Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun To Be With

 I'm not sure which act of the Shakespearean - or Websterian - tragedy my institution is now at. There's definitely been a murder, but the corpse is still twitching and there are plenty of suspects. The murderers have departed the scene, but there are a couple of new guys around, professing friendship ('I'm all about people…I can't rule out compulsory redundancies') but insisting that we go hiking in the woods where - completely coincidentally - some of their former colleagues went missing. Let's call them Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. 

But of course those of you who work in HE know how this one ends. Tolstoy was wrong when he said that 'happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way'. More fool him for writing in a period before liquid modernity and liquid capitalism. Contemporary higher education management is - if you can bear an overused metaphor - infectious and therefore unhappy in just the same way, even if panelling, finials and wince cellars disguise, for example, the vicious pension reductions in more favoured institutions. Its agents latch onto a host, suck it dry, then move on to the next victim, overwhelming its exhausted phages with a disarming smile and some slick words. Guildenstern lasted just two years in charge of a similar institution; Rosencrantz made Goldsmiths what it is today.

In the midst of all this, one little detail caught my eye at the end of the cheery email that announced we'd gone from having no debt and healthy reserves to a £20m deficit (can't think why the previous VC brought his departure forward a few months): the bit no-one really reads about an Employee Assistance Programme. Has anyone ever tried it? I imagine the conversation goes a little like this: 

Voice: 'Hello and Don't Panic. Megadodo Employee Assistance Programme. How can I help you?'

Employee: 'Hello. I'm Marvin. I'm not really sure how this works. I'm not actually an employee of yours'. 

Voice: 'That's alright sir/madam. Nor am I: we're all sub-contractors. We're here because your employer realised that institutions literally can't care about their employees and some managers couldn't handle brutalising people whose children's names they know. Also, helping people being happy and fulfilled doesn't really show up on an outputs spreadsheet. Meanwhile my company realised that while it too literally can't care either, it can make money paying less money to people like me who can pretend to care.* We can do care metrics: the more of you I talk to, the more I can bill your employer. Talking of which, could we hurry this up a bit?' 

Marvin: 'Wouldn't it be cheaper just to care about your colleagues enough to not make them need to beg for help in the first place? Capitalist managerialism is making me want to end it all'. 

Voice: 'Oh no'. 

Marvin: 'yes, it's terrible'. 

Voice: 'I know. If we don't keep under three deaths per month I lose my commission and the contract gets reviewed'. 

Marvin: 'That must be very stressful'. 

Voice: 'yes, but luckily my company has an Employee Assistance Programme with the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation'. 

Marvin: 'I know. That's who I work for'. 

According to the Guide, the inventors of outsourcing are 'a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes'. Fortunately, a copy of the Encyclopædia Galactica from a thousand years in the future fell through a time warp in which it describes the outsourcing division as 'a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first up against the wall when the revolution came'.