The post isn’t delivered anymore. In this university, like many others, the post used to come to a central room, the postroom, where it would be organised and delivered to each department. Then someone, normally an administrator, would go through the pile, posting parcels and letters into individuals’ pigeonholes. A simple system that occurred without notice, becoming less and less urgent as emails and digital transfer reduced the amount of physical items. Visiting the postroom now is to observe a system halted, disrupted, but not completely dismantled. Piles of letters, circulars and parcels gather in departmental pigeonholes, left for months without anyone seeming to know that they need to be sent out anywhere beyond this room.
It is the end of the academic year, following months of tense industrial action. I think about the post, and how it used to travel around the buildings. This is one tiny element in a new wave of reform, framed as efficiency but experienced as chaos and loss, distilled in the experience of visiting the postroom. I had been going in, on occasion, in my last few months of work, checking on what might have arrived. The replacement for the quiet movement of letters and parcels has been nothing. A drift of not caring, a pile of pretend innovation which is in fact an exodus of people, roles, structures, empathy. I thought that something would be put in the place of the previous system, but over the summer I can see that nothing has been, and probably for most people, this is the smallest problem in a huge pile of completely foreseeable consequences to redundancies and restructures.
To retrieve post, I have figured out that it is best to visit the postroom and request a department’s pile to leaf through. No one has made this clear, so only the curious or those still reliant on pre-digital communication would bother to sift through. Many staff who joined during covid probably have no idea where the postroom is, or that it exists. I go down on occasion and have a chat with the staff working there, speaking about colleagues who have left, taken early retirement, taken redundancy. We exist in a post-reform limbo: the new structures are only sketched out, and departments are working with fewer and fewer people.
It is eerie witnessing a system so easily halted: the departments still exist, the post still arrives, but the connections between the two have been cut, with no fanfare, no Plan B. It has been a number of years since there were porters tasked with internal mail delivery (itself a trace of a pre-digital system, I have faint memories of memos arriving in lined envelopes, multiple addressees crossed out from previous usage). Administrative reform, framed as efficiency, means that there are no longer departmental administrators who had been the ones to take over the task of the porters. These administrators have now gone, or have been centralised, and those who stayed are overwhelmed with monstrous email inboxes, struggling to contain the requests of students from multiple programmes, departments, locations. Department heads and academic staff have got bigger problems than deciding which person will pick up the post.
In the autumn, I have left the university and started a new job. I meet a friend who is still working there. She had been to the postroom more recently than me. She found a parcel labelled with my name and brings it when we meet: acts of kindness and chance now replacing institutional systems. The level of loss and also incomprehension grows like the pile of post. The lack of investment starkly illustrated in the minor details, easier to think about perhaps than those who have ‘chosen’ redundancy, or those whose workload has doubled because they have somehow managed to stay.
A couple of days later I’m sitting on a train, returning home from my new job. I’ve left the piles of post and am starting to become familiar with a different set of strategies to wrestle the impossible demands on universities teaching the arts and humanities. I think about the external requests to fix education for school children, to ensure graduates get good jobs, to constantly monitor metrics that speak to everything and nothing, and wonder what compromise between fiction and complicity I will need to find. But I’ve got a job in a department with no redundancies on the horizon, and this is a privilege. I try and push the stress and impossibility away, and focus on the luxury of employment.
I’ve been dreaming about babies. In one dream I have a pram, and a baby that I’m looking after for a friend. We are travelling on a bus and somehow I get off without the child. The dream unfolds in nightmarish panic as I try and get on a following bus to catch up with the baby in its pram, alone and possibly now with someone else. I think about how I will tell my friend what I have done. When I wake I think, why didn’t I tell the bus driver? Why didn’t I call the bus company? In the dream there was no one to help, only what I could manage under my own steam, which would never be enough. It’s not a subtle dream, one in which helplessness and care and individual responsibility in the face of institutional indifference stage themselves in my subconscious.
Sitting on the train this dream returns as I see parents with babies struggling on and off at stations. It’s not rush hour, and it’s half term, so families outnumber workers. A small baby starts to cry, and the plaintive sound activates everyone. There is no ease when a baby cries. Its quietly desperate crying outlines unspecified needs that cannot wait for the end of the journey. As I hear it, I am returned to the experience of listening to my own children when they were tiny, remembering my amazement at the righteousness of babies, the exhaustion that would wave over me at the enormity of what it meant to look after them. I realise that those feelings of helplessness in the face of caring for small children connect with my current experiences of universities over these last few years: in the postroom, on the picket line, in front of piles of demands and competing fictions that move further and further away from what happens in the classroom.
It’s now 2025, three years since I was first visiting the postroom in search of lost post. Writing up these memories I feel faintly embarrassed. However, the post in the postroom still speaks to me. Universities and public bodies continue to cut resources and shred infrastructure in the service of magical thinking, framed as efficiency savings. I’ve lost track of how many friends are on strike, at threat of redundancy, have been off sick due to stress. Set against a backdrop of an increasingly volatile and hostile world, these calamities are small but are instructive. My ear is tuned to the mute sounds of institutional neglect.