There is a sentiment circulating in the staff rooms and Substack threads of the educational world, a quiet resistance typed furiously into WhatsApp groups at the end of a long term: we are all being flattened.
Let us be brutally, scorched-earth honest for a moment about the modern UK university sector. It is no longer an incubator of thought; it is an algorithmic slaughterhouse of intellect. It is a compliance engine running on the fumes of marketisation, where students have been surgically reclassified as “consumers” and lecturers as “content providers.” We are subjected to the panopticon of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), National Student Surveys (NSS), and arbitrary engagement metrics designed by middle managers who haven’t stood in front of a classroom since flip-phones were partnered with a Blue Steel gaze.
We are drowning in a sea of administrative bullshit that has absolutely nothing to do with actual education, but everything to do with keeping the compliance engine running.
The system demands a perfectly friction-free, replicable, and sterile delivery of ‘value.’ It wants standardised rubrics, homogenised learning outcomes, and clean, easily digestible data points. It is a machine that takes the sprawling, chaotic, neuro-complex reality of human beings and squashes them flat. Oh my soul.
If you’ve ever read Edwin A. Abbott’s 1884 novella Flatland, you know the exact architecture of this hell. In Abbott’s satire, society is a strictly two-dimensional hierarchy of geometric shapes. (I love squares, btw.) The more sides you have, the higher your status. The most damning indictment in the book is reserved for women, who are reduced to mere straight Lines—the lowest, thinnest dimension, socially required to constantly sway back and forth so they don’t accidentally impale anyone with their sharp, invisible edges.
The modern university is Flatland. It wants us all on a 2D plane, sliding around, bumping into each other’s rigid edges, terrified of anything with actual depth.
Which brings me to this morning.
If you want to know what it feels like to fail at being a functional geometric shape in Flatland, look no further than my lecture today. The roster promised a large group. Reality delivered exactly five students, scattered across a cavernous room like survivors of a minor apocalypse, blinking at me in the double-projector-over-kill-empty-room-glare.
I walked in already compromised. My neurodivergent brain had hit a wall of absolute, paralysing overwhelm. In presenting, my slides were not updated (they were still last year’s slides?!) - a cardinal sin in the church of Content Provision. The cognitive load of trying to mask my rising panic while desperately trying to locate a thread of intellectual coherence resulted in a total brain block. I stuttered. I lost my place. I stared at the five faces looking back at me and felt the immediate, suffocating weight of Imposter Syndrome settling over my chest like a lead apron. Let’s not dress it up in polite academic reflection: the session was a fucking disaster.
I am a fraud, the brain whispers. I have no business being here. The algorithm is right: I am a glitch.
When you are neurodivergent in a system designed for standardised minds, your failures are never just bad days; they feel like existential indictments. You internalise the institution’s structural decay as personal inadequacy. The five present students aren’t a symptom of a disengaged, post-COVID, gig-economy student culture - they are my fault. The blank slides aren’t a symptom of burnout - they are proof of my incompetence. It is a devastatingly efficient gaslighting machine.
In Abbott’s two-dimensional universe, the gravest crime a citizen can commit is “Irregularity.” The societal imperative of Flatland is to ruthlessly correct any deviation - through literal surgical reshaping or outright execution - so that every shape perfectly aligns with the mathematical norm.
As a neurodivergent academic operating in a neurotypical institution, I am, by definition, an Irregular. When my brain locked up today in front of those five students, I was failing to perform my geometry correctly. The modern university, much like the ruling circles of Abbott’s world, does not tolerate Irregularity. It demands that we surgically correct ourselves—through relentless masking, through burnout, through the quiet, grinding violence of administration - just to pass as a standard, predictable polygon on a Senior Management engagement spreadsheet. You internalise this structural demand until your own failure to comply feels like a fatal flaw.
But then, I received an email... An error in the system landed in my inbox.
The subject line had been standard issue: Re: Seminar Today. I assumed it was a panicked request for an extension or a quiet apology for missing a lecture. I had replied with the usual academic triage: Don’t worry. You haven’t missed anything.
But the student—let’s call her S - didn’t reply to ask for a favour. Instead, I was forced to remember the Sphere.
In Flatland, the protagonist, A. Square, has his reality shattered when a three-dimensional Sphere suddenly intersects his world. To a flat being, a Sphere is incomprehensible - it appears as a circle that impossibly grows and shrinks, defying all known logic. The Sphere ultimately pulls A. Square upward, out of his flat existence, allowing him to see his entire world from above, exposing the rigid, absurd limitations of the 2D plane.
S’s email was the Sphere intersecting my inbox.
In the crushing geometry of higher education, students - and particularly female students - are often subtly conditioned to play the exact role Abbott cynically assigned to women in his satire: the straight Line. They are expected to be compliant, one-dimensional, and practically invisible (read, silent), carefully navigating the institution without causing friction.
S refused the geometry of the Line. By taking the time to articulate her experience, by claiming space to validate the exact neuro-complex teaching style that the university implicitly discourages, she claimed volume. She reached into the flat, metric-obsessed despair of my inbox and pulled me up:
“It never feels like you are trying to make students fit into one way of thinking or learning; instead, you create space for different perspectives, personalities, and approaches - which is incredibly rare!! That kind of teaching makes such a difference. It makes people feel seen, understood, and more confident in their own ideas.*”
(*email text reproduced with S’s permission, thank you!)
Reading those words again this afternoon, shaking off the humiliating residue of my disastrous morning lecture (Oh, I am so sorry, my students), I felt the sudden, jarring friction between human complexity and bureaucratic simplicity. S’s message wasn’t just a thank you; it was a breach of the logic we are expected to inhabit.
In the novella, A. Square is ultimately thrown into prison for preaching the “Gospel of Three Dimensions.” It is considered institutional heresy to suggest that there is depth beyond the flat plane. S’s email is a reminder that recognising the dimensionality of our students is a similarly heretical act. Creating a classroom that accommodates neuro-complexity—refusing to surgically alter our students to fit the TEF rubric - is dangerous, exhausting work. It is an active rebellion against the algorithm.
In higher education, we are constantly told to be “resilient.” But resilience is a bullshit concept - a polite, corporate euphemism designed to make you feel guilty for bleeding when the institution cuts you.
What S recognised wasn’t resilience. It was resistance.
Creating space for different minds isn’t a pedagogical strategy; it is an active refusal to participate in the flattening. It is looking at a room—even a room with only five exhausted students in it—and refusing to see them as data points. And the brutal truth is, when you teach like that, when you leave your edges raw and refuse to script every interaction, you are going to have days like I had today. You are going to crash and burn. You are going to stand in front of a projector with brain fog, feeling like a total charlatan. But S’s email proves the heresy is necessary.
S noted in her email that she was taught to actively voice positive feedback because teaching staff usually only hear the negative. She is right. We operate in an ecosystem built on critique, where feedback is a weaponised metric, rarely a gift. To take the time to write an email of genuine praise, expecting nothing in return, is an act of institutional defiance. It is a quiet, well-articulated middle finger to the engagement spreadsheets.
We are at the end of a ten-week semester, and I am running on neuro-burnout, the edges of a lupus flare, fumes, and sheer, unadulterated rage. I am so fucking angry that we are forced to operate in a sector that prioritises a sterilised, compliance-driven “culture” over actual, visceral student learning.
The modern cogs of the Higher Ed machine don’t give a flying fuck if these kids actually learn how to think critically, just so long as the engagement metrics are green and the consumer satisfaction surveys hold steady.
And right alongside that rage sits a deep, agonising shame. Shame that today, I let the crushing weight of this bullshit system break me. Shame that I stood in front of those five students and failed them, simply because my brain could not mask the exhaustion of surviving in Flatland for one more hour.
Today, the algorithm won. Today, I felt entirely flat. But S’s email is a permanent reminder that the classroom must remain a sanctuary from a world that prefers its subjects strictly transactional.
To S, and to all the digital outsiders, the neuro-spicy, the anxious, the messy, three-dimensional humans who refuse to be flattened: thank you.
You make the impossible stand worth taking. We are not just data points. And occasionally, even on the days we fail spectacularly, we are seen.
If today’s dispatch resonated, or if you simply want to arm yourself with more theory before your next battle with an engagement spreadsheet, here is a curated reading list from the muddle:
Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884)
The ur-text for this post. Originally written as a biting satire of Victorian social hierarchy, its brutal geometry serves as a perfect, chilling mirror for the modern bureaucratic institution. Come for the mathematical weirdness; stay for the existential dread of being a Line.
Jerry Z. Muller, The Tyranny of Metrics (2018)
Essential reading for anyone who has ever felt their soul leave their body while filling out a TEF rubric. Muller forensically dismantles how the obsession with quantifying human performance actually ruins the very institutions it claims to improve.(Email me for open access.)
Robert Chapman, Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism (2023)
A brilliant, necessary look at how economic and institutional systems demand neurotypical conformity. Chapman perfectly articulates why existing outside that norm is fundamentally treated as a systemic glitch, and why claiming space for neuro-complexity is an act of political resistance.
Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber, The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy (2016)
An antidote to the corporate, neoliberal “resilience” trap. Berg and Seeber argue for a deliberate rebellion against the relentless, algorithmic acceleration of academic life, advocating for the return of actual, messy, unquantifiable human connection in teaching. (Email me if you need open access via Research Gate.)
Stefan Collini, Speaking of Universities (2017)
The definitive, scorched-earth critique of the marketisation of UK higher education. If you want to understand exactly how the system successfully
rebranded students as “consumers” and academics as “content providers,” Collini tracks the decay beautifully.
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