Disgusted of academia: a university lecturer bewails his lot

There’s a beautiful moment in I Am the Secret Footballer (2012), a Guardian column turned whistle-blower memoir, when the anonymous author is momentarily freed from an enveloping depression caused by his career as a professional sportsman. He’s at Anfield to play against Liverpool in one of the biggest games of the season when he picks up a pristine, unused football before a warm-up drill and, inexplicably, sniffs it. With that inhalation he’s transported from the corruption, pressure, scandalous abuse and monstrous egos of elite sport and for a few seconds becomes a kid uncontainably excited at the prospect of kicking a new ball around his council estate. This Proustian reverie, a rediscovery of the simple pleasure of playing a game with other people, is treasure, because it reminds him why he chooses to do what he does with his time as an adult.

By contrast, it’s difficult to understand why the author of The Secret Lecturer is still an academic. After 15 years as a lecturer in an unnamed Arts and Humanities subject at an unspecified institution, he’s still clearly smart and funny – some vignettes of the foibles of middle-aged men in the workplace are sharply observed – but there is nothing to suggest that he takes, or, indeed, has ever derived, any happiness from his chosen career.

Some sense of that pleasure – the excitement of a new research project; an adrenaline rush during a lecture that you suddenly realise is pitch-perfect; the camaraderie of reading and thinking with others – would have made the disappointment and pain he clearly experiences in his working life more impactful and understandable. Even though he has not ‘set out to be deliberately gloomy’, he admits that he ‘probably accentuates the negative aspects of my job’.