When I shared with a friend that I had just bought ‘Dark academia: How universities die’ by Professor Peter Fleming, she replied in a short sharp text: ‘The assassin’s guide’. It brought an immediate smile to my face. It did not immunise me from how disheartened I felt reading the book, but it did trigger a ‘strategic hustler’ to make an appearance. We will each have our own take-aways as we read it. These were mine:

• How can anyone stay working in a university once their full insidious machinations are laid before them and hunches can remain no more?

• How does Peter stay working at a university after he has laid bare their full insidious machinations?

• Given that information abounds about staff and student suicides and precarious casualised workforces, so management cannot cry ignorant, at what point are we allowed to call them psychological and financial terrorists?

• How much more evidence will they continue to disbelieve so they can keep their exorbitant wage-theft-dependent salary?

• When the yucky game of ‘careerism’ is something you learn you must play to keep a roof over your head, how much blame for fearful silent complicity should a worker additionally carry?

• When will universities restructure their management - for fiscal prudence and viability no less, their favourite words - so they can get first hand visceral experience of what it’s like to be rejected, dejected, discarded, devalued, forgotten, unthanked, and poor?

• Is the controlling power of fear and money so great among both academics and administrators that they are like Stanley Milgram’s participants in his infamous obedience study - nervously laughing and rationalising away what they know is gravely bad?

I’m one of the younger members of the dinosaurs who completed their PhD before neoliberalism and managerialism grabbed universities by the throat. But I know people just a few years younger than me who did their PhDs much later than me and were already a ‘strategic hustler’. They think I’m weird for taking so long to get the memo. What we’re each hustling for and how we do it are not the same.

Anyway, for those of us who ‘relax with a dense monograph’ this book satisfies.