You've Always Been The Caretaker

As course leader for an undergraduate programme at the University for the Creative Arts, Rochester, I cherished many things about my role, certainly all the great and obvious stuff about enlivening the imaginations of young people and doing a decent day’s work in a location characterised by high levels of diversity and low self-esteem.?

Less loftily, I loved my Tuesday afternoons, sitting alongside first year students in the darkness of Lecture Theatre 1, watching movies lauded for their expressionistic production design and masterful storytelling.

A particular highlight was always Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), in which the star was less Jack Nicholson and more The Overlook, that story’s deserted hotel, its empty spaces imprinted upon by traumas of the past.

When I returned recently to UCA Rochester, for no other purpose than to photograph the place before its scant staff and few remaining students leave for good, it was Kubrick’s film flickering away in the secret cinema of my imagination.

The Overlook

As The Shining understands very well, once stripped of their raison d'etre, formerly busy, communal spaces elicit uncanny effects. As I approached the hilltop campus, I made ready to be disquieted by the slow, sad death of the place and likewise the clamour of its past lives. ?

How could this redoubtable old pile not bring on the heebie-jeebies? ?As everyone knows, any haunted house worth its salt needs to be built on the site of something more ancient. In The Shining, the Overlook is constructed over Native American burial ground.? No less impressively, the Rochester campus was erected brick-by-brick on the site of a Napoleonic-era fort.?

As I crested the hill with its promenade of cherry trees, I was thinking about the lightless tunnels deep below the now-necrotic campus; about who or what might walk there, just as, back in the day, I’d listened, rapt, as caretakers lent on their brooms to thrill me with tales of their respective encounters with the ‘ghost of north block’…?

I’m sorry to disappoint, but I didn’t find Rochester’s long empty corridors remotely sinister, not even as I tracked slowly along them with my camera or climbed again those many flights of silent stairs. No unhappy phantoms here, no spooks and no sign certainly of Kubrick’s identical twins, just a few old faces who, surprised to see me after all this time, perhaps took me for a ghost.

Strong Meat

Lecture Theatre 1 was exactly as I’d left it.?

It wasn’t strange to find it empty.? I’d always come to this room in advance of my students to coax the projector into life and wield cans of air freshener to exorcise the very particular odour generated by lots of young people in a largely airless room.

There’s another memorable scene in The Shining when Jack Nicholson’s caretaker walks into the Overlook’s vacant Gold Room to find it populous with figments from the past. I found Lecture Theatre 1 no less lively, its seats filled many times over with memories of former students, a temporal palimpsest of bright young things.

Just to be clear though: not everyone shared my enthusiasm for my Tuesday afternoon film screenings. For most, The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari (1920) was too old, too slow and too silent. For many, Black Narcissus (1947) was just some old weird film about libidinous nuns, while The Shining mostly just scared the shit out of them.

One film proved routinely divisive.

As sumptuous as it is sleazy, Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) is a lurid, Technicolour nightmare about a ballet school harbouring terrible secrets. Before pressing play, I’d prepare students for what was coming, because what was coming was strong meat indeed. ?In one scene, maggots fall from the ceiling to twitch horribly in the hair of the film’s plucky protagonist, Suzy Bannion. ?

Hard to stomach then and more so now since the shocking case of Sheila Seleoane, a real woman in a real building, whose body lay undiscovered for two years, even after maggots wormed their way into her neighbour’s flat through the ceiling light. ?

Plot twist

It was also in Lecture Theatre 1 that my colleagues and I learnt of our impending redundancies. Unlike, say, the denouement of The Sixth Sense (1999), another film screened in this self-same room, this reveal came as little surprise. Nonetheless, I asked a simple question of the Vice Chancellor, after he’d finished presenting the business case that would kill off finally the idea of course leadership and subject specificity as being effective or desirable in the design and delivery of creative education.?

I said, ‘But what is it going to be like to work and study here?’

Another type of leader might have said, ‘It’s going to be tough,’ or ‘I wish it was different,’ or ‘I’m sorry it’s come to this.’ Our leader said, ‘It’s going to be better.’

My resignation followed a month or so later and throughout the period of my notice, I remained the very model of decorum. ?Not for me the fire axe or the hacking down of doors. I know some colleagues expected more from me. My equilibrium was a disappointment to some and a mystery to others.

What my colleagues didn’t know was I’d been walking around with UCA’s whistle blower policy weighing heavily in my laptop bag for months.

The Straw Man

Cult classic, The Wicker Man (1973) is about a self-regulating community conspiring together in a game of appearance versus reality, and, in common with The Sixth Sense, boasts a killer final twist.? Most times, my first years never saw it coming, as the art of Anthony Schaeffer’s screenplay lies in its powers of misdirection. ?

I had long suspected our own community of conspiracy, that given certain economic conditions, we were not above working against the interests of our own applicants. How else to explain the phenomena wherein students would materialise on day one of a course for which their interview and/or portfolio had been unsuccessful? ?

If ever I flagged the ethical implications of applicants being offered unsuitable courses - irrespective of the advice and experience of the institution’s subject-matter experts - senior management would reframe my concerns accordingly: course staff are putting unnecessary barriers between learners and their knowledge and sometimes we will act on the applicants’ behalf...

A straw man is the term used when someone deploys a closely associated argument to derail, discredit or obfuscate the original line of enquiry. ?As straw men go, the argument that subject matter experts are elitists was an effective manoeuvre because a) it was always going to be true of someone somewhere and b) it co-opted all the good and reasonable stuff about inclusivity and diversity, and to argue against those ideas was not only to lose the argument but prove it too.?

Da-dum Da-dum

Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) is as old as I am. In spite of its great age, it still delivers. How I always enjoyed the moment my first years leapt out of their seats when Ben Gardner’s head popped out of the hole in the bottom of his boat!

One of the many achievements of Spielberg’s film is the way it manages to establish an ever-present feeling of threat. We are left forever scanning the horizon looking for a dorsal fin. ?More so, we are encouraged to view the world from the POV of an apex predator and in this way come to understand our new place in the food chain.?

While a good deal less exciting than Jaws, I nonetheless recall one course leaders’ away day where a representative from UCA’s legal firm told us about the new role of the Consumer and Markets Authority in the Higher Education sector. In common with composer John Williams’ da-dum da-dum, the note sounded was one of lurking danger.

Maybe it’s because I don’t scare easily or more so because I’ve never been confused as to where my loyalties as an educator lie, but it was hard to feel anything but reassured by the causal line drawn for us that day between delivering better-than-decent learning experiences and the exigencies of compliance. Admittedly, the line the lawyer actually drew was one of those plummeting red ones, charting the results of student litigation running quickly into millions of pounds, but the lesson I took home was how course leaders had the leading role in protecting students from sharks and HEIs from deep water.?

The Inciting Incident

In film-speak, ‘the inciting incident’ is the moment that truly kicks-off a story.?

In Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), the inciting incident comes when Marion Crane decides to steal $40,000 dollars from her employer to start a new life with her lover in Fairvale; after this, her fateful stop-over at Bates Motel; after that, the infamous shower scene.

If the end of my story sees me returning to the Rochester Campus on the cusp of its closure to take a few moody photographs and stand pensively about in Lecture Theatre 1, its inciting incident is a single email received six years earlier.

The subject of that email was UCA’s applicant cycle, its sender, my then-Head of School, advising us that, whatever we may think or feel to the contrary, any due diligence on our part in regards to making offers was largely a wasted effort, given ‘The V-C is likely to overrule any rejects except in exceptional cases.’

To my knowledge, this was the first time our worst kept secret had been put into plain sight, in a moment as indicative of the stupidifying effects of group-think as I can think of. ?

So this is how unsuspecting young people fetched up on my course who I’d otherwise sought to protect, advise differently or sign-post responsibly. Senior management is reversing course teams’ interview decisions to bolster the university’s finances, and spoiler alert, this isn’t some selfless act of social justice undertaken by the best and most altruistic of our teaching and learning community.

This is conspiracy after all, if by conspiracy we mean self-serving practices invisible to the applicants themselves, invisible to the bank of mum and dad, and likewise found absolutely nowhere in any marketing copy or open day presentation.

Hitchcock had a theory about filmmaking I shared with students before screening his films.?The key, Hitchcock argued, to producing maximum discomfort was telling audiences exactly what was happening, not surprising them but burdening them with knowledge. This is why, in the moments before Marion Crane is killed, the director treats us to the slow silhouette of her assailant moving towards the shower curtain. ?

The Unreliable Narrator

But maybe I’ve watched too many films, or, more likely, the same film too many times.

In one of cinema’s greatest (and oldest) twists, we find out at the end of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari that the film’s trusted narrator is himself unreliable, hysterical even. I mean to say, so what if the VC is dishing out offers to applicants his own staff have judged would be better served studying elsewhere, studying something different or trying again a year or so later?? Applicants don’t have to accept their offers, right? ?How can this be an abuse of power when the ball is so firmly in the applicant’s court?

Or so the straw man said.

Is it really good enough that the university’s regard for its paying customers should boil down to something as bleakly one-sided as ‘buyer beware’? ?

And thinking back to that causal line between consumers and compliance and between standards and reputation, is it really okay for an applicant to be invited to spend money on something already flagged as not being in their best interest? Is it ever okay for a university’s highest-paid staff member to magic acceptances from rejections for the purpose of maximising income from student fees? And is it really okay that course leaders should have their eyes opened to the practice but only as a function of closing them?

Ambiguous though its ending is, the narrative of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari is more easily discerned; situated within an obviously skewed reality, it is a plot in which the wishes of a single powerful man are enacted by a somnambulist.

Matte Paintings

Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus, otherwise known as that ‘old weird film about libidinous nuns’, is set in an abandoned palace high up in the Himalayas and is rightly celebrated for its production design and otherworldly atmosphere.?The vistas of the mountains are matte paintings by Jack Cardiff, and the monastery itself a set at Pinewood Studios. In short, the allure of this fiction's location is a seductive facsimile.

Lecture Theatre One 1's small black box with its nice big screen was also where I’d host course talks for would-be applicants and their parents. What better venue for screening student work of which I was suitably proud? ?

I had a loose sort of script developed over the many times I’d delivered it, combining a few bad jokes for breaking the ice and lots of real and boundless enthusiasm for the challenge of my course. ?I was a pretty good salesman, quite comfortable selling our wares because, unlike the ersatz locations of Black Narcissus, I wasn’t faking.

When it came to answering all those perennial questions about our application process, how it worked, the diligence of it, I said what I always said by way of reassurance, and what I said was, ‘If we make you an offer it means something.’

So I was right about that, but also wrong. Turns out the meaning of our offer was not congruity but expedience, not partnership but asymmetry.

Later, after I declined to participate further in outreach days or school visits, my colleague in marketing struggled to understand my change of heart. I’m uncomfortable, I admitted.? I’ve been compromised, I said, and still my colleague didn’t get it.? (Perhaps I should have shared Hitchcock’s ideas about the special agony of living with knowledge?). ?Instead, I reminded this person we were presenting our admission policy in one way while operating in another.

We are dissimulating, I said, to which my colleague replied, scathingly, ‘Everyone is doing it.’?

Room 406

Meanwhile, back in The Overlook, there is one space in particular for which Kubrick reserves special dread.? We know ‘something bad’ happened inside Room 237, and later we find out what: there is a woman in Room 237, a dead one, and she’s decomposing in the bath.

You might say 'Room 406' has a similarly ominous ring to it. It is, however, just a glorified cupboard on the ground floor of the Rochester Campus. Nonetheless, it was in the privacy of this particular room that I one day had it out with a Head of School. ?

By this time in my story, my own Head of School had vanished from the organisation without trace to be replaced by someone shiny and new. I chose to speak to this particular Head of School because he was one of the good ones, but I watched, miserably, as what I had to say on the subjects of inertia, complicity and dereliction left him dead-behind-the-eyes and greenish.

‘Look,’ this decent man said hopelessly, ‘Everyone is doing it,’ as, from the ceiling above, maggots plopped softly to settle in our hair.

Denouement

If this whole thing had been one of my Tuesday afternoon movies, my telephone conversation with the Deputy Vice Chancellor these few weeks later would have been underscored by suspenseful, non-diegetic music and crackling with awards-worthy dialogue. ?What I actually said in my brilliant and zinging rejoinder to the DVC’s contention there was nothing untoward about senior leadership’s hidden/not-hidden role in changing offers was, ‘If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.’

Oh well. ?I should have said something like ‘A fish always rots from the head’, but my meaning must have been clear enough, and near enough the mark, because the DVC said, ‘What are you going to do?’

I guess the DVC wanted to know if I was going to take my concerns, and my email trail, to the Consumer and Markets Authority.? I guess the DVC wanted to know if it was my intention to self-immolate in a blaze of pious glory and take the institution and its quacking duck down with me.? I did by now have the whistle blower policy in my bag and I’d imagined doing it many times over, screening one denouement after another in the secret cinema of my imagination:

There was the ending in which the baddies were led away in chains while the music swelled and the credits rolled.?

There was the ending in which I vanished mysteriously overnight never to be spoken of again.

There was the ending in which pretty much the whole world shrugged and said, ‘Everyone is doing it.’?

There was the ending in which I was seen to impugn the reputations of my hard-working colleagues and likewise diminish the achievements of students.

I envisioned too the wet-lipped pleasure I would be giving to those ideologues with vested interests in there being ‘less universities like ours’; and always I thought about Rochester, this redoubtable pile high-up on this hill, and how best to take care of it.?

‘What are you going to do?’ the DVC said, to which I replied finally, ‘What are you going to do?’, which is the sort of thing someone says when, contrary to the sorts of films they're showing to their students, they still believe in happy endings. This was me saying, ‘You fix it. You do the right thing, because if you do the right thing, I think I can stay here.'

You might say my challenge to the DVC that day was ultimately an expression of love: for the idea of a place and of its custodians. ?

And all this time you thought this was a horror story.

The End

At the climax of Suspiria, Suzy Bannion, after exposing the evil coven, walks from the school as it burns to the ground. ?As she wipes the hair from her face, she smiles. She got out alive and so did we, which, of course, is the point of a film like Suspiria; it’s richly cathartic.

In the end, I walked away too, though I don’t believe in covens exactly and I didn’t set everything on fire. I still have days when I think I should have done and on those days I feel shame. It’s not houses that are haunted.

Even so, from the moment I resigned, I felt the relief that comes after you’ve been nauseous for days and you finally puke, but it wasn’t the scene with the maggots that did it; it was love that made me spill my guts.

Turns out, you can only stomach hope for so long.

Post-credits scene

I’m mindful, of course, of the closing moments of The Shining, where Kubrick’s camera tracks slowly towards an old photograph of the Gold Room, where, impossibly, we see Jack Nicholson’s character as stuck in the past as a fly in amber. ?

And so, after taking one last photograph of my own, an unremarkable image of rows of austere empty seats in an empty airless room, I left Lecture Theatre 1 and walked the short distance through the campus reception and out into the present day.

Later that same sunny afternoon, I walked down into Rochester itself to meet a friend for a pint of beer in an old pub. A student of mine from years back, he’s made a few films of his own since and had them screened at the BFI and on the BBC. When not working on his own stuff, he lectures at a big university in another part of the country, where, in his continuing mission to protect the student experience from the dark forces of genericism, he stays late some evenings to screen provocative films for his undergraduates.

‘You’re taking proper care of them', I said, raising my glass.

‘I learnt that from you’, my friend said, raising his. ‘You’ve always been the care taker.’