CHE

Abstract

2010. Leafy mid-October in a university town. Early evening. Forty academics sitting in a ring for the Autumn Term meeting of CHE, the Campaign for Higher Education. ‘Hi, I'm Florence, I'm a Stipendiary Lecturer in Philosophy at Whichcote College and I'm also social media officer for CHE’. The introductions take five or six minutes. The Chair, a Racine scholar, speaks about developments during the summer vacation. The CHE response to the government White Paper was uploaded onto the Public University website. The successful proposal of a no-confidence vote in the Minister for Universities, David Willetts, received an encouraging amount of media coverage. Florence finds herself distracted from the Chair's remarks by a money spider that appears at the edge of her field of vision. It seems to be spinning a web between her fringe and the side of her head: putting out silk, abseiling from it while it guides the lines of the web – what are they called, Florence wonders, is it ‘radicals’, or ‘radials’? – with an extraordinarily delicate touch, as if it were trying to cocoon her head. Florence remembers that the word gossamer comes from ‘goose’ and ‘summer’, but why is that again – something to do with goose down, how light and wispy it is? The Chair has finished speaking and working group leaders are now making their reports. Florence smooths her hand over her hair and reports the number of Twitter and Facebook followers she has gained in the past three months. The Gladstone Professor of English thanks the Chair and the groups for their endeavours. The Chair thanks him back and asks if anyone has any other business. No hands come up. They should carry on lobbying their media contacts then, the Chair says, and getting the message out. Everyone leaves and goes their separate ways. Florence makes her way back through the college grounds alone.

She joined CHE the previous academic year. When the government's plans to cut university funding were announced, she rearranged tutorials so some of her students could travel to London to join the protests; she ran a discussion group on the theme ‘Historicising Solidarity’ (which was not her choice of title); she discussed Stefan Collini's London Review of Books essays on universities at dinner parties. When she saw her students again, she was rather jealous that she hadn't been there with them occupying Millbank. She signed the open letter to the Independent, urging caution on the government. And yet a sinking feeling set in, not just that this was all doomed from the start (which was true), but that it was a kind of play-acting. For every triumphant speech, every rousing action, a new blow fell. Government policy was decided before the White Paper had even been published; her university immediately decided to charge the maximum tuition fees of £9,000 per year, and it had been decided already that this was going to come into force in 2012. All the campaigning, all the brilliant analyses and protests, all the Stefan Collini articles, hadn't prevented or even delayed a single part of the government's plan. CHE had won the arguments and been totally defeated.

‘Hi, Florence?’ She turns back at the front gate of the college to find the Gladstone Professor of English five feet behind her. She is surprised that he knows her name. ‘I just wanted to say, I don't really understand this Twitter business but we're very grateful for the work you've been doing on it,’ he says. ‘The Chair and I were wondering if you'd like to discuss taking on a larger role in the group – being a sort of public face for the campaign, as it were?’

At dinner back in Whichcote, Florence sits next to the Dean, Peter Shawcross, who is talking to the Tutor for Students, Dave Stretch, about an incident known as Hedgehog-Gate. One morning last week, the hedgehog that lived in the front quad (the students named him Julius and elected him as an honorary member of the Junior Common Room) was found dead on the edge of the gravel path. It soon emerged that he was kicked by Harry Judd-Bentley when he got back into college around 2:30 the previous night. Harry had no memory of it, but the Porters went back over the CCTV footage: Julius was minding his own business, a grey blob on the screen, when Harry came along the path and gave him a swift kick that sent him skidding across the gravel.

The Dean has summoned Harry to a disciplinary hearing. The JCR has put ‘RIP Julius’ on the agenda for their weekly meeting; lots of the students are upset by the incident, and rumour says that some of them are seeking counselling. The Tutor for Students, sick of dealing with Harry after he has been on and off academic special measures for the last two years, is inclined to pass the matter straight to the police; it is an act of deliberate animal cruelty, and just because it happened inside the college doesn't mean the law doesn't apply. But the Dean has convinced him that the most important thing is to keep the incident quiet. The last thing the Dean wants is bad publicity, with the college coming into admissions season. They are leaning towards a two-pronged approach: Harry will be given a final written warning and a certain amount of community service, the nature of it to be decided by the JCR.

Florence has stayed on the margins of the discussion, her thoughts tending back towards the Gladstone Professor's proposal, but half an hour later the Tutor for Students taps her on the arm and asks if she'll sit on the disciplinary panel. They are waiting to go back in for dessert. Dave Stretch needs a teaching fellow on the panel, and hopes she will agree with how they are going to handle the case. Florence agrees to agree with them. Over dessert she sits in silence and eats apple crumble with custard followed by cheese and crackers and a handful of grapes.

Florence's relationship with her elder sister, Emily, was transformed by the iPhone. When Emily first moved to San Francisco, they would occasionally talk on Skype, but co-ordinating when to be at their laptops with a reliable WiFi connection was enough of a challenge to limit communication to every two or three weeks. Since Florence got her iPhone, after years of urging from Emily, they have spoken almost daily. The thin drone of the Facetime ringtone gives Florence a start and she finds herself laughing when Emily's face fills her screen.

‘You're very close to the camera,’ she says.

‘Oh, sorry, is that better?’

‘Beaucoup.’

‘Hello.’

‘Hello.’

There is something reassuring in Emily's habit of Facetiming with nothing in particular to say. She seems to do it more often the busier she gets with work. Sometimes they Facetime each other and sit in companionable silence while they write emails or cook meals or read books. It amuses Florence to sit there watching Emily send high-powered messages to the head of Google or the NSA or god knows who – her sister's work is effectively unimaginable to her.

‘How are you?’ says Florence.

‘Okay. I just spoke to the parentals.’

‘How are they?’

‘Okay, I think. Same as ever. Daddy's still insane.’

Pause.

‘How are you?’, says Emily.

Florence sighs. ‘Oh, you know. Actually the whole work thing is getting me down a bit really.’

‘You were saying that last time.’

‘Yes. It's just the whole climate really, the whole neoliberal thing, blah blah blah, it just feels like the things I spend my days worrying about have nothing to do with why I got into all this in the first place. You know?’

A pause, and Emily says decisively, ‘I've always thought you could do better, you know.’

‘Why do you say that?’, Florence says. Emily has always given the impression that she envies Florence's freedom to spend so much of her time on intellectual pursuits of her own choosing. In these conversations, Emily's role is to cheer Florence along by telling her how awful the corporate world is.

‘Oh, I don't know really, it just seems a bit … provincial, you know. A bit small-time for you. When I think of the people I was friends with in grad school, and the people I work with now, the academics just seem sort of dowdy.’

Florence feels insulted. Typical of Emily to pull this older-sister act, as if she were the arbiter of all values just because she lives in California and makes tonnes of money. What a snob she can be!

It puzzles Florence how easily her sister can get to her. But it sometimes feels as if Emily knows what Florence really thinks before she knows it herself. The idea that she is growing tired of academia has been coming to Florence slowly and with reluctance. Some days she can hardly face her colleagues. She is the youngest tutor in the college, and one of not very many women, and the only mixed-race British person, although she has several colleagues from India and China. Often at lunch in the Senior Common Room she will be stunned at the world she has entered into, largely populated by churchy types, posh old men who make mysterious allusions to their other homes in London and their private members' clubs, and half-senile Emeritus Fellows, all of whose company tends to leave Florence feeling variously tongue-tied, bored, inhibited, condescended to, leered at and unable to be herself. Often after a morning of tutorial teaching – three or four hours of unbroken conversation – she can't bear to eat with her colleagues, and pops out the back gate of college to buy a sandwich instead, which she brings back and eats at her desk.

As the days have got greyer and shorter, she feels stuck on a treadmill of poorly paid teaching work interrupted by applications for better jobs she isn't even sure she wants. Of course, if she were to get a permanent Lectureship with a proper salary, it would improve her life. It would enable her to live in a flat that wasn't horrible and didn't use up the majority of her monthly income in rent; to buy new clothes or take holidays where she stayed in hotels instead of camping. But she still can't find much enthusiasm for the applications. She puts off writing the statement describing her research interests for as long as possible, then scrambles something together on the day of the deadline. When the rejection letter comes two months later, or when, as often happens, they don't even bother to tell her that she hasn't been shortlisted but she finds out that someone else has got the job, she feels a terrible shame at her failure to take her application – that is, to take herself – seriously.

She is aware that her complaints are the luxury of someone in a comparatively privileged position; that there are hundreds of well-educated people struggling to get teaching positions like the one she has, as well as billions of people living and working in more oppressive, precarious conditions than hers; and she knows, for this reason, that her feelings don't reflect well on her morally. This awareness doesn't lessen the subjective disquiet that her work causes her to feel. For all that Florence supports the CHE cause, for all that she wants to defend higher education, the reality of working in it has begun to feel distinctly discreditable. How could she front a campaign merely concerned with defending universities and thereby maintaining the status quo? It sometimes feels like the majority of her time is devoted to training aspiring young members of the elite in the glib manipulation of words. She trains future management consultants by making them talk about philosophy texts they sometimes clearly haven't read. It does not put her in a good frame of mind. She spends much of her time resenting the work she is asked to do while scrabbling for the chance to do more of it.

And now it turns out that Emily has thought she should leave academia all along, and not said anything. Florence has always been painfully sensitive to Emily's words. When they were girls, Emily would make her cry and then say with a terrifying coldness, ‘What are you crying for? You're so childish,’ and would tell their mother with a sigh that Florence was crying again, as if she hadn't caused it herself. Emily would pick up her hairbrush and say, in her sharpest voice, ‘Ugh! Your hair gets everywhere – are you a dog?’ (Last summer, Florence's boyfriend had picked one of her thick black hairs from a sofa cushion and said to her fondly, ‘Your hair gets everywhere!’, and not understood why this sent Florence into a sulk for the rest of the day.) But Florence also remembers how Emily got her into politics and literature and music; how she took her along to protests where she gave amazing speeches which made Florence wish she could be like her big sister; how she inspired her to do graduate studies in the first place, and then surprised everyone by dropping out to work in the city … Now Florence doesn't know what to think.

Florence is due to meet with the Dean and the Tutor for Students thirty minutes before the start of Harry's disciplinary panel. When she arrives at the Dean's office, Harry is already sitting on the stairs in the hallway. His head is bowed over his iPhone, abundant curly hair hanging over his face. He stands up, swaying a little. He seems very young and thin.

‘Hello – it's Dr Yeh, isn't it?’

‘That's right. We should be ready to see you at three.’

Harry leans in close to her. His lashes are very long. He looks rather like that boyband boy, Florence thinks – what's his name? – the one with tousled hair who is always in Grazia.

‘Look, Dr Yeh, I know I've caused a bit of bother here with the hedgehog thingy and whatnot. But I just wanted to say, my friends who do PPE tell me you're pretty chill for a tutor, haha, like you're basically some sort of Marxist, right?’

‘I'm certainly interested in some aspects of the Marxian tradition’, Florence says, before Harry cuts her off –

‘Right, yeah, so I just wanted to say I hope you won't be too hard on me.’

‘It's not quite as simple as that, Harry. There are all sorts of college regulations to be followed. I'm sure the panel can come to a fair decision.’

He makes a sulky face at this, and giggles. Florence wonders whether Harry has got high before his own disciplinary hearing. ‘We'll come and get you when we're ready,’ she says, then knocks on the Dean's door.

The Dean and the Tutor for Students are in mid-conversation. Instead of a final written warning, they are now of the opinion that Harry should be rusticated for the remainder of term. Florence asks what happened to the final written warning idea.

‘Bit of a snafu there,’ says the Tutor for Students. ‘I was forgetting that I already gave Harry a final written warning last term, when he threw a glass in the college bar.’

Florence heard about this at SCR lunch: the boy was sitting in the corner of the bar, not talking to anyone, when he stood up, started screaming incomprehensibly, threw a pint glass against the bar's brick wall and tried to cut his chest up with a shard of glass before some boys from the rugby team managed to restrain him.

‘Technically Harry is still under the terms of that final written warning,’ says the Dean. ‘I checked the college regulations and rustication is the only option we have, short of kicking him out altogether. Which we very much don't want to do.’

Pause.

‘Would that be so bad?’ Florence asks. ‘I thought he'd been a nightmare from the beginning.’

The two men look at each other.

‘Let's just say there are family circumstances that make expulsion inappropriate in this case.’

The Tutor for Students smiles and says, ‘What Peter means is that the kid's dad owns half of Buckinghamshire. The Alumni Office would fucking kill us if we expelled the son of the potential biggest donor we've ever had.’

‘What we need to do’, the Dean says, ‘is to send him home now, get him to straighten himself out over Christmas and then hold his hand for two more terms until he finishes Finals. If he gets a 2:2 or a Third, fine. Just get him to that finishing line. After that he can fuck off and become a dipsomaniac in a Moroccan monastery for all I care.’

They discuss strategy. Florence's role is to come in at the end with concerned suggestions about Harry's drinking. She doesn't mind taking a back seat during the meeting. It falls to her to bring the boy in from the hallway. He comes in and bends himself into an armchair, his toes tapping and fingers twitching out of time with each other.

‘So, Harry, you know why we've asked you here today.’ The Dean is looking at a sheaf of papers. ‘On the eighteenth of June you were given a final written warning after a string of incidents which culminated in an act of vandalism on a parked car belonging to the Bursar and a glass-throwing incident in the college bar. You said then that violence of this sort was out of character, that you regretted the incident and that it wouldn't be repeated. And yet here we are. Would you care to explain what happened in the early hours of Thursday the twenty-ninth of September when you got back into college?’

‘Yeah, sure. The thing was. Hm-hmm. Could I possibly have a glass of water?’

The Dean raises his eyebrows. ‘The water cooler is in the hallway.’

There is a scramble while Harry gets up, lurches into the hallway, comes back with a tiny paper cone of water, sits down, gulps it in one go and puzzles as to where to lay the empty cone, placing it on the arm of his chair only for it roll off on the floor. He starts to bend forward to pick it up when the Dean says, ‘Leave it! For goodness sake, leave it. Now will you please answer my question?’

‘Yeah. The thing with Julius was, right, I loved that little guy as much as anybody. I used to feed him. The last thing I'd want to do is hurt him, so I have no explanation of why I did it. To be honest, I don't remember doing it.’

‘Harry, you say you have no memory of doing it, but what do you remember of that evening?’

‘Where would you like me to start?’

‘Just fill in the background to the incident for us in as much detail as you can.’

‘Okay. I started in the college bar with Steve and Jonno around maybe seven with a couple of snakebites – absolutely filthy – and then Jonno said he had a Pizza Express voucher, and at first we were like, vouchers? seriously, dude, are you a pikey or something? but then he said it was for a free bottle of prosecco so we thought, result!’

‘Why don't you skip to the part where you got back to the college?’

‘Ah, right. Basically I came back from Park End absolutely steaming, and I kicked a hedgehog. Who sadly died.’

The Dean sighs theatrically. He hurries through the rest of proceedings. The boy barely reacts to his rustication. Florence asks her question about his drinking, and suggests he make an appointment with the University counselling service or his GP at home. He nods vaguely at the suggestion. The Dean dismisses him. Harry thanks them all, picks up his paper cone and leaves the room.

‘Well that was a bit of car crash,’ the Tutor for Students says. ‘Do you think he was on drugs?’

‘I think he was just nervous,’ says the Dean. ‘He gets skittery like that.’

‘Hmmmm. We should try to get the other students to keep an eye on him while he's away.’

The Dean ignores that remark and turns to his monitor to write up a record of the meeting. The Tutor for Students falls into a few seconds' silence, shakes his head and says, ‘That kid is such a wanker.’

The Dean, without looking away from his monitor, says, ‘I gather that the college's own high-society beauty, Ms Delamere, finds him distinctly charming.’

Florence takes in this information silently. Veduta Delamere was one of her students in the same year that she appeared in Tatler's list of ‘People Who Really Matter’ for the first time, and became a minor celebrity. She is the sort of upper-class girl who treats her tutors like friends of hers whose pedantry and dedication to academic study are minor eccentricities that she tolerates. Yet she is still charming in the process: it is as if her beauty, confidence and good humour make the arguments of her tutors irrelevant. Rumour has it that her modelling agency is putting her forward for some major campaigns after her Finals. She is the most beautiful girl Florence has ever seen. Florence feels vaguely put out that the Dean knew Veduta is dating Harry and she didn't. ‘At what point would keeping him in the college become so much trouble’, Florence says, ‘that it no longer matters how rich he is?’

They look at her. ‘You do realise’, the Dean says, ‘that your fellowship is funded by a major gift from the Judd-Bentleys? When we let Harry in, they gave us a hundred thousand to fund a four-year teaching post. How do you think we were able to appoint you?’

Three weeks later, as she approaches the college's front gate, Florence sees Veduta coming out.

‘Hello,’ Florence says. ‘How's work going?’

‘Pretty well. I had a bit of a disaster at the weekend when I got stuck in Vancouver because of a cancelled flight, but I made it back in time for my tute.’

‘What were you doing in Vancouver?’

‘Well, it was fashion week, and since I had a quiet week with work I was able to take up a few invitations. I'm sure you're far too busy for such things.’

‘Perhaps my invitations got lost in the post,’ Florence says.

In truth, Florence feels a little intimidated by Veduta: the girl seems somehow more grown-up, more competent with things of the world, than Florence feels herself to be.

Veduta smiles in acknowledgement of the joke. ‘I thought I would show my face anyway. Parties aren't going to attend themselves.’

‘Well, I doubt you missed very much,’ Florence says, then feels she should keep up the veneer of tutorliness: ‘I hope you took some reading with you.’

‘Of course. I wanted to say as well, thank you for being so understanding with Harry.’

‘Oh, I didn't really do anything –’

‘No, he told me it was your intervention that kept him from getting expelled altogether. He's grateful.’

Florence decides not to correct this interpretation of events. ‘Is he doing okay?’

‘I don't know. We haven't been in touch that much. He's still drinking a lot. And … the other stuff. Maybe more so.’

The last thing Florence wants is to talk with a student about another student's drug problem. ‘Well, I'd be grateful if you would remind him about some of the counselling options,’ she says.

‘He's been scaring me a bit sometimes, to be honest. We were Skypeing last week and he just looked totally dead in the eyes, and he said, “You know I'm a total psychopath, don't you?” But then the next morning after something like that he'll be sweet and normal again. To be honest, it sounds like he's getting fucked up more often now than when he was in college.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘It's his parents that are the problem. Sir David is nice but he's always away, and his mum's just been really depressed for years, so whenever you go to the house there's this awful sort of passive-aggressive atmosphere. His mum's just been shut up in this mansion in the countryside for decades, going mad from having nothing to do, and they just give Harry limitless amounts of money and he ends up driving to Bicester and hanging round with a load of skagheads and squaddies in these horrible pubs.’

‘Gosh,’ Florence says. ‘Were you there when he had that, umm, glass incident in the bar last term?’

‘No, but he didn't just throw the glass, you know. He got a bit of it and started trying to cut himself.’

‘Yes, I did hear that,’ Florence says.

The rest of term and the vacation pass uneventfully. Spring Term begins. One morning, still sitting in her pyjamas and drinking a cup of hot chocolate, Florence opens her email and reads her daily update from jobs.ac.uk telling her about new positions in academia. Nobody is hiring in her field today except a new university in Doha; she opens the link, scans the details, vaguely ponders moving to the Middle East and negotiating a tax-free salary, and deletes the email.

Her other new message comes from the CHE account. It takes her by surprise; the group has gone quiet since last term, or at least, it hasn't attracted her attention. She never acted on the Gladstone Professor's proposal that she take a larger role in the campaign; she missed the last meeting of Autumn Term and first of Spring Term, and stopped updating Facebook and Twitter.

As soon as Florence has settled down in her office an hour later there is a knock at the door. She minimises the browser window where she is searching Ebay for vintage bracelets, opens the door and finds herself facing Harry Judd-Bentley.

Harry's period of rustication doesn't seem to have straightened him out. He says how much perspective on life it has given him, but his knees and hands jiggle compulsively and his dilated pupils dart around the room behind Florence, so that she turns round to see what he is looking at, only to see the blank office wall. With one hand he shreds a tissue he has pulled from his pocket, creating a small mound of white paper on the seat next to him.

‘Look, Dr Yeh,’ Harry says, ‘I just want to say again how chuffed I was about how you helped me out. If it had just been Stretch and Shawcross in there, I would have been done for, but I got this message from Doc Stretch a few weeks ago – hang on, I've got it here …’

He slides his iPhone from his very tight jeans and fiddles with it. ‘No, yeah, I can't find it, but it basically says that I'm now de-rusticated or whatever, and it came at the exact same moment that my mother got back from hospital after this eye operation which was a sort of follow-up thing after her cataract got buzzed out by the lasers, so I thought that's got to mean something, and Veduta has always told me what a good egg you were, so, umm, yeah, thanks.’

‘I'm glad to hear the time away from college did you some good,’ Florence says, feeling like a boring old arsehole. ‘Big couple of terms ahead. Have you managed to catch up with your work?’

‘It's mainly revision now – you know, head down and whatnot – and I've got lecture notes for the weeks I missed, which I'm starting to read through when I get the time, although in a way I'm keen to start some new topics now, I feel quite fired up. Do you think I could change my Special Author topic?’

Florence tells him that he would have to talk to his own tutors in Modern Languages about it, but that it is almost certainly too late, a term and a half before Finals. He is supposed to be writing about Bertolt Brecht, on whom he spent a whole term last year, but it seems he hasn't read anything by Brecht and can't remember what he wrote in his essays. He now wants to write about Slavoj Zizek. When Florence suggests that his Special Author choice probably has to be a literary writer who writes in French or German, Harry looks rather hurt and says, yes, of course, but he wants to write about Zizekian themes, like fairytales and communism. Well, he can certainly write about communism while writing about Brecht, Florence says brightly, but Harry rolls his eyes and looks at her as if she were being incredibly dense. ‘That's hardly the point, is it?’, Harry says. He looks back towards the door and says he is worried the Proctors will burst in, find him here and arrest him for being back in the town. Florence reassures him that he is no longer rusticated, and that the Proctors haven't actually had the power to ban rusticated students from entering the town for years, but the information doesn't seem to go in.

An awkward silence. ‘When did you get interested in Zizek and communism?’ Florence asks.

‘Yeah, it must seem strange when I was pretty much a massive Tory before, but I've been reading a lot about it actually. Ever since Veduta told me her tutor was a communist or a Marxist or whatever, I've been getting really into it.’

‘What have you been reading?’, Florence says.

‘I started reading The Communist's Manifesto over Christmas, and that was just amazing. I haven't finished it yet but I'm really into it. And then I watched this movie about Che Guevera –’

‘Che, you mean?’, says Florence.

‘That's the jobbie. I saw that and I just thought, we need a fucking revolution in this country. And then I watched The Baader-Meinhof Gang –’

‘Complex,’ Florence says.

‘No, it's quite easy to follow really.’

‘The movie's called The Baader-Meinhof Complex.’

‘Ah, right, yeah, whatever. That was the one that really blew my mind. Just this idea that you can be, like, “Fuck the system!”, and you can make that into your lifestyle and just totally change things, it was a real awakening. And now I'm just like, capitalism is bullshit. It's these fucking cuts, man. I even said it to Daddy on boxing day, and Daddy actually knows George Osborne a bit, I mean just to see him socially. And he didn't agree with everything I was saying, but he was definitely, like, admitting there's a lot of inequality. That was what made him give the money for the college auditorium, actually – it was just him thinking, what can I do to help people who are less privileged?’

Florence heard about this last week: the money for the Judd-Bentley auditorium was put up over Christmas, and the college is now seeking an architect. The building won't be finished until long after Florence's fixed-term contract has ended. When she saw the size of the auditorium bequest, Florence calculated how many years' worth of her salary that money would pay for; the answer was more than sixty. ‘Very good news about the auditorium,’ she says.

Pause.

‘Have you heard about David Willetts?’, Florence says. ‘He's coming to dinner in college in seventh week.’

‘Who's David Willis?’

Florence explains to him that David Willetts is the Minister for Universities, and that if Harry cares about these ‘fucking cuts’ then he should consider Willetts one of the cutters in chief.

Harry becomes more agitated. ‘We should have a protest! When the high table people walk in with their gowns on, all the students should boo him, or egg him, or do some sort of organised chant against him. What do you think, Dr Yeh? I totally think we need to do something when Willetts comes. This is like the number one enemy coming into our territory, it's a total Trojan horse situation. I could be the leader of it, definitely.’

‘You hadn't heard of David Willetts thirty seconds ago and now you're his number one enemy?’, Florence says.

Harry ignores this remark. ‘Don't you think this is a really important opportunity to make a statement about the cuts? I mean, he's coming right here, to our college!’

‘Look, Harry,’ Florence says, regretting having brought the matter up, ‘I couldn't take any part in it. He's coming in a private capacity as a dinner guest of one of my fellow Fellows, and I don't think I'm even going to go to the dinner. If the students want to do something, there it is. But really, I think you should just concentrate on your Finals and, you know, staying in a good state of mind right now. These are really big terms for you, and I think they'll probably be stressful enough without worrying about all this stuff.’

Harry stands up abruptly, knocking his thighs into the coffee table so that the stack of books wobbles. ‘I see, right, so you're just like all the others, you want to shut me up too. You say you're a radical but actually you're on their side. Is that what you think, that it's more important not to embarrass the college at a dinner than to struggle for our rights as students?’

Before Florence can reply, Harry leaves the room and she is staring at the door, wondering what just happened.

‘What I can't believe is that the government has done such an appalling job of explaining it. I thought spin-doctors were supposed to present unpopular policies to the public in the most favourable way, but here they've done exactly the opposite. That's why you had all this handwringing over tuition fees by people who don't even understand the numbers.’

The Bursar, Trevor Bains-Archer, is holding court at dinner on the subject of student fees. He is very tall, maybe six foot four, in his mid-fifties, with rosy cheeks and a shiny, completely bald head. He was an undergraduate at the college thirty-five years ago, then had a long career as a banker before returning as Bursar.

From across the table, Jan Namaste, a young Physics fellow, gives Florence a pointed look. Her involvement with CHE is well known. She ignores Jan's look and eats a forkful of peas. Jan says to Trevor, ‘You mean because it's more like a graduate tax, like the Lib Dems were in favour of?’

‘Exactly! It's exactly what all the tax-lovers wanted. It simply adds more tax bands: instead of paying twenty or forty per cent, graduates will pay twenty-nine or forty-nine on earnings above the threshold. So all this talk about the risk of debt putting off people from poorer backgrounds is utter balderdash. The only risk is on the part of the government, who don't know how many of these loans they're going to have to forgive. The real problem isn't the fact that we're going to be charging £9,000, it's the fact that it still won't be nearly enough.’

Jan is about to say something when the Bursar interrupts him with his attempt to get the Butler's attention, who shuffles over in his red waistcoat and bow tie, speaks to the Bursar and shuffles off to get some more roast potatoes. When he returns with the tray, Florence has prepared some points on which to challenge the Bursar. She finishes a mouthful of lamb, takes a sip of red wine and says, ‘I think on the access question you're ignoring some of the wider picture. When you look at the cutting of the EMA and the Aim Higher scheme, it surely does look like there's going to be harm to access for poorer students.’

‘Actually I agree with you about the EMA. Cutting that is a big mistake, and in fact I think they're going to reverse that,’ the Bursar says.

‘But also, on the point about risk, there's a solid amount of data that says people from lower socio-economic groups are more debt-averse –’

‘Data come up with by Marxist sociologists, no doubt!’

(There are laughs around the table).

‘Well, maybe we need to pay more attention to Marxist sociologists,’ Florence says. ‘What I was going to say is that this aversion to debt, whatever form the repayment scheme takes, is real. And you have to add it to the fact that if we're talking about going to university to get this notional economic benefit to your future earnings, the promise of a deferred benefit is something you need a certain level of confidence to trust in.’

‘Confidence!’, the Bursar says, and rolls his eyes, rather campily for such a large man. ‘What on earth can you mean by confidence?’

Florence passes her hand through her hair. ‘Umm, social confidence. Financial confidence. Confidence in one's life prospects, which is based on knowing people from the same background as you who value education and have had that experience.’

‘I must say, I think this is utter nonsense. When my wife and I get harassed on the train by packs of marijuana-smoking, hip-hop-listening hoodies, they don't seem to me to lack confidence. If anything they have too much; they need to learn some deference. You're treating people like children if you believe that's the problem. You're allowing them to wallow in low aspiration.’

‘Or maybe, for disadvantaged people, not having aspiration is a rational response to not having opportunities.’

‘Oh, please. I'm sorry, but as soon as you start on with “disadvantaged” you've lost the argument as far as I'm concerned. This talk of advantages and privileges is just the worst kind of sociological babble.’

‘Well, it might not be the most elegant vocabulary, but it refers to real things that have real effects.’

The conversation pauses while the Butler comes round to refill everyone's wine glass. When it resumes, the Bursar speaks in a softer tone, turning towards Florence as if interested in her for the first time. ‘Might I ask what gives you such insight into the psychology of the downtrodden masses?’

Florence looks up from her lamb to meet the Bursar's eye. ‘Well, as the chair of the remuneration committee you know how much I get paid.’

The Bursar laughs. ‘Touché. But we both know you could have taken your degree and gone to the city and you'd be living in a big house in Islington by now. That's the problem with you left-wing people, you haven't got any sense of competition. You should be the ones urging the government to take the cap off fees altogether, so the best academics can be rewarded as highly as they deserve. I wish we could pay junior fellows more but you don't value yourselves highly enough, that's the problem. You don't push for the best you could get.’

Florence smiles and remembers how often she has heard the Bursar mention what a large pay-cut he took, leaving banking to come and rescue the college's finances – even though he is being paid far more than any of the academic staff. The Bursar has finished his roast potatoes and Florence has finished her lamb. As they rise from the table so that the setting for dessert can be laid out, he tells her he enjoyed their conversation, with the generosity of someone sure he has won the argument.

At the end of the sixth week of term, since the weather is unexpectedly mild, Florence goes camping with her boyfriend in Wales for the weekend. Back in college, she checks her email for the first time in three days and has seventy-three new messages. Most of them are pointless circulars or emails about matters that will sort themselves out by being ignored, along with a handful of questions from students about vacation work or revision. She has another message from Harry, which says in the subject line, ‘D-DAY: THE TIME FOR ACTION HAS COME’, and begins, ‘Dear Dr Yeh, if you have any free time these days might I recommend a film?’ Florence reads a few sentences further on; the film Harry wants to recommend is a documentary about the Enron scandal that she saw at the cinema when it came out five years earlier. She scrolls down to see thousands of words of unbroken text, an oppressively dense block with a photo of David Willetts's grinning face pasted into the message at the bottom. She clicks back to her inbox; she will read Harry's screed later, if ever.

Today is supposed to be her research day, but Florence finds that she can't settle down to her article on the predicate view of names. Students are emailing her and she has stupidly made a comment on a Facebook post which draws her into a long, tedious but involving discussion of gender essentialism. Enough of all this. Leaving her iPhone in the office and wearing her sunglasses for the first time this year, she takes a book with her (Mulhall, Philosophical Myths of the Fall) and leaves the house. She looks in the window of Oxfam Bookshop, fleetingly considers a hardback set of Husserl in German before admitting to herself that she will never be that person, and pops into Sainsbury's, where she stands in the self-checkout queue trying to remember what the space looked like when it was Borders. She can't quite bring it back, despite the hundreds of hours she spent in there, sometimes reading entire books while sitting in an armchair. She buys a Danish pastry and a hot chocolate from a deli, and walks until she finds herself by the Botanical Gardens. She goes in and finds a bench where she sits down to read the book, eat the pastries and drink the hot chocolate.

She feels bad about blanking Murray's email and withdrawing so much from CHE, especially after they'd asked her to front the campaign. Why has she done that? She finds that she can't articulate it to herself. A grey squirrel is sitting on its haunches three feet from her. Tiny black eyes and scratchy little fingers. She tries to think her way into its quiet, companionable mode of being. Start again from the ground up. It is as if she were frozen this winter, as if she were unable to feel her own feelings. It occurs to her that she has been rather depressed. But now she can see the matter clearly. She will gather her faculties together, return to CHE optimistically and put her energy into it. It's too late to sign into dinner tonight and confront Willetts, but from tomorrow she will drive CHE forward. And why shouldn't she succeed, when there's so much will to oppose the way universities are going?

The moment she gets back in her office, Florence's phone pings with a message from Emily (‘Hey sis tried 2 Facetime you, give me a ring when you get this? x’) and another from Veduta, delivered an hour ago. Florence gave her mobile number to the Finalists in case any of them had a last-minute exam crisis, but Veduta wants to know whether Florence has heard from Harry. She is concerned, the text says: all day Harry has been sending her completely crazy texts about David Willetts.

After she reads Veduta's message, Florence looks again at Harry's message. Among the mad drift of his sentences, he keeps on returning to the theme of Willetts's visit to the college – ‘the EVENT’, he calls it. He has a plan for how to bring the event into being. He doesn't say what the plan is. At the end of the email he writes, ‘First kill was Julius the hedgehog. Now do you believe what a total psychopath I am?’

It is five past seven. Florence hurries to college and makes her way through the passageway that cuts past the kitchens and opens onto the main quad; a few stragglers are hurrying late towards the dining hall, trying to get their gowns on while they run. The college croquet team are practising on the lawn of the quad. The sun is still shining; the croquet players are gamely wearing shorts and flip-flops despite the chill in the air.

Florence climbs the stairs towards the dining hall to find Harry pacing on the landing. From inside the room, she hears the roar of hundreds of people talking while they wait to eat. There is a buzz of expectation in the air, at the knowledge that the college is hosting a distinguished guest. Harry has dressed up in his black-tie suit, but has his white shirt hanging open to his navel; his hair is filthy with sweat.

‘Harry, what are you doing?’

‘They wouldn't let me in, Doc – I forgot to sign in for dinner tonight, so they stopped me at the door –’

‘Thank god for that.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Harry, I don't know what you've got in mind but you definitely can't assault the man just because you disagree with his policies.’

Before Harry can reply, the huge bell in the ceiling of the hallway rings three times, echoing around the stone walls. The people sitting at high table are ready to come upstairs from the SCR and enter the dining hall. The fellows and their guests will be walking past Florence and Harry in seconds.

Harry walks to the back wall of the hallway and stands in the shadows. He reaches with his right hand into the inside left pocket of his jacket. Florence walks towards him; when she is three feet away, he puts his left hand up flat to stop her.

‘What are you doing, Harry?’

‘I'm going to do it, Doc. It's like you said, he's the enemy in chief and he's right here on our territory. Someone has to take a stand.’

The bustle from downstairs grows louder. The Butler comes out of the dining hall to hold the wooden door open, glares shortsightedly at Florence and Harry, and says, ‘Evening, Dr Yeh’. Florence nods back at him.

Footsteps from downstairs: they are coming. The President of Whichcote's head appears around the corner, as he walks two abreast with his guest for the evening; then the whole group rounds the corner, and nestled in the middle of them is the bald head of David Willetts. He is lending his right arm to George Mayer, his old tutor, who struggles to manage the stairs.

‘Don't do anything stupid, Harry.’

Harry shuffles in the shadows for a second as if he were scratching his armpit before Florence sees the flash of the blade he has pulled from his pocket. ‘I've got to, Doc,’ he says. ‘I've got to.’ He is crying a little.

Sir Michael, the President, notices Florence just as he is about to enter the dining room. He smiles, a little puzzled to see her hanging round outside dinner in jeans and hoodie, and carries swiftly on into the dining hall, shaking hands with the Butler. Willetts is ten feet away from Florence and Harry now, on the other side of five or six people. Harry steps forward with the knife lowered at his right side. Two fellows in the group look at him with bemused cheerfulness. In that moment he looks like a lost little boy in an expensive dinner jacket that hangs off him as if he were thin as a coat hanger.

He raises his right hand to chest height as he approaches the group, still walking, and Florence finds herself hurtling towards him. She hits him square in the back with her right shoulder and he goes down under the tackle with no resistance. His elbow makes a painful crack as it hits the stone floor, and Florence slumps on top of him, pinning him easily. The fellows step back in confusion (‘I say!), looking around for someone to make sense of the situation.

Florence hears the voice of the Bursar, Trevor Bains-Archer: ‘For goodness' sake, get off him! What on earth are you doing to the boy?’

She looks up to tell them that he has a knife, but before she can speak, Harry wriggles out from under her, scrambles across the floor to pick up the knife that went spinning five feet away when she tackled him, and runs off down the stairs.

‘What on earth possessed you, doing that to Harry?’, says the Bursar.

‘Didn't you see he had a knife?’

‘Nonsense!’

A voice Florence doesn't recognise said, ‘I think he did, Trevor – he picked it up just before he ran off.’

‘What on earth?’

‘He was after Mr Willetts,’ Florence says.

‘Good lord!’

The President has come back into the hallway, ready to take charge of the situation with professional briskness. ‘Well, we need to find Harry, don't we?’, he says. ‘Trevor, could you run and get the porters to phone 999 and then come over here?’ He walks back down the stairs, followed by Florence and several rugby boys.

As they round the corner, they see Harry at once. He is slumped against the wall by the doorway to the SCR with the knife in his hand and his white shirt and exposed chest soaked in blood.

Harry was sectioned after the Willetts incident. He had stabbed himself twelve times in the chest and abdomen with a blunt Kitchen Devil knife taken from his student house, but none of the wounds was deep enough to put him in real danger. To the police, he admitted everything about the plan to attack Willetts. In his bloodstream they found traces of cocaine, cannabis, MDMA, citalopram, modafinil and ketamine. Florence showed them the email he had sent her. It turned out he had sent the same message to several other college fellows, but none of them had read it before the incident.

After he had been examined, Harry was indefinitely detained in a psychiatric hospital. Questions were asked in college about whether enough had been done to help him with his substance and behavioural problems, but nothing came of it. The newspapers ran with the story for a few days, but none of them interviewed or mentioned Florence. The Daily Mail discovered the history of Harry's school days: he was already on a lot of drugs, and had attempted to sexually assault a younger boy in his dorm, but instead of expelling him, his school had only banned him from being a boarder. Nobody in college knew this when he was admitted. The Mail had also got wind of his friendship with Veduta, and illustrated their story with a photo from one of her fashion shoots and a photo of Sir David Judd-Bentley. Florence had expected to see a red-faced buffoon of a Lord but the long-nosed, thin-cheeked man in the photograph looked intelligent, gentle and a little melancholy.

David Willetts was moved from his position as Minister for Universities in 2014, but by then everything he had proposed had been enacted: the teaching grant for the humanities had been cut; student fees of £9,000 a year had been brought in; every university had immediately started charging the maximum amount, and many were pressing for it to be raised. Stefan Collini wrote more excellent articles about the reforms.

In the Easter vacation, Florence goes camping with her boyfriend again, this time in Croatia, and doesn't check her email while she is away. When she returns, she finds a message from Tina Melden, the President's PA, sent two days previously: ‘The President would like to see you on Wednesday at 11:30. Please let me know if this date and time are convenient for you.’

Today is Wednesday, and the clock on Florence's computer tells her it is 10:19. She looks at the message for a few seconds and tells Tina she will be there in an hour. She jumps in the shower and searches for a top that isn't wrinkled.

Fifty minutes later she is sitting in the entrance hall of the President's lodgings when the Bursar and the Head of HR walk in. Trevor greets her with a tense smile. They sit on opposite sides of the hallway beneath a row of evil-looking old scholars who seem to be sunken under a thick glaze of soot. Next to Florence, a suit of armour stands jauntily beside a fire extinguisher that looks shockingly bright amid the Victorian gloom that hangs around everything else. The presence of the Bursar and the Head of HR convince Florence she is about to be sacked. She is going to be sacked for encouraging Harry to make a scene about Willetts coming to dinner. It gives her an almost giddy feeling – nervous but somehow unhinged, as if she might burst into hilarious laughter. So this is how her decade-long career in higher education ends: from student to graduate to teacher to nothing. When she looks back on it, it doesn't amount to much.

Tina Melden's head appears around the door of the President's study. ‘Sir Michael is ready to see you now – just you, Florence, at first.’

Sir Michael Cannington became the President of Whichcote two years ago. He arrived at the college with the reputation of being the most intelligent man in Whitehall. Florence hasn't seen much evidence of that in her interactions with him but he is certainly the sort of presence to make a meeting run smoothly. At lunchtime conversations he conjures smooth resolutions to seemingly thorny questions, smiling gently to himself, as if it amuses him to exercise his abilities on trifling college matters while keeping most of his powers in reserve.

He invites Florence to take a seat on the antique chaise-longue that sits opposite the fireplace, diagonally across from his own high-backed armchair. With his thin legs crossed extravagantly, two inches of bare ankle above his purple socks, he brings his fingers into a cradle in front of his face while he ponders his words. Florence sits upright. Finally he speaks.

‘You can probably guess the reason why I asked you to come and see me today. I wanted to communicate to you in person how very grateful everybody at Whichcote is for your intervention in the incident that occurred when the Minister for Universities visited the college. Speaking personally, it is one of the most remarkably brave acts I have been lucky enough to witness, and I really can't stress enough what a great service to the college and the university it was.’

Florence is floored by this. ‘Umm, well, it was … well, thank you very much, Sir Michael,’ she says.

The President waves away the use of his title with a small gesture of his left hand. ‘I gather that the Minister has written to you himself to give you his thanks, is that right?’

‘Yes, yes he did.’

‘A very brilliant man, Willetts. Really a first-rate mind, and a man doing work of the utmost importance with these reforms.’

Florence doesn't know what to say to that.

‘But what I really called you in for today, Florence, is to talk about your own situation, and I hope you'll agree with me that I have some good news for you. In light of the excellent work you've been doing for the last two years, and of course of recent events as well, the college would like to offer you an improvement on the terms of your employment with us, and I'm happy to say that this offer has been agreed with the help of Sir David Judd-Bentley himself, who is also very grateful to you for all that you've done for Harry. Trevor and Deborah are now going to make you an offer, which I very much suggest that you accept. They'll see you in the Writing Room. And then we can all put this business behind us and look toward a very happy future, I think. Is there anything else you'd like to say?’

Already the President is standing and ushering Florence to the door. In confusion, she blusters some words of thanks for his time, which he dismisses with a wave of his hand. He steps nimbly around her to reach for the door handle and holds it open.

In the Writing Room across the hallway, the Bursar and the Head of HR are waiting for Florence with cups of coffee and several short stacks of paper laid out on the mahogany table. The table is so wide that the Head of HR stands up and walks around to Florence's side every time she wants to pass her a document. The job offer is all drawn up and ready for Florence to sign. It will make her the Judd-Bentley Fellow in Philosophy, a permanent fellow of the college, starting on the first spinal point of pay grade 9, with full entitlement to the college's joint-equity scheme for house purchases. She only needs to put her signature on the contract and the non-disclosure agreement that forbids her from making any public comment detrimental to the policy of the college or the university.