The modern university still teaches, still publishes, still awards degrees. From the outside, it appears busy, productive, and professional. From the inside, many of us feel something else entirely: a dull, persistent sense that the institution no longer quite knows what it is for.

In this opening episode, I make a deliberately unsettling claim: the university has not failed, collapsed, or been “captured.” It has adapted. It has reached a stable end state in which its founding ideal, truth, remains sacred but no longer sovereign.

This is not a polemic about bad managers or ideological enemies. It is not a nostalgia piece for a golden age that never really existed. Instead, this episode introduces the core framing of the series: how large institutions preserve their legitimacy by immobilising the very principle they claim to serve.

Drawing on The Emperor Is a Hostage, I introduce the central metaphor that will structure the entire podcast. The Emperor represents the belief that truth matters. The Golden Throne represents the vast machinery of audit, metrics, compliance, and procedure built to keep that belief symbolically alive while preventing it from ruling directly.

No prior knowledge is required. Warhammer 40,000 is used here not as fandom, parody, or satire, but as a bleak mythic language capable of describing institutional living death with the seriousness it deserves.

This episode sets the tone, the grammar, and the stakes. The question is not how to save the university. The question is how to understand what it has become.

Get the book here https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GCFWD29C

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