Revise and Resubmit - The Mayukh Show
English Podcast starts at 00:00:00 Bengali Podcast Starts at 00:38:03 Hindi Podcast Starts at 00:57:32 Danish Podcast Starts at 01:16:23 Reference Peter Fleming (2021). Dark Academia: How Universities Die. Pluto Press. https://www.plutobooks.com/product/dark-academia/ Youtube channel link https://www.youtube.com/@weekendresearcher Podcast Website https://mayukhmukhopadhyay.com/reviseandresubmit EGOS In memoriam Peter Fleming https://www.egos.org/egos/about/in_memoriam_Fleming 🎙️📚 Welcome to Revise and Resubmit, and to another episode of Weekend Book Review. Some books arrive at exactly the moment when they become impossible to read as ordinary books. They become conversations with someone whose voice we now know has fallen silent. Today feels like one of those moments. I come to Dark Academia: How Universities Die with a mixture of admiration and quiet sadness. Reading it now, I cannot help but hear more than an argument about universities. I hear the voice of a scholar who cared deeply about what a university could be, and who refused to mistake efficiency for education or management for wisdom. 🌧️📖 Peter Fleming never wrote to comfort institutions. He wrote to challenge them. Throughout a remarkable career spanning the University of Cambridge, Queen Mary University of London, Cass Business School, and later the University of Technology Sydney, he became one of the most fearless critics of corporate culture, neoliberalism, and the quiet erosion of human dignity in modern workplaces. Yet those who knew him remember something equally important. They remember a generous mentor, an ironic wit, and a colleague whose kindness matched the sharpness of his intellect. His passing in July 2026 leaves the academic world immeasurably poorer, but his ideas continue to ask difficult questions that refuse to disappear. 🕯️ In this book, Fleming invites me into what he calls the "zombie university," a place where metrics replace meaning, rankings eclipse curiosity, and scholars slowly surrender time, imagination, and even their health to systems that measure almost everything except genuine learning. The pages are often unsettling because they feel painfully familiar. Behind discussions of managerialism, commercialization, surveillance, and competition lies a quieter grief. It is the grief of watching an institution built for discovery gradually forget why it existed in the first place. As someone who has spent years inside academic life, I found myself pausing often. I was not simply reading about universities. I was thinking about corridors, supervisors, classrooms, late night writing sessions, and the fragile hope that knowledge can still change both people and society. Perhaps that is why this book feels less like a critique and more like a warning offered with genuine affection. 🍂✨ So today, let us revisit a work that asks uncomfortable questions with remarkable honesty. And as we begin, I wonder whether the real question is not whether universities are dying, but whether we still remember what they were meant to keep alive. 🤔💭 🙏 My heartfelt thanks to Professor Peter Fleming and Pluto Press for giving us a book that continues to provoke, unsettle, and inspire. 🎧 If you enjoy thoughtful conversations like this, please subscribe to Revise and Resubmit on Spotify, and our YouTube channel, Weekend Researcher. You can also find us on Amazon Prime Music and Apple Podcasts. Your support helps us keep important books and important conversations alive. 🌟📚
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