Together we can save Niko Tiliopoulos

All power to the imagination

Niko Tiliopolous, my friend

They’re trying to fire my friend Niko Tiliopolous. Despite his research output and teaching quality, they’ve been trying to fire him for some time for a variety of reasons. They’ve taken so much of his energy. Now they’re giving him a choice- literal, physical death, or the destruction of the life he has built for himself as a scholar. You can sign the petition against this monstrosity here.

Niko is immunocompromised. His lungs are badly damaged, and he has been told, by no less than three specialists, that if he catches COVID he will die- indeed a cold or flu might finish him off. Niko told me once that he wanted to die by being burnt up on the Terminator of the moon, but he does not want to die yet. So, with COVID he took to giving his lectures online. The University - by which I mean its administrators - has decided this is insufficient. Ultimately he’s just a point they want to prove, part of a broader war on working from home. Now I get the desire to make university lectures in person- campus life, intellectual and otherwise- is important. But there’s no consideration of the special circumstances of the case, no willingness to compromise by, for example, shifting his duties away from teaching or letting him teach from home on the basis of reasonable accommodations.

I wish I could fire management instead. They’re not really the university. We are the University. They live parasitic off our energies. They’re an occupying force.

I don’t want my friend to die, or to lose access to the academic projects which are so very much of who he is and be cast into poverty. Please, whatever else you think, sign the petition.

Who is Niko

The hero of our story is a lecturer of mine when I was an undergraduate and, since I have few friends from high school, one of my oldest and dearest friends. A personality psychologist, a man with many strange and beautiful ideas, a man whose life would make an astonishing biopic. I watched, for example, as he tried -so hard but unsuccessfully- to save the life of a depressed alcoholic, I watched him grieve the loss of his brother, I saw the depth of his sadness, a poet’s sadness, at lost love. I watched him prepare mentally for the likelihood of his own death by failing lungs.

Although I cannot go into detail, he has faced violent death for what he believes in, and through that probably saved more lives than we’ll ever know. He bears charisma, wisdom generosity, openness, humor, taste, and tastelessness in equal measure and a deep, bitter sadness. He is a good man. He was a founder of the Disability Action at Work Network and a mental health pioneer in Indonesia. He writes poetry. He has a toy lightsaber replica but is very worried about breaking it. The engines of creation run in him, he is lightning in a bottle that the administrators have taken the better part of to keep their Macbooks on.

All the while I have known him, I could see the constraints digging in. I could see that there were so many ideas he wanted to play with, but couldn’t. Niko has brilliant publications, but the chains of an increasingly narrow system of peer review and research output appraisal held him back, he once said to me that he could only work on something he truly believed in once every two to three years.

Despite this, he maintained a good output. Bullshit administrative conventions, requirements, procedures, best practice guidelines, etc., etc. weighed on him, but he conformed. In a very real sense, I think the rigidity of the university system- its desire to unweave the rainbow of creativity and murder-to-dissect scholars - took a pound of his flesh right from the chest, but he kept going. He jumped the hoops when appropriate and fought the fights he thought were significant. While I won’t detail it here the university has been trying to take his job for years. Even though, now, he is quite literally fighting for his life, he’s always been fighting for his life in a way- for the worlds that he could create if only he was given space.

We all owe a lot to people like Niko- I know I do. You see them in every department, though they’re getting rarer. Eccentric, unusual, not fitted for the sharp elbows of office politics, but maybe, just maybe, onto something brilliant. The logic here is very simple, there are a lot of normal people looking for truth, and one’s outlook determines where and how one looks, ergo, the odd will more likely find it than the normal. I grant there are exceptions, but I’ll repeat the point: if ordinary people using ordinary methods could have found the extraordinary, they would have already done so by now. The fiery energies of people like Niko are being confiscated, and for what? How many talents for innumerable things, from weaving to psychotherapy to baking have gone unused, because of the bullshit you have to do to win a little space to use your talents?

A few anecdotes:

1. A philosopher I very much respect told me recently: “You can’t publish anything anymore without a hundred references and a four thousand word literature review attached that is polished and shiny and deals with fourteen objections no one would bother to make anyway. It’s impossible to just publish an interesting idea now. The first half of every paper isn’t even worth reading, it’s just there to show the author is a very serious person who should be published in a very serious journal”.

2. The new scholars I meet- postdocs-, new philosophers mostly, they’re lovely. But I can’t help but notice that they’re not as eccentric as their forebears. As competition for spots in academia becomes more fierce, the, for want of a better word, neurodivergent are being pushed out. The strange people who wanted to change the world, or dig deep into reality, were replaced by those seeking a career. It’s just a simple dichotomy, of course, many force themselves into the mold of careerists, trimming the wings for Blakean mind flight.

3. They just put a lock on the philosophy common room FFS.

Draw a line

None of this has to happen. We can choose to save Niko.

Firstly sign the petition here obviously. Then share it as far and wide as you can.

More generally we can choose to make work, all work, not just academic work, shared labor on behalf of humanity, rather than this squirreled, surveyed, scored farce of our creative powers. We can draw a line. Every day, collectively, we have the option to draw the line. We can stop squabbling, stop screaming uselessly, and draw the line.

If it’s easy to call attention to the creeping suits in universities it’s only because, historically, we’ve had a measure of freedom from them. Everywhere, the creative energies of humanity are dampened. You can say this is the way it has to be because there have been kings and their delegates since at least the invention of agriculture. Well, sure, but we never had technology like we do now. We can remake the world, and even if we cannot ultimately triumph, we can at least win ourselves a measure of breathing space. If they’ll only organise, those who produce the world can rebuild it. Connect with your fellow workers, your neighbors, and your old friends, talk, organize, and act. Win space.