the River Ouse and their left by marshes. Despite their strong position, the battle did not go well for the English, and they were overwhelmed. One wing of their army retreated along the Ouse and the other, almost encircled, through the swamp. Thousands died. The invaders could walk ‘dry-foot over the fen’ on the corpses of the slain.

Five days later, at Stamford Bridge, the invasion was ended by a large English force that ‘dyed the ocean waves for miles around with Viking gore’. The first defeat, though, had high cost. Without it, a stronger English force might have confronted the Normans at Hastings; and if that decisive battle had gone otherwise, there would have been no genocide in the North and the Anglo-Saxon era would have continued for a while longer.

I suspect some men who fell at Fulford knew the stakes, and that they would not have been surprised even by the end of their world. Theirs was a culture that grew in the wreck of Rome, and their poems often turned to ruins, winter, and transience:

He who deeply considers, with wise thoughts,

This foundation and this dark life,

Old in spirit, often remembers

So many ancient slaughters, and says these words:

‘Where have the horses gone? Where are the riders? Where is the giver of gold?

Where are the seats of the feast? Where are the joys of the hall?

O the bright cup! O the brave warrior!

O the glory of princes! How the time passed away,

Slipped into nightfall as if it had never been!’

There still stands in the path of the dear warriors

A wall wondrously high, with serpentine stains.

A torrent of spears took away the warriors,

Bloodthirsty weapons, wyrd the mighty,

And the storms batter the stone walls,

Frost falling binds up the earth,

The chaos of winter, when blackness comes,

Night’s shadow looms, sends down from the north

Harsh hailstones in hatred of men.

All is toilsome in the earthly kingdom,

The working of wyrd changes the world under heaven.

Here wealth is fleeting, here friends are fleeting,

Here man is fleeting, here woman is fleeting,

All the security of this earth will stand empty.

The Wanderer; RM Liuzza translation

A millennia on, the marshes where men died are domesticated. A sprawling campus, part of the University of York, covers their eastern reaches. The waters are channelled into generic, forgettable pools fringed with generic, forgettable buildings. It is, of course, the modern kind of forgettable architecture. Every chunk of grey and glass has its own unique variation on the shape of a shoebox. The innovations are of the type that everyone in the world has seen so much of that only those paid to do so can even pretend to care anymore.

In this, the University of York is no better or worse than every other university. They have all spread their aggressively mediocre buildings across the cities and towns: shiny lumps of architectural conformity that advertise the shallowness, greed, and transience of the institutions to the whole world. We should be thankful for them. They physically represent the death of the modern university’s soul, and so make it obvious. Now a university is just a machine for uprooting humanity. It takes the young from home but gives then no adult responsibilities, drops them into a society of other uprooted youth, habituates them to the mentality of the virtual class, and leaves them drifting in debt and doubt.

At this point, some readers may hope I will criticise the ‘woke’. I will not. A worm digesting a living human being is a problem. A worm digesting a corpse is just the natural order of things. The universities are corpses and fashionable ideologies are maggots.

A terrible decision killed the universities. History, always Sphinx-like, showed them three good things, but only let them keep two. The one that they left on the table was the one that they should have treasured. Without it, their wyrd was written. The three gifts history offered were called ‘important’, ‘new’, and ‘true’.

The academics, some through greed and some through ambition, some for ideology and some for fear of speaking up, mostly chose ‘important’ and ‘new’. The rewards were prestige, names in print, foreign conferences, and money borrowed from the future. The cost was leaving truth on the table. So the replication crisis spreads from psychology through every discipline, one by one, to the point that a former editor of the British Medical Journal argues that it is ‘time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise’. The situation in the humanities is, as everyone knows, worse. Living closer to myth than to science, they sense the shape of their choice, so they muddy the waters by arguing that there never was any truth anyway. An earnest young postgraduate once told me that texts have no meaning. I said I didn’t know what he meant. He tried to explain it to me again. I’m not sure why. He must have thought that he was saying something.

Some academics with honest, timid souls chose ‘new’ and ‘true’ instead. They are the last heat left in the corpse. Their good-enough papers land in the second tier of journals, or below. That is the price of leaving importance on the table. Unable to grab the research money, they drift into teaching roles. Barely able to keep up with the blizzard of publications, they inevitably teach the ‘new’ and ‘important’ ones. Their own, different, choice stops mattering. They are not important. They gradually become tepid imitations of their more successful colleagues. The last heat leaves the body of academia.

If you stand in damp fields in twilight in winter, where once was a marsh, when the students are gone, you might sometimes see a strange shape on the water, a sparrow’s shadow glimpsed and then gone. If it’s not just the light, and some spirits do linger, I deeply doubt that they’ve been impressed. When they had to pick, they left ‘new’ on the table, and…

Here wealth is fleeting, here friends are fleeting,

Here man is fleeting, here woman is fleeting,

All the security of this earth will stand empty.

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Image: TFTV, University of York by John Robinson (CC BY 2.0)