The university as monster

Express Tribune

25-02-2025

What makes a university monstrous? It isn't just the presence of dark academia aesthetics or secret societies. It isn't a haunted library or a forbidden manuscript. The true horror lies in the institution itself—the way it selects, indoctrinates, exploits, and ultimately consumes.
There's something inherently unsettling about the university. It dangles the promise of knowledge but demands submission. It cultivates intellect while reinforcing hierarchy. It sells the illusion of transformation, yet leaves its mark on those who pass through, moulding them into what it needs - or discarding them when they fail to serve. Literature often portrays universities as spaces of metamorphosis, places where the self is unmade and remade. But what if the university itself is not just a backdrop, not just an old house with shadowed corridors, but a living thing, a force with its own hunger?
These four books don't just frame the university as a haunted mansion filled with academic ghosts. They treat it as something far more insidious: a system that tightens around its inhabitants, shaping them, consuming them, and sometimes, spitting them out.
1. 'The Secret History'
There are no flickering candles or grand, crumbling ruins in The Secret History. No restless spirits haunt the halls of Hampden College. But the university in Donna Tartt's 1992 debut novel is less a setting than it is a force, an intelligence that selects, indoctrinates, and ultimately destroys.
Richard Papen arrives at Hampden College, drawn to an elite Greek studies program led by the elusive Julian Morrow. What follows is an initiation into a way of thinking so insular, so intoxicating, that reality itself begins to bend. Under Julian's tutelage, Richard is welcomed into an esoteric circle of students - brilliant, aristocratic, and strangely removed from the rest of the college. They speak in ancient tongues, dress with a studied elegance, and move through the world with an unsettling detachment, as if they belong to another time entirely.
Yet beneath the cultivated charm of their world lies something darker. The further Richard is drawn in, the more he begins to sense a quiet, almost imperceptible dread. Whispers of something unspeakable lurking beneath their perfect compositions and hushed laughter. Hampden's idyllic veneer cracks, revealing a place where knowledge is not merely power but a temptation, a narcotic, and, for some, a death sentence.
2. 'Babel, or the Necessity of Violence'
If Hampden seduces, then the Oxford of this 2022 novel by RF Kuang is openly, unapologetically monstrous. Here, the university is not simply complicit in colonial power. It is the engine that drives it.
Robin Swift, a Chinese orphan raised in England, enters Babel, Oxford's prestigious translation institute, believing in its promise of scholarship and belonging. But he quickly learns that the university extracts language and refines knowledge into a form of magic that fuels British imperialism. Robin and his fellow students are not being educated so much as they are being consumed, valued for their linguistic talents, but never truly allowed to belong.
Unlike The Secret History, where the characters' downfall is largely of their own making, Babel makes it clear that the university's hunger is systemic. Far from allowing, it demands destruction. Those who recognise the monster for what it is must choose between complicity and rebellion, at great personal cost.
3. 'The Library at Mount Char'
At first glance, this 2015 novel by Scott Hawkins doesn't seem to belong on this list. Its nightmarish Library is not a university in any traditional sense. But in this world, learning is indistinguishable from suffering.
The Library is ruled by a godlike figure known as Father, who takes in twelve orphans and subjects them to brutal, specialised training in arcane knowledge. Each child is assigned a "catalogue"— a single domain of expertise - and mastery comes at the cost of everything else. This is an education that goes a step above expanding young minds as it rewires them, hollowing out their humanity in service of something larger and more terrifying.
Hawkins takes the metaphor of academia as a devouring force to its extreme. Here, knowledge erases, instead of enlightening and the pursuit of mastery is indistinguishable from obliteration.
4. 'Piranesi'
Unlike the other books on this list, Susanna Clarke's 2020 novel does not immediately present itself as a critique of academia. It unfolds in an endless, labyrinthine House, where the protagonist, dubbed Piranesi, wanders, documenting his days in careful journals. At first, the House seems to exist beyond time, a world of statues and tides, quiet and infinite. But as the novel progresses, the true horror reveals itself.
Ultimately, the House is the byproduct of academic obsession. Throw in the haunting figure of the Other, a visitor who intermittently enters the plot with gifts and wisdom. At its heart, Piranesi is a pursuit of knowledge that has long since abandoned its humanity.
Clarke's novel turns the traditional academic journey inside out. In Piranesi, the true scholar is not the one who hoards knowledge, but the one who learns to live within it, to see it as something wondrous rather than something to be conquered. But by the time this realisation comes, the damage has already been done.