Professor Dan Briggs
It’s the second week of term and I’m only in the second semester of my return to undergraduate teaching in the UK university system. Much has changed I think to myself as I approach the seminar room. As I wait outside, I laugh to myself as I recall some amusing experiences from the last time I was teaching undergraduates…
“I pay your wages”
I had left the UK in 2013 to work in a private university in Spain where wealthy, disinterested students who were not academically fit for the public university system were sent by mummy and daddy to do the bare minimum to get their degree certificate. Typically, when the semester started in Spain, the first 5 or 6 weeks would see the expected class size of 25 drop to around 10 or 11. By week 7, we were almost into single figures and often concluding classes with no-one attending in last few weeks of the semester.
The students – of well below average competence and commitment but well above average spending power and generally entitled – had grown up in a cultural environment where everything had been presented to them with little effort. Indeed, many had jobs waiting for them on concluding their degrees, which mummy and daddy had arranged. I developed an alcohol dependency when marking the papers, mainly because few made clear sense, the majority hadn’t really read any of the material and they had looked for short-cuts to do the work. To make matters worse, some couldn’t even get my name right. Some classics were “David Bridges” or “Profe Biggs” or just “Module person” – the latter of which cuts deep with a dehumanising undertone. Sometimes students would just submit their work without even their name on or any title on the essay and even with no content in the email submitting the work. That’s how much they cared.
“I hope I get a pass” many would say to me when I released the marks. But many failed and had to retake, and retake, and retake again. One such third year student failed his dissertation presentation five times – in three of which he submitted the same plagiarised work he had previously submitted on two prior occasions. On another such occasion, I was publicly challenged by one student who I had failed. She said in front of the class “my work was worth a 4” – the benchmark pass mark – “come on, its worth a pass”. I said “No, it was a 3, you failed, you’ll have to do it again” to which she replied “it was a 4, you have to pass me, I pay your wages”.
Knowledge, the Master, and the wage-paying student
This story is, for Lacan, a near-perfect theatre of discourse failure. Two of Lacan’s four discourses – Master and University – describe the structures through which knowledge, desire, and power circulate. In this case, the private Spanish university has catastrophically collapsed the University Discourse (where knowledge mediates between authority and the subject), replacing it with the Master’s Discourse whereby my student, as opposed to me, occupies the position of true Master.
“I pay your wages” is the sentence that crystallises the socioeconomic relationship. Rather than read this as impulsive frustration and insolence on behalf of the student, Lacan would see it as a structural revelation. The student has correctly identified who holds the position of the Master in the institutional structure. Not the beholder of knowledge (me) but the holder of capital. My objectification is still incomplete – by misnaming or even not even naming me at all I become what Lacan would describe as the objet petit a: a disposable, interchangeable instrument of the Other’s enjoyment. The dehumanisation is not incidental or accidental but a brutal manifestation of how the logic of the system is acted out.
The plagiarised dissertation, submitted identically on three consecutive occasions, is equally exemplary. Lacan’s work distinguishes knowledge (savoir) from truth but many of these students possessed neither. Perhaps more importantly, they had never been constituted as desiring subjects in the first place because subjects who lack something seek something in its absence. Because everything had been delivered on demand, desire itself had never been properly stimulated and formed. Without lack, there is no desire. Without desire, there is no learning. The credential of the degree is pursued not as a symbol of knowledge but instead as an empty signifier – a piece of paper that unlocks the job mummy and daddy have already arranged, thus masquerading as a vital, hard-earned qualification and representing the ultimate short-circuit of the symbolic order.
But that was then and this is now. The Spanish private university and the marketised UK university arrive at the same destination by different roads – one through the blunt entitlement of inherited wealth, the other through the slow institutional surrender of academic authority to consumer logic. However, in both cases the University Discourse has collapsed, the Big Other has abdicated, and what remains is a symbolic order held together by the flimsiest of fictions.
“One thing a week”
It was only in September 2025 that I returned to the undergraduate lecture hall and the seminar rooms, with a massive amount of ambivalence mainly because the increasing marketisation of UK higher education has recalibrated students as consumers and institutions as competitors. In all truth, league tables, satisfaction surveys, and revenue-driven recruitment now dominate the academic mission. Similarly, much has changed in the lives of the current young generation who, in the intervening period, went through the traumas of the lockdowns and emerged increasingly anti-social and digitally dependent. They also apparently now ‘benefit’ from the prominence of AI-assisted learning in schools and universities. This, among other things, means that in general young people increasingly don’t read, don’t want to read and don’t know how to read, preferring instead the distracting allure of digital apparatus.
On campus all this is very evident I reason, thinking back to the first lecture I had given the week previously when around 70 students had turned up from a possible 136 who had registered. Arriving individually, 6 of 25 turn up to the seminar as we wait in silence outside the seminar room. They all look at their phones and scroll up and down, left and right while I watch on moved only by the clock ticks which seem to echo down the corridor. I consider myself fairly experienced at breaking the ice and disturbing awkward moments with conversation. The conversation went a little like this:
Dan: Well, only six of us. Wow. I wasn’t expecting that. Do people normally turn up late to the seminars? I’d hope so, you know.
[They look at each other hoping that one of them will respond so the others don’t have to engage in social interaction]
Student 1: Nah, it’s like this.
Dan: Right, but I mean it’s only week 2. I guess I would expect this to be a turnout for say week 8 or 9.
Student 1: Mostly, it is like this.
[Ten seconds pass and just before they start to revert back to the phones, I ask]
Dan: But aren’t there any consequences for poor attendance or non-attendance?
Student 1: Normally if you attend one thing a week, they don’t write to you.
[Clock ticks over silence resumes as I knock on the door to call time on other class]
‘One thing a week’, I think to myself, how is it that they don’t have the intellectual capacity or at least the momentary thought space to muster up an accurate description for what they are actually attending.
The corridor of silence: Drive, scroll, repeat
My ambivalence could be seen by Lacan as the condition of a subject caught between two incompatible symbolic positions. To some degree, and even though I was educated at a time when universities had already taken their first steps along the corporate pathway, I know what the university once meant. Over the years, have seen what it has become. In the Lacanian sense, I have become a split subject or – the barred subject – divided between an idealised Big Other (the university as site of genuine intellectual desire) and the deflated real of what it is now and how I now inhabit it.
The scenario I encountered outside the seminar room is extraordinarily revealing. Six students, each locked into their phone, performing the compulsive circuit Lacan would associate with drive rather than desire. Drive does not seek an object – it circles one endlessly. The scroll is not a search for anything in particular; it is the loop itself that satisfies, or rather, that substitutes for satisfaction. The students are not bored in the classical sense because boredom requires an absence of stimulus, which might generate desire. They are instead over-stimulated into passivity and their nervous systems are colonised by what Žižek, extending Lacan, would call the superego injunction to enjoy.
The exchange that follows is a compressed masterclass in what Lacan called the failure of intersubjective recognition. It is within this that I attempt to prise open a symbolic space – conversation, curiosity, and a general shared uncertainty about why so few chose to attend. But the students have already foreclosed that space. Student 1’s response, “Nah, it’s like this” and “Mostly, it is like this” – are not dismissive but bluntly descriptive of realitry. They are reporting, with flat accuracy, the real conditions of their symbolic world. They are not alienated from the institution but have taken it to its word.
But perhaps the most illuminating line was when I was told “if you attend one thing a week, they don’t write to you” because this is the story’s pivotal Lacanian moment. It reveals that the Big Other – or the university as symbolic authority – has already abdicated. The institution has quietly communicated that attendance is optional, that knowledge can be deferred, that the bare minimum is sufficient. The students have not undermined the symbolic order because the institution had already dismantled it.
The clock ticks. The silence resumes. In both cases the institution itself dismantled the symbolic conditions under which genuine desire for knowledge could form. The students have not failed the university. The university has failed the students, then handed them a satisfaction survey and asked how it was doing (although they’ll be lucky if too many the students actually complete it). Lacan reminds us that the subject is always constituted by and through the Other. When the Big Other and its institutional order – the university, the curriculum, the seminar – quietly signals that knowledge is optional, negotiable, and subordinate to revenue, it should not surprise us when students simply, and quite rationally, take it at its word.