The University of Wokeness

from a member of the founding cohort

I wrote this almost a year ago as I was graduating from my weird little uni. I discovered it today and the unbridled rage it was written with made me giggle. MUCH of this is fictionalised. Sorry to anyone from my uni who reads this and is pissed off. Don’t contact me about it though - I don’t take criticism well.

Enjoy x

After I left Warwick, I decided I was too cool for it. To have failed at something felt unbearable. I had to transform the experience so that it had failed me; any sane person would have done the same thing and gone home. I convinced myself I had made the only rational and civilised choice. “It just wasn’t for me”, “It didn’t have my people”, “I guess I didn’t really fit in”. I rattled off these statements to various friends and family with such a strange pride. I think now that perhaps this was all a lie. I was not too cool, just too scared. Too ill to cope. Regardless, I’d committed to these statements as my official story and so I let them become true. My personal data-miners picked up what I was putting down and it was not long before I started getting Instagram adverts for a brand-new university in East London. It advertised itself as a place where we’d create ‘solutions to the world's most complex and interconnected problems’. This will do, I thought. This fits the narrative quite nicely. This is sufficiently quirky.

For the six months leading up to that first day in September I was sceptical as to whether it was even a real place. It was completely possible that there was no university and the whole thing had been a total scam. I had these thoughts frequently but I didn’t attach any anxiety to them. If this institution turned out to be complete bullshit, or if it went bust two months in, I could just take another “gap year”. I was happy at home. I could be a professional recluse indefinitely.

But alas, come that day at the end of September, I was standing on the third floor of our university “campus” with 60 other eager beavers shuffling awkwardly and lightly sweating. I’m not being a dick when I put campus in inverted commas. But the campus really was just couple of big empty rooms with a few silicon-valley aesthetic touches. From the outside it looked like a small, gothic East London pub. Freshers week was renamed Founders week. Freshers had connotations of hazing and was lacking in wokeness. It was named Founders Week because we were the first cohort of students the university would ever have. And we’d be the first people to graduate. If, that was, the university managed to stay open for the whole three years. I’d rather they’d stuck to calling it freshers week. They’d placed a university, and an accommodation block to match, slap bang in the middle of Whitechapel, home to the largest South Asian population in England. We walked from our accommodation block to the university everyday, dodging the Bangladeshi food market that stretched along the road, avoiding their produce in favour of the oh-so-comforting Sainsbury’s meal deals. We ate our prepackaged, overpriced sandwiches over some light conversation about the horrors of gentrification. Being referred to as a founder every 5 seconds was more than a little uncomfortable

Founders week kicked off with a queasy ceremony where each of us were asked to step over a red line that the marketing team had taped to the linoleum floor. It was meant to signal the start of our new lives. From the crossing of that red line until the start of the first class, life was a whirlwind. Founders week consisted of laughing yoga, a DJing workshop, a 3 minute silence in which we were forced to stare into the eyes of a fellow classmate, and a graffiti workshop spray-painting the walls of brick lane with nervous bits of student artwork.

The week culminated in a 3-course feast cooked by a chef who had apparently just gained a Michelin star. The main course was a big fat lump of duck. I was nervous and had no appetite but I was determined to behave normally. I cut myself a slice of the big bird and shoved it in my mouth. Five minutes later I was still chewing. The duck was putting up a noble fight. With each bite, bile rose higher in my throat and my jaw became more fatigued. I chewed down on a grizzly bit of fat and felt my gag reflex wake. I excused myself to the bathroom where I spat the mangled duck into some blue tissue roll.

I’d been seated for this extravagant meal next to one of the ‘founders’ of the university. A Danish businessman who happened to be the one who’d arranged the Michelin star chef - a friend of his. When I resumed my place at the dining table he noticed I wasn’t eating my slab of duck anymore. “Are you not a fan of the duck?”. No, it’s hideous. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever eaten. You’re an idiot and you have too much money. “a bit full”.

The feast ended with speeches from all four of the institutional founders. These were men who had pumped enough money, or intellectual muscle, or ideally both, into the university and had therefore ascended to big dick status. The last of the founders opened up the floor to the rest of the room. “This is an actively anti-hierarchical institution, so if you have something you’d like to say, something to contribute to the space, please do take the microphone”. Pandoras box shot open. There must have been at least 15 speeches from fellow students. They all said a variation of the same thing. About how weird they were. How lost and lonely they had felt. How they’d never fit in anywhere in their whole lives (the whole eighteen years). That was, until they found this wonderful university. They finally felt seen and accepted. They had found their family. This week had been the best of their lives. Some even added performative flourishes, audience participation - “seriously guys, I think we should all give ourselves a pat on the back for taking such a big leap”. I managed a half grimace as I lifted my arm over my head and patted my stupid back. Their individuality complexes were rivalling even my own, it was threatening.

From that point on, “space” was tenaciously filled and occupied by anyone who could get their hands on it. Our opinions were so important. God, we’d all simply die if we didn’t get to hear each other’s unique perspectives. Truly innovative was each young genius!

The founders and their underlings quickly filled the bare campus with thrills and amusements. They had everything. A vintage upcycled piano, stalls that doubled as ancient style drums, hanging chairs, biophilic wall design, multi-faith prayer rooms, and tampons in every gender neutral bathroom. However, by the end of the first week of teaching it was clear they had missed out on something vital. There were in fact no rooms which had been suitably designed for teaching. The founders reiterated, “we are not an institution who want to do prescriptive teaching and typical lecturing”. This was all well and good, we were on board with the anti-hierarchical pedagogy, but we simply couldn’t hear a thing anyone was saying. The professors would turn to the right of the long, thin room and say, “the World Wildlife Fund often creates conservation areas for animals by violently displacing the indigenous people who originally live there”. Before the professor had the chance to expand there’d be a call from the far left side of the room, “Sorry, our table didn’t catch that. Could you just repeat?”. And then the professors would say, “Oh yes, my apologies, I was just explaining that the WWF have been accused of displacing indigenous peoples in the name of preserving wildlife”. It would go on and on this way until the suggestion box – a hostile paper holding facility - was overflowing with the suggestion that learning might be improved by being able to hear the teachings. The founders conceded. Hierarchy or no hierarchy, hearing was essential. They rectified the problem by introducing a soft foamy microphone which could be safely thrown across the room from professor to student to other student, and magnify the vital opinions of each member. And so, with the chunky foam microphone in tow, we set about solving the world’s most complex and interconnected problems.

Our tiny Italian philosophy professor Riccardo opens the class: “Can an eye see?”. There is a hushed intellectual silence. One of the more dim witted among us murmurs “wow what an incredible question”. I stroke my beardless chin and look up to the sky. I have no intention of formulating an answer to this, I’m just trying to blend in. The usual hands stick up into the air. Riccardo scans the room before landing on Sophie. I grimace in her direction. Sophie is cold and extremely beautiful. Both of these things together mean that I characterise her as a nasty bitch, and I say this often. If she were cold and ugly, or even cold and just average looking, I would say “Sophie? Hm yeah I don’t know she seems a little cold to me”. Or on the days I was feeling more gracious I might say “Sophie? Yeah I guess she’s a bit shy”. The addition of her being undeniably beautiful, tall, and skinny somehow gives her coldness a mal-intent. Yes, yes, internalised misogyny, I’m a product of my environment what can I say? Professor Riccardo throws the foam microphone in her direction. The throw falls short and knocks over a stainless steel water bottle and a large cup of barely drunk tea belonging to one of her table mates. She saves her MacBook from the carnage, stands, and delivers her answer;

‘From my point of view I’d say the eyes themselves don’t actually do the "seeing" - they just collect light and send it to the brain. The brain's the one that actually processes all that info and turns it into something we can understand as vision.’ There is enthusiastic nodding from the professor. She continues, ‘if you think about it, what we “see” is really our brain's version of the world, not necessarily reality itself’. Riccardo is nodding so enthusiastically now that I think his head might fall clean off. He needn’t be. It’s a mediocre answer.

I look over to our assistant professor Ezekiel to gauge his reaction. He is the more important of the two men and everybody knows it. To our small cohort, this man is God. He’s done it all. He’s fulfilled the neoliberal dream. We read and reread his website, analysing his life journey. Seeing where we might be able to sync up our career timelines, lamenting the bits where we’re already too late to best him – child prodigy, pianist and England squad basketball player by seventeen. He looks at Sophie and smiles as she finishes her answer. She is his chosen protégé.

Sophie is a good choice. She’s smart but not radical. She’ll challenge but she won’t offend. She won’t point out that you can’t be both a radical activist mitigating against the climate crisis and also work for Black Rock investment firm (where she’s applied for the Spring graduate scheme). She won’t kick up a fuss. She’ll balance mutually exclusive identities with ease, the same way Ezekiel does. Ezekiel is shameless in his inconsistencies, reckless even. On Tuesday he will post an infographic about the amount of Carbon emitted by a single Ryanair flight. On Friday he will thank British Airways for his first class flight, #PaidPromotion. On Monday he will teach us about the unprecedented carpet bombing enacted under the Obama administration. On Wednesday he will post a selfie of himself and Malia Obama “Happy birthday babe. Miss you girl”. He not only gets away with this, he is rewarded for it. He dances happily on the centre-left, fucks around in the odd think-tank, and doesn’t rock the god damn boat. He is palatable, and so is his prodigy.