You have been warned. First, David Butterfield has excoriated Cambridge University in these pages, leaving its standing devalued. Now Julian Stannard, a poet and novelist, delivers in fiction a devastating evisceration of other current universities. The University of Bliss belies its title. This is a work of high satire and Stannard vents his frustration with more than a touch of Swiftian saeva indignatio. His ridicule is extreme and addictively readable.
The novel follows the career of the newly appointed vice chancellor Gladys Nirvana, partial to foot massages which transport her to regions signalled by her surname and give her acute sexual gratification. She is a renegade academic turned administrator, self-serving, freeloading and money-grubbing, who enjoys a staggeringly high salary. Bureaucrats have taken over the university; academics and scholars are as nothing in the world of the Office of Continuous Improvement and the Department of Wellbeing. The spiritual needs of the university are nurtured by the Lady Bishop Imelda Wellbeloved, pro-vice chancellor, whose pet Shih Tzu has been neutered ‘to align with the university’s non-binary policy’.
Dickensian names proliferate – Fred Clueless is the head librarian; Saffron Fraud, OBE, runs the Branding and Marketing Centre. If surviving lecturers, who are constantly having their salaries cut, infringe the administration’s rules, they are relocated to punitive accommodation in neighbouring Shit Town, where Terry Eagleton has been seen getting off the train. Since this dystopian novel is set in 2035, he would be 92.
Students, too, are considered an administrative nuisance and are watched – just like the academics, whose ‘offices and computers are monitored, for any incriminating evidence of scholarly activity’. There are surveillance cameras everywhere.
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