THE UNIVERSITY OF OPTIMISED COMPLIANCE PART III

ACADEMIC ABSURDISTAN

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SCENE XIII: THE ANNUAL KPI MASQUERADE BALL

Every department gathers in full regalia:

• Costumes represent Key Performance Indicators:

  • Prof. Metrics as “Publication Productivity” (wings of Excel spreadsheets)

  • Dr. Engagement as “Student Satisfaction” (mask with bar charts)

  • The Dean as “Institutional Visibility” (cape of logos)

• Participants must:

  • Circulate while tracking every interaction in a logbook

  • Dance only when metrics align in harmonious quadrants

  • Bow politely to anyone whose H-index exceeds theirs

• Music is played from a pre-approved playlist of quantified jazz, sampled for optimal statistical compliance

• Winner receives:

  • A golden KPI baton

  • Public acknowledgment in the quarterly newsletter

  • One extra mandatory committee seat

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SCENE XIV: PEER REVIEW AS PHYSICAL SPORT

• Journal submissions are literally thrown into the ring

• Reviewers equipped with whistles and flags:

  • Red flag = methodological flaw

  • Yellow = “questionable terminology”

  • Green = procedural compliance confirmed

• Submissions that survive three rounds are awarded:

  • A formal nod

  • A footnote citing “peer-reviewed rigour in action”

  • And the ability to apply for a subcommittee grant

• Audience members cheer quietly (noise levels monitored by Ethics Panel)

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SCENE XV: THE RESEARCH SEMINAR SURVIVAL CHALLENGE

• PhD candidates present their findings to a panel of rotating senior academics, each with a clipboard of existential questions:

  • “How does this contribute to the meta-meta framework?”

  • “Is your methodological positioning intersectionally decolonised?”

  • “Can you justify this using only passive voice?”

• Presenters must:

  • Deflect inappropriate enthusiasm

  • Nod in the prescribed 7-stage validation sequence

  • Cite at least two colleagues no one has ever met

• Survival is measured in:

  • Breaths not taken out of procedural order

  • Slides not causing cognitive dissonance

  • Emotional poise maintained at or above 85%

• Graduates exit the seminar with:

  • Heightened anxiety

  • A certificate of conditional epistemic endurance

  • Permission to apply for one grant in the next decade

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SCENE XVI: THE COMMITTEE-OF-COMMITTEES ANNUAL REFLECTION

• Committee members read aloud:

  • Minutes from all committees

  • Summaries of subcommittee recommendations

  • Email chains exceeding 42 messages each

• Reflection protocol:

  • Praise procedural adherence

  • Identify any signs of unpermitted innovation

  • Encourage self-aware compliance

• Outcome:

  • Everyone feels simultaneously proud and exhausted

  • The Chair drafts a new memo summarising reflection on reflection

  • No actual decisions are made

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SCENE XVII: THE 4:59 PM EMAILS (AGAIN)

• The ritual closes the day as usual:

“Please ensure that all procedural artefacts, reflective documents, and logs of reflective artefacts are submitted by 5 pm.

Non-submission will trigger an escalated engagement protocol, including but not limited to: gentle reminders, peer monitoring, and optional reflection circles.”

• Staff sigh. PhD students nod. Administrators nod more loudly.

• Somewhere, a genuine insight tries to escape. It is politely escorted back into a footnote.

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EPILOGUE: THE UNIVERSITY OF OPTIMISED COMPLIANCE

• Bureaucracy is both celebrated and required

• Virtue signalling is a measurable outcome

• Committees multiply like well-fed rabbits

• Innovation is only tolerated in abstracts

And yet… somehow, miraculously, learning continues.

Somewhere beneath the paperwork, a seed of curiosity sprouts—though it must first fill out a form, get ethical clearance, and circulate for signatures.

When Renaming Replaces Modelling: Stratification, Instantiation, and the Flattening of SFL Architecture

Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is not just a collection of analytic tools. It is a theory with a very specific architectural commitment: meaning is organised across different levels of symbolic abstraction, related by principled relations such as stratification, realisation, and instantiation. These relations are not optional metaphors; they are what give the theory its explanatory power.

In what follows, we want to examine a prominent reconstrual of SFL—associated most clearly with the work of J. R. Martin—not in order to dispute its descriptive utility, but to show that it rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of this architecture. The issue is not disagreement over details. It is a systematic flattening of relations that Halliday treated as categorically distinct.

This flattening has consequences: theoretical, methodological, and disciplinary.

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1. Levels of symbolic abstraction are not modules

At the core of Halliday’s model is the idea that language is organised across strata that differ in level of symbolic abstraction. Semantics, lexicogrammar, and phonology are not parallel components that “interact”; they are asymmetrically related.

Lower strata realise higher strata.

Higher strata are realised by lower strata.

This is not a claim about where meaning “is”. It is a claim about how symbolic systems are organised so that meaning can be made at all.

A crucial distinction follows from this:

semogenesis (the fact that meaning is made across the system) is not the same thing as stratification (the organisation of symbolic abstraction).

When stratification is misunderstood as “all strata make meaning”, the architectural distinction collapses. Once that collapse occurs, all strata are treated as strata of meaning, rather than as differently abstract symbolic resources.

This is precisely where the reconstrual begins.

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2. From stratification to interaction

In Martin’s work, strata and metafunctions are consistently treated as modules that relate by interaction rather than by asymmetrical realisation. This is visible in the claim that all strata “make meaning”, and more starkly in the treatment of phonology as a stratum of meaning.

From a Hallidayan perspective, this is a category error.

Phonology does not mean in the same sense that semantics does. It stabilises and transmits distinctions that are already semiotically differentiated at a higher level of abstraction. Treating phonology as a meaning stratum erases the very notion of symbolic abstraction that stratification was introduced to explain.

Once this move is made, the theory no longer has the resources to explain why different symbolic levels exist at all.

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3. Instantiation is not descent

A parallel misunderstanding occurs with instantiation.

In Halliday’s model, instantiation is a perspectival relation between potential and instance. A system can be viewed from the pole of potential (as a system) or from the pole of instance (as a text or event). Nothing “moves” down a ladder. No stratum instantiates another stratum.

Instantiation is not a process. It is a way of seeing the same semiotic organisation from different perspectives.

In Martin’s reconstrual, however, instantiation is characterised as all strata instantiate, as if instantiation were a kind of downward movement of meaning. This confusion becomes decisive in his treatment of context.

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4. How context became language

Halliday distinguishes context from language. Context is not a higher stratum of language; it is a different order of abstraction altogether. Field, tenor, and mode are contextual variables that are realised by semantic patterns in language, not systems within language.

Martin reconstructs this architecture by:

• redefining context potential (context of culture) as a stratum of genre

• redefining context instance (context of situation) as a stratum of register

• treating field, tenor, and mode as systems of register

This move converts a relation of instantiation into a relation of interstratal realisation, collapsing context into language. The result is a model in which register and genre are varieties of language rather than ways of relating semiotic potential to situation and culture.

The cost of this move is high: the theory loses the ability to distinguish contextual organisation from linguistic organisation in principle.

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5. Renaming as a method of theorising

These architectural confusions would be serious enough on their own. But they are compounded by a distinctive method of theorising.

Rather than modelling new phenomena from data, Martin repeatedly takes existing Hallidayan analyses and renames them, presenting the renamed constructs as novel theoretical advances.

The most striking example is the stratum of discourse semantics.

Halliday’s stratum is simply semantics. In Cohesion in English (Halliday & Hasan 1976), cohesion is analysed as a set of lexicogrammatical resources.

Martin elevates cohesion to a new stratum and relabels its systems:

• reference becomes identification

• lexical cohesion becomes ideation

• conjunction becomes connexion

• Halliday’s semantic system of speech function becomes negotiation

These renamings are not accompanied by a new theory of symbolic abstraction. On the contrary, they are enabled by misunderstandings—such as confusing reference with deixis—which create apparent novelty by differentiation.

Misunderstanding becomes a generative resource.

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6. Why this matters

This is not a dispute about terminology, nor about whose framework is “better”. It is about what happens when a theory built on differentiated relations is reconstructed as a flat landscape of interacting modules.

When stratification, instantiation, realisation, and variation are all treated as the same kind of relation:

• explanatory power is replaced by descriptive proliferation

• architectural constraints disappear

• theoretical novelty becomes indistinguishable from relabelling

The result may be productive in the short term, but it is unstable. It cannot explain its own foundations.

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7. A broader lesson

The deeper issue here is not confined to SFL.

This case illustrates how a theoretical architecture can be hollowed out while its vocabulary is preserved. Once the relations that give concepts their force are flattened, the theory may continue to circulate—but it no longer does the work it once did.

Recovering Halliday’s model is not a matter of loyalty or orthodoxy. It is a matter of taking symbolic abstraction seriously.

Without that commitment, we are no longer doing systemic functional theory at all—we are simply rearranging its names.

THE UNIVERSITY OF OPTIMISED COMPLIANCE PART II

FURTHER MISADVENTURES IN ADMINISTRATIVE EXCELLENCE

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SCENE VIII: THE ETHICS REVIEW OLYMPICS

Every department competes to demonstrate procedural rigour.

Events include:

1. The Consent Form Sprint – who can circulate a 17-page consent form, collect signatures, and file it in triplicate first?

2. The Conflict-of-Interest Hurdles – leap over any personal, professional, or ethical conflicts without touching the floor.

3. The IRB Triathlon – proposal drafting, minor revisions, and self-flagellation on methodology all before lunch.

Winner receives:

• A certificate of “Performative Ethical Excellence”

• A voucher for one extra committee of your choice

• Eternal peer recognition for procedural virtuosity

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SCENE IX: DEPARTMENTAL POWER STRUGGLES (DISGUISED AS MENTORSHIP)

Mentorship sessions are held to guide new academics toward authentic compliance.

• Each mentor must:

  • Remind mentees of hierarchical structures, without implying hierarchy

  • Evaluate their potential for publication, without stating expectations explicitly

  • Give feedback, without giving feedback

Mentees respond with:

“I feel supported, though unsure by what metric.”

Mentors nod gravely. The cycle continues.

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SCENE X: THE GRADUATE STUDENT’S EMAIL QUEST

A PhD student must navigate interdepartmental email chains that are:

• 18 threads deep

• Contain 72 attachments, 43 of which are redundant

• Include 7 subcommittees commenting on a document never intended to be read

Each email ends with:

“Please review at your earliest convenience (or whenever ethical engagement permits).”

The student gains new skills in:

• Contextual anxiety management

• Decoding performative concern

• Formatting citations in quadruple-checked compliance style

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SCENE XI: THE TEACHING EXCELLENCE PERFORMANCE ART

Lecturers submit “evidence of teaching excellence” as:

• Videos of themselves nodding thoughtfully while students speak

• Annotated rubrics on rubrics

• Graphs showing engagement without revealing actual engagement

Student evaluations are read aloud, line by line, at a committee gala, with applause only allowed when a metric aligns perfectly with departmental KPIs.

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SCENE XII: THE DEPARTMENTAL RETREAT

Held in a room with:

• Ergonomic chairs

• Whiteboards for conflict resolution

• A suggestion box for procedural anomalies

Activities include:

• Icebreaker: Share Your Stress – participants are graded on vulnerability

• Trust Exercise: Approve Without Question – a test of passive compliance

• Closing Circle: Reflect on Reflection – followed by an email summarising all reflections, to be reviewed by a committee

Retreat is universally declared transformative, despite no one remembering what changed.

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FINAL SCENE: THE EMAILS AT 4:59 PM

The day closes as usual:

“Reminder: Please submit:

• Progress reports

• Emotional labour logs

• Evidence of ethical awareness

• Minutes of informal hallway discussions

Failure to submit constitutes a minor procedural infraction.”

All sigh. All comply. Some smile faintly.

“It’s another day well-administered,” says the Chair.

And somewhere, buried beneath paperwork, a genuine idea tries to escape. It is politely reminded: submit first, innovate later.

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THE UNIVERSITY OF OPTIMISED COMPLIANCE

A Day in the Life of Procedural Excellence

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SCENE I: THE WELCOME EMAIL

Subject: “Welcome Back, Esteemed Knowledge Workers (or Readers of Emails)”

Content excerpt:

“As per standard operating protocol, please acknowledge receipt of this email within 12 hours.
Failure to do so will trigger an automated escalation, including but not limited to:

• Calendar audits

• Sentiment analysis of your inbox

• Follow-up with your departmental wellness officer”

Note: “Welcome” is under review for potentially implying a pre-existing sense of belonging.

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SCENE II: THE DEPARTMENT MEETING

Attendees:
All staff and PhD students, each behind a nameplate displaying:

• full name

• pronouns

• research identity

• positionality statement (condensed to 12 words)

Agenda:

1. Review the minutes of the last meeting (from last week, delayed by 3 days due to email backlog)

2. Discuss the establishment of a subcommittee to study subcommittees

3. Vote on whether to vote in future meetings

Procedural note:
Every comment must be phrased as a question, even if it is a statement.

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SCENE III: THE RESEARCH GRANT APPLICATION

Title: “Ethical Implications of the Epistemic Hierarchies in Multisystemic Knowledge Production”

• Length: 64 pages (excluding references, references not required for page count)

• Footnotes: obligatory, self-citing, and double-checked for performative erudition

• Outcome: success measured not by knowledge produced, but by number of institutional forms correctly submitted

Reviewer comment:

“Innovative. Please reframe in more inclusive language; add at least three more buzzwords.”

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SCENE IV: THE TEACHING EVALUATION

Students asked to rate the course using a scale that is itself under review for intersectional bias.

• 0 = Radically oppressive

• 5 = Uncomfortably neutral

• 10 = Ethically impeccable

Note: Comments must reference either climate justice, decolonisation, or emotional labour—or risk being flagged for irrelevance.

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SCENE V: THE COMMITTEE ON COMMITTEES

Meeting convened to examine the necessity of the committee itself.

• Recommendations:

  • Form a subcommittee to evaluate redundancy

  • Circulate a survey about “how meaningful our discussions feel”

  • Publish a 12-point policy on procedural integrity

Minutes are longer than the meeting.

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SCENE VI: THE LIBRARY

Students come to borrow books.

• Each book has been reclassified multiple times:

  • “Critical Theory → Speculative Humanities → Ethical Interventions”

• Borrowing requires approval from:

  • Librarian

  • Subject specialist

  • Ethics review panel

  • Your nearest peer mentor

Optional: A tutorial on the performativity of citation practices.

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SCENE VII: THE END-OF-DAY EMAILS

“Reminder: Please submit your time logs, workflow reflection, and emotional labour assessment by 5pm.
Non-compliance may be considered ‘unethical engagement with the academic ecosystem.’”

Staff sigh. PhD students nod solemnly.

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FINAL NOTE

At the University of Optimised Compliance:

• Bureaucracy is celebrated as a research output

• Procedures replace pedagogy

• Virtue signalling counts as service

• Nothing is resolved, yet everything is minuted

And yet, somehow, at 4:59 pm, someone smiles.

“It’s another day well-administered.”