British universities once enjoyed an enviable reputation. Then the political class introduced fees, and in came corporate fixers, accountants, branding experts, those who salivate before the market. Hardnosed managers cut posts and salaries: why not put those bumbling professors on zero-hour contracts and get them to do a vast amount of unpaid work?

Now in 2035 at the University of Bliss in the south of England, the dead hand of bureaucracy smothers all intellectual endeavour. An unashamedly corporate ideology holds sway, thinly veiled by ubiquitous rainbow washing and tokenistic gestures towards moral and spiritual values, the environment, and mental wellbeing. Cue for poets Tristan Black and Harry Blink and charming if duplicitous post-structuralist Humph Lacan to fight back. But is it too late to save the university?

The University of Bliss is a spoof, a satire, a cri de coeur—Evelyn Waugh on acid. And of course, any similarity to actual persons, living, dead, or merely soulless, is purely coincidental.