It’s Tough at the Top by Anon.

Book cover for Anon. (2025). Taken from the Erratum catalogue.

Erratum, 2025.

ISBN: 978-1-916541-22-1, Pbk.

As our first anonymously authored book launches a new imprint—The University of Fools Press—it feels not entirely inappropriate to follow its publication with a few reflections of my own as its editor.

When confronted with a book of this kind, namely, a book of a type that I had not quite seen before, a book I could not anticipate in its broader configuration before it appeared, the problem of unfamiliarity presents itself. As an editor, I am faced with the issue of what exactly to make of the book before me precisely because it is unusual. Books of this sort seem to me to require the form that they have taken, and finding such books is, actually, something of a selective prejudice as commissioning editor.

In this specific case, the difficulty of not knowing how to assay the book was roughly twofold.

The first difficulty seemed to be inherent to the style of writing which would appear to be also, and at the same time, a style of thought. It’s Tough at the Top creates a situation within its pages where it is difficult if not impossible to locate any statement that might be considered sincere, or grounding, and upon which the reader might build some kind of secure understanding from which to navigate the rest of the text. This might not seem so much of an issue with a work of fiction, but for a work of criticism it would usually be considered a pressing concern. Just what is the author saying? This was never clear to me.

The position taken by the author remains uncertain, then, and more so than usual perhaps due to its lack of attribution. The orientation of the text is obscure as a consequence of this very anonymity which compounds the issues that are already presented by its form.

Unable to become familiar with the author, the reader is confronted by their own familiarities, namely, large sections of text within the book which are recognisable discourse for anyone who has been working in the University sector (certainly in UKHE). These familiar statements which make up the good bulk of the book (and which are amusing precisely because they are so banal), are to be experienced alongside the strange intrusions of somewhat perversely associated ideas. These are certainly not part of the standard discourse and would not be expected to crop up in the usual management speak or corridor chat. This establishes a situation in which the reader grounds their own framework for understanding the text, building from the statements they are yawningly, achingly familiar with, and which provide the text with its basis in a shared (and suffered) reality.

The second issue is one of classification. I am never myself minded to classify texts (I simply do not care in this way), and yet, there would appear to be some kind of preoccupation with the problem of classification within the book itself. Classification would seem to be a feature of the system that the book sets out to toy with, in its own context at least, a context in which being brought to visibility, being classified and located, is clearly identified in the book as one of the primary exercises of a disciplinary institutional toolkit.

In the words of the anonymous author, words that accompanied the initial draft, this book is merely a book-length sentence collection. This phrase might apply to any book which uses sentences, although it more obviously applies to this book in that each sentence begins on its own line. Addressing the question of classification within its repetitive cypher, in which each sentence must begin with the words ‘The Vice Chancellor…’ there are some potential rebuttals that issue from within the book itself:

For instance, The Vice Chancellor was certainly not a poem, comes about midway through the book. Whereas within the opening pages it is written, The Vice Chancellor was a list. If these statements refer as much to the book in hand as they do to its central character, they might be taken as an indicator that the book rejects cultural refinement (insofar as we might associate that with poetry), and perhaps by association that it rejects the supercilious gaze which might be associated with the critic who feels squished in a university environment precisely because of their more refined literary/intellectual attachments or pretensions. This critic impugns the university for being too leaden, too reduced, too stupid, a gesture which serves to redeem some version of academia (a refined academy not beset by economic demands, managerial logics and so on) in its denunciations. This would not appear to be position of the author. Or if it is a position at times glimpsed within some of the many statements which make up the book, it might not be considered a central, or foundational prejudice of the author.

There would appear to be other traps located within the book, including the assumption that the Vice Chancellor referred to repeatedly throughout is any kind of discrete, identifiable individual. It is likely that the Vice Chancellor is described specifically as a man only for some kind of critical effect, or set of effects, which issue from that presumption. And so, if a Vice Chancellor reading the book felt personally attacked, this would be just another epiphenomenon in the book’s broader existence. The two statements quoted above clearly themselves indicate that the phrase, The Vice Chancellor, does not refer to a particular individual, or even to a character type, and might have a broader critical remit throughout.

Lastly, as editor I should perhaps anticipate the obvious objection that the book’s epigraph is perhaps misattributed to Artaud. The line, “The fault is yours, rectors” is actually a fragment from a Letter to the Rectors of European Universities, published in La Révolution Surréaliste (no.3, 1925), a publication which Artaud was overseeing, certainly, but he does not sign off the letter under his own name. It might seem unduly pedantic to point this out, particularly as I read the epigraph as a playful misdirection itself, a misdirection to begin the book with. Namely, a sign pointing one way when it might have more helpfully pointed the other. This is a sign placed at the start of a book which does not consistently claim that the fault lies entirely at the door of the Vice Chancellor’s office, and so it would be not so much unfair as wrong to insist the fault is yours. The fault might lie with those who maintain the Vice Chancellor’s office by investing it with power. If the book persists in describing the shrivelled-up humanity which defines the position of being a Vice Chancellor, it only does so on the condition that the university cultures of those the Vice Chancellor might make redundant are considered implicated in his existence.