This is not fan fiction. Could have fooled me

I’ve written plenty of those too over the years. Editorially, we tend to advise against, for fear that the hook will disguise rather than illuminate.

But having just finished an 80k word book on higher education governance with Warhammer as the metaphor, I both think I now understand more about governance, and want to avoid Watford’s branch of Games Workshop like the plague.

Brian Lucey spent 38 years at Trinity College Dublin, served on its governing body, and published over 400 papers. He then wrote a book arguing that the system he thrived in has become a civilisation that survives by keeping its founding purpose technically alive while ensuring it can never actually speak.

The emperor is a hostage uses the fictional universe of Warhammer 40,000 – what I now understand to be a tabletop wargame set in a galaxy-spanning human empire governed by a corpse on a life-support machine – as an analytical framework for diagnosing university dysfunction.

I’ll be honest. My first reaction was to dismiss it as eccentric. Some of it is. But buried in the extended analogy are five arguments that deserve engagement from anyone working on student interests, institutional reform, or higher education policy more generally – whether or not they’ve ever painted a miniature Space Marine.

Worse than dead

The standard critique of universities comes in two versions. The cynical version says universities have abandoned truth for money. The defensive version says truth is alive and well, thank you, and the critics are overblown. Lucey offers a third position that’s more interesting than either.

Truth – the belief that understanding the world has intrinsic value – hasn’t been abandoned. It’s still sincerely held by many academics, often at real personal cost. People structure entire careers around it. Universities didn’t invent this belief cynically – they inherited it from intellectual traditions that long predate the modern institution. The belief is real, but it’s no longer the principle by which the system behaves.

For Lucey, what happened is that as universities expanded – mass education, industrial research funding, global competition – the founding belief couldn’t be abandoned without destroying institutional legitimacy. The entire enterprise rests on it. Without the claim to truth, universities become training centres, consultancy firms, or credential factories. So the belief must be preserved – it must be kept alive.

But the system has grown too large, too complex, and too financially entangled to listen to it.

This is the moment of “enthronement.” Truth is still worshipped, still invoked constantly – in mission statements, accreditation documents, strategic plans, speeches to new students and donors. These aren’t lies – they’re liturgy. The belief remains sacred but it’s no longer sovereign. What changes isn’t what the system says it values but what actually governs behaviour.

The distinction matters for students because it explains a paradox that otherwise looks like straightforward hypocrisy – universities genuinely believing in educational transformation while systematically organising teaching around throughput, satisfaction metrics, and retention dashboards.

The contradiction isn’t moral but structural. When truth conflicts with scale, funding, risk, reputation, or throughput, truth yields quietly, and the language remains unchanged.

Students experience the gap between rhetoric and reality but have no framework for naming it, so they internalise the dissonance as personal disappointment rather than systemic failure.

Villains

A lot of higher education commentary identifies a cause for dysfunction – neoliberalism, managerialism, marketisation, the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the National Student Survey (NSS), whichever preferred devil is in vogue. Lucey’s analysis is more unsettling because it identifies four distinct pathological patterns operating simultaneously, reinforcing each other, and none requiring deliberate bad faith from anyone.

The first is output fetishism – competition stripped of judgment, where papers must flow, grants must be submitted, students must be processed, and reflection gets reclassified as procrastination while care gets reclassified as inefficiency.

The second is prestige obsession, the slow replacement of substance with appearance – a paper is good because it’s published in a good journal, and the journal is good because it publishes papers like this, with prestige feeding on itself until entire literatures emerge that are exquisitely calibrated to the tastes of gatekeepers while drifting steadily away from the world they claim to describe.

Then there’s perpetual restructuring – strategic plans, restructures, transformations, initiatives, and roadmaps layered on top of each other so that nothing is ever allowed to stabilise long enough to be evaluated honestly. Failures are never owned because they belong to previous configurations, and successes are never consolidated because the next change is already underway.

Finally, bureaucratic accretion – compliance layers that accumulate, forms that reproduce, mandatory trainings that proliferate, and no process ever retired because retiring a process carries risk while adding one can always be justified. The result isn’t sudden collapse but slow suffocation.

What matters about the quartet isn’t so much the individual diagnoses – regular readers will recognise each one. What matters is that they reinforce each other. Publish more, brand better, restructure constantly, document everything – none of these imperatives contradict one another, and all of them undermine truth-seeking in small, deniable ways. Together they form a system in which nobody needs to be a villain and everybody is complicit.

It’s why moral exhortation fails. Telling academics to “be braver” or “care more about truth” misunderstands the problem entirely, because the issue isn’t motivation – it’s that bravery is punished structurally, and caring is only rewarded when it aligns with metrics.

The SU officers I work with who have led a campaign for something, won every argument, secured every commitment, and watched nothing change will recognise it immediately. The system didn’t resist their campaign. It absorbed it.

Overlapping predation

A cracking chunk of it concerns external assessment – REF, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), EFMD Quality Improvement System (EQUIS), and the rankings. The standard critique is that these systems are flawed, gameable, and distortionary. Lucey adds something – they are multiple overlapping cycles that never synchronise, and each iteration learns from the gaming strategies of the last.

REF preparation bleeds into survey season bleeds into accreditation site visits bleeds into data collection – there’s no recovery period between cycles. Each assessment demands more comprehensive legibility than the last – REF 2029 adds “people, culture and environment” with metrics on workload, mental health, and equality, diversity, and inclusion that, however well-intentioned, create new categories of legibility and new targets for gaming.

QS introduced sustainability and employability rankings as separate products, each requiring new data submissions. What can’t be measured in iteration N gets operationalised by iteration N+1.

The deeper insight is about complicity. Universities created global rankings, participated enthusiastically in international comparisons, competed for prestige on metrics they helped define, and demanded that knowledge be made globally legible, portable, and comparable. In doing so they created the conditions for external assessment regimes to emerge as systematised predation. You can’t broadcast your excellence on every available frequency and then complain when someone builds a commercial infrastructure around measuring it.

The complicity runs deeper still – REF is administered by academics, AACSB and EQUIS peer review teams are academics, and the rankers consult academics for survey design. The assessment ecosystem is composed of the assessed – but coordinated by entities that profit from the anxiety the cycles create. For-profit companies and commercial publishers have revenue interests, and the accreditation bodies charge substantial fees.

And you can’t just refuse to participate. Institutions that don’t engage with REF lose quality-related funding. Business schools without AACSB or EQUIS accreditation lose access to international student markets. Universities that boycott rankings continue to be ranked anyway, using imputed data, often performing worse due to non-participation penalties built into methodologies.

The upshot for students is that institutional resources, attention, and energy that might otherwise go toward teaching quality, curriculum innovation, or genuine student support are permanently redirected toward feeding multiple assessment machines simultaneously. The institution is always in preparation-or-recovery mode across several fronts, and it can’t stabilise long enough to do the thing it claims to exist for.

Corridor decisions

One of the book’s other upsetting sections concerns what Lucey calls elite circuits – informal networks of trust, private communications, reputation-based access, invitation-only collaborations, off-the-record conversations, and shared cultural or intellectual literacy that signals belonging.

Those who can access the circuits don’t experience academia as most people do – they aren’t trapped in grant cycles, bureaucratic queues, or institutional silos, but move laterally across institutions, disciplines, and countries with relative ease. Opportunities appear before they’re advertised, risks are signalled early, and failures are softened or redirected.

None of this is necessarily sinister. Elite circuits exist because the formal system is slow, noisy, and unreliable, and when stakes are high, those with experience learn not to rely solely on open calls, transparent metrics, or procedural fairness. They rely on trusted pathways.

The cost is opacity. From the outside, outcomes appear arbitrary or unjust – why did this person move so easily, why did that collaboration form so quickly? The answer isn’t always excellence or corruption. It’s often just access to channels that others can’t see or enter.

It also explains why reform efforts that focus solely on formal structures repeatedly fail. Changing the visible system doesn’t touch the hidden one – metrics can be revised, policies rewritten, governance reformed, and yet outcomes remain stubbornly stratified because the real traffic flows elsewhere.

The consequences for students are direct and uncomfortable. The formal system they encounter – applications, assessments, grades, feedback mechanisms, representation – isn’t where the most consequential decisions about their education are made. Staffing decisions, curriculum priorities, resource allocation, and strategic direction are shaped significantly through informal channels that students not only lack access to but lack the ability to perceive.

Student engagement strategies that focus entirely on formal governance participation – more seats at tables, better survey mechanisms, improved representation structures – will be absorbed by the institutional machinery without changing outcomes. The table itself may not be where the meal is being decided.

Dying memory

But it’s the book’s final chapter that is most disturbing.

Lucey argues that the system has now produced a cohort of academics who never experienced truth-as-sovereign and therefore can’t recognise its absence. For them, metrics aren’t a distortion of scholarship – metrics are scholarship. Impact case studies aren’t a bureaucratic imposition – they’re what research means. Precarity isn’t an injustice – it’s simply the condition of academic labour. The question “but is it true?” is met with “true by what standard? Which framework? Whose evaluation criteria?”

For Lucey, they’re not cynical – cynicism requires memory. They’re sincere. They believe in excellence, impact, rigour, and innovation, using these words without irony because they have no experience of those words meaning anything else. When they enforce metrics, they do so in good faith, and when they design curricula around outcomes and descriptors, they do so with genuine concern for quality.

They’ll train the generation after them the same way because this is all they know. Because adaptation, once it reaches this depth, becomes culture.

If this is true of early-career academics, it’s doubly true of students. Student voice and student engagement work assumes students can articulate what’s wrong, but if students have been educated entirely within a system where satisfaction surveys are quality assurance, where learning outcomes are learning, and where employability data is educational success, they may be structurally incapable of demanding the transformation they’ve never seen.

You can’t miss what you never had, and you can’t demand what you can’t imagine. And it’s not students’ failure – it’s the system’s final achievement.

Students

If I have one moan, it’s the treatment of students. They appear only as objects – processed, extracted from, occasionally weaponised.

The argument ruins that the system engages with them almost exclusively in aggregate. Students are not names but numbers – FTE counts, retention rates, satisfaction scores, progression metrics, employability statistics.

When institutions claim to act in students’ interests, they typically mean they are optimising metrics about students, not responding to what students actually need. And their representatives play along – believing or pretending not that something should be done because it would be the right thing to do, but because it would improve the numbers.

When students are consulted, it is through instruments the institution controls – surveys that ask what they liked, not what they learned, and feedback mechanisms that capture sentiment, not understanding. When students express distress, the institutional response is dashboards and directors – not smaller classes, more staff contact, or curricula designed around intellectual risk rather than assessment throughput.

The system then converts its own structural failures into individual disappointment. Students who feel short-changed don’t typically conclude that the institution is architecturally incapable of delivering what it promised. They conclude that they chose the wrong course, didn’t work hard enough, or expected too much.

The belief that higher education is necessary and benevolent is so deeply embedded that when the reality falls short, the student blames themselves rather than the system. And because each cohort passes through in three or four years – too quickly to accumulate institutional memory, too briefly to understand the power structures that shaped their experience – the pattern is never disrupted from below. The system doesn’t need to suppress student dissent – it just outlasts it.

Fine. But that reading ignores that students do organise, do disrupt, and have forced genuine institutional change – protests, rent strikes, campaigns on assessment practices, welfare provision, decolonising curricula. The “system outlasts dissent” line is often contradicted by historical evidence.

It also treats all students as one thing. International students paying full fees, part-time mature students, postgraduates, students on widening participation programmes, students with disabilities navigating reasonable adjustments – these are radically different experiences of the same system, and the structural pressures on each are different.

It’s especially patronising about students’ analytical capacity. Students are perfectly capable of systemic critique. Many student officers I’ve worked with develop more sophisticated institutional analysis in a year of SU work than academics develop in a decade.

And the “satisfaction versus education” line, structurally sound as it may be, ignores that some of what gets dismissed – mental health services, hardship funds, accessible buildings – represents genuine student need that the “real education is intellectual discomfort” crowd consistently undervalues.

So what?

Like all my favourite books by academics, there are no solutions – although at least there’s not a call for more research. He conveniently argues that solutions at this level would be a category error, because the system has evolved to make decisive reform structurally impossible.

But the diagnosis itself has consequences, particularly for anyone working on student interests.

It’s SU elections season, and I’ve been poring over manifestos all week. The miserable bit is that what’s clear is the formal system the winners will interact with isn’t where the decisions that shape their education are actually made.

Student lobbying for better feedback, better representation, and better governance is necessary but insufficient, because they operate within a system designed to absorb exactly those demands without changing its behaviour. The system responds to students in aggregate and only through proxies it controls – satisfaction metrics, retention dashboards, and employability data.

If those election winners want to move beyond absorption, they’ll need to invest less in formal participation and more in understanding and mapping the informal power structures that actually determine resource allocation, curriculum design, and staffing decisions.

They’ll need to understand which decisions are made in committees and which are made in corridors, learn how assessment regimes shape what their institution can and can’t do regardless of what any governance body decides, and develop the analytical vocabulary to name what’s happening – not as individual institutional failings but as the predictable output of a system that keeps its founding purpose alive precisely so it never has to obey it.

It also asks this. If the generation now entering academia can’t recognise what’s been lost, and the generation that remembers is retiring, who will articulate the demand for something different? Where does the pressure for genuine transformation come from when the system has succeeded in making its own dysfunction invisible to those inside it?

Lucey’s answer appears to be “nowhere.” Whether that’s realism or despair depends on what happens next. But the diagnosis – that truth isn’t dead but entombed, that the system feeds on the sincerity of those who serve it, and that complicity is distributed so thoroughly that nobody is innocent – deserves to be engaged with. Even if the Warhammer metaphor, if I’m honest, doesn’t.