Before proceeding further into the anatomy of the modern university, this bonus episode pauses to explain the conceptual machinery of the series itself.

How should this project be read? What do the metaphors mean, and just as importantly, what do they not mean?

In this episode, I lay out the conceptual map that underpins The Emperor Is a Hostage. The Emperor is not a Vice-Chancellor. The Golden Throne is not a single policy, office, or reform. Chaos is not “bad behaviour.” These are structural metaphors designed to make visible the incentives, constraints, and adaptations that govern large institutions once they grow beyond the point where truth can rule directly.

This episode explains why Warhammer 40,000 is used as an analytical language rather than a joke, and why conventional academic critiques often fail to capture what actually happens inside universities at scale. It also introduces the methodological stance of the project: part institutional ethnography, part conceptual critique, part self-indictment.

Crucially, this is not a guide to fixing the system. It is a guide to seeing it clearly. To understanding why intelligent, well-meaning people enforce metrics they distrust, participate in rituals they privately mock, and sustain a machine they know is hollowing out the thing they once cared about.

If Episode 1 names the condition, this episode explains the grammar. It is a field manual for navigating a dead institution that still walks, still speaks, and still demands obedience.

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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If truth is the god of the university, then bureaucracy is the machine that keeps it alive.

In this episode, we go from the ideal to the apparatus. Drawing on Chapter 2 of The Emperor Is a Hostage, I examine the vast administrative machinery that sustains modern universities: accreditation systems, rankings, compliance regimes, funding models, audit cultures, and risk management frameworks.

This is not an attack on “the administration.” On the contrary, this episode begins from an uncomfortable admission: the Golden Throne works. Without it, the modern university would collapse under its own scale, legal exposure, and financial complexity. The machinery exists because it is necessary.

But necessity has consequences.

The Golden Throne does not ask whether something is true. It asks whether it is legible, auditable, fundable, and compliant. In translating inquiry into process, it converts sovereign judgment into ritualised procedure. Decisions are no longer made by appealing to truth directly, but by navigating layers of proxy metrics that protect the institution from risk while slowly producing stagnation.

This episode explores how bureaucracy becomes load-bearing, why “no” is often the safest answer, and how systems designed to prevent catastrophe end up punishing insight more harshly than failure. It also traces how this machinery spreads globally, exporting a bureaucratic monoculture that reshapes universities far beyond the West.

Finally, the episode confronts the true fuel of the system: unpaid labour, vocational devotion, and the quiet sacrifice of those who care too much to stop.

The Golden Throne is not evil. But it is a cage. And once built, it cannot be switched off without killing the god it sustains.

Read more in the book, available here https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GCFWD29C

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Every university claims to serve truth. It places the word on its crest, its mission statements, its accreditation documents. But what happens when an institution worships truth while no longer allowing it to rule?

In this episode, I examine the theological core of the modern university through its most unsettling metaphor: a god kept alive but silenced. Drawing on Chapter 1 of The Emperor Is a Hostage, this episode explores the distinction between what is sacred and what is sovereign, and why that difference explains so much of academic frustration, burnout, and disillusionment.

Truth, Lucey argues, has not been abandoned. It has been enthroned. Preserved symbolically, invoked constantly, but stripped of the power to override budgets, rankings, reputational risk, and strategic alignment. Like a god on life support, truth legitimises the system while being prevented from intervening in what is done in its name.

This episode unpacks the myth of a past “golden age,” the role of scale in silencing inquiry, and the rise of proxy questions that quietly replace “Is this true?” with safer, bureaucratic substitutes like “Is it fundable?” or “Is it compliant?”

At its emotional core, this is an episode about grief rather than anger. About why academic compromise hurts in a way ordinary workplace compromise does not. And about what it means to serve an ideal you still believe in, even as the system built around it no longer can.

Read more in the book, available here https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GCFWD29C

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.