Institutional Flesh

Some people, to earn money, sell their bodies. Some people, to earn an institutional chair, sell their dignity.

The former, you will say, is prostitution. The latter? We have no word for that.

But let me tell you, prostitution is not a profession, but a mindset.

Power in unjust hands is violence; but when it strikes with a smile, veiled in the civility of sweet words, it becomes something colder than cruelty.

The appointment of Professor Greta Kristen as Dean of Student Affairs at the University of Longsong did not raise questions. It was whispered about in the corridors and over staffroom coffee. After all, she belonged to Trogadoland, the land that the new Vice Chancellor called home. Prof Stephen Matthew, the new Vice Chancellor, had a primordial belief that loyalty began and ended with birthplace, Trogadoland. Prof Stephen expected intellectual bowing, not debate. Under his reign, merit was incidental; proximity, both geographical and personal, was currency. He introduced his own rules: from Monday to Thursday, he would dress in full formal wear – coat, tie and shiny boots; on Fridays, he was all flashy chapri styled.

Professor Preetha was quietly removed from the Chair of the Dean of Student Affairs. Her fault was not of conduct, but of regional belonging. Greta built her throne on the ruins of that dismissal; each shaft of humiliation aimed at Dr Preetha became a climbing ladder in Greta’s ascent. But regional loyalty alone wasn’t enough. One had to master the domestic corridors of power. Greta did not knock on institutional doors; she walked into the VC’s kitchen, simmering curries of her homeland, stirring more than just food. She bonded with the VC’s wife over spices and stories, over heat and flavour—and soon, the aroma of opportunity filled the air. Together, she and Mrs. Matthew stirred the pot.

Greta was nothing if not self-aware. She knew research wasn’t her cup of tea. Her interest in academics had expired quietly decades ago, mummified beneath recycled PowerPoint slides and dog-eared handouts. She taught the same electives with the same notes, delivered the same lectures, and assigned the same marks, generously rounding up from 2 to 3 to buy silence rather than stir engagement. So, she never eyed Dean positions which required academic or research acumen. Her target was softer, easier: The Dean of Student Affairs.

Within six months of his appointment as the VC, those not hailing from Trogadoland were quietly removed from academic positions. In their place, almost every Dean’s chair found a loyalist from his homeland. Extensions of superannuation were granted not for excellence, but for regional allegiance. Retirement was postponed as a reward for loyalty. Prof Stephen was a man who spoke often of integrity while silencing every voice that didn’t speak in his dialect. Greta was fluent in his silences. She knew how to perform her job just enough to keep his power erect. She was deft with her mouth and tongue—artful with nervous pulses and masterful with words. It was a job that needed no title, a blow that left no wound, a paradise built on gasps caught between control and release.

When Greta was appointed as Dean of Student Affairs, no objections were raised. Thus, began the quiet rewriting of rules, relationships, and reputations. Dignity was traded within the corridors of institutional power. To her colleagues, she spoke with disarming modesty: “The management wants me to be Dean. The day they ask me to step down, I will.” When Greta sat on the Dean’s chair, she resembled an experienced madam, poised for negotiation over nervous pulses and velvet deals. Her voice, low and textured, carried authority draped in a masculine cadence, perfect for softening orders into suggestions. She knew where to linger, when to dip, how to curl sound into rhythm, how to hold tension on the cusp and release it in cadence, her words tracing pleasure like a tongue fluent in rhythms the body never forgets. She knew where to press, when to pause, how to lace fulfilment in the silk of tone. She didn’t speak to persuade; she struck the chords meant to hum beneath the skin. And Prof Stephen? He listened closely. Her words coiled through him, aimed below the belt.

Her brand of humility was smooth enough to melt stone while tightening her grip behind the scenes. Greta never walked without her signature smile, a carefully stitched curve that whispered Shakespeare’s warning: “Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it.” The serpent was behind the colourful petals, and the venom was real. Greta’s brand of welfare left cinders in its wake: students charred, wardens scorched, and the administration reduced to a slow, silent smoke. The corridors reeked of orchestrated execution—gallows in every room, nooses in every file. The heat wasn’t visible, but it was everywhere. When power is won by sycophancy, the chair means nothing. Without experience, you don’t command respect—you demand it. And when respect must be claimed rather than earned, you set the whole house on fire just to feel warm.

Greta, schooled in Prof Stephen’s gospel of nepotism, built her dominion the same way: by cultivating a nexus of clerks and compliant hands. She didn’t want a Chief Warden with ideas or a spine—she wanted a clerk in uniform, trained to nod at orders and knock only when summoned. Not a professor who might question her trade in velvet deals, but a doorman of desire who was trained to knock only when summoned and never questioned what passed through the door. For Greta, doors weren’t meant to open; rather, they were meant to filter: opened by invitation and closed on suspicion. The Chief Warden, after all, sat ex officio on every committee that mattered. And with the right doorman in place, Greta could issue verdicts by instinct, rubber-stamped in silence.

A professor in that position might expose her inefficiencies and puncture the façade of her authority. But clerks? Clerks asked no questions, raised no mirrors. A professor counsels toward futures; a clerk buries ambition beneath paperwork. And in that bureaucratic burial, the queen launders her velvet deals in carbon copies and committee nods. Place a professor in the Chief Warden’s seat, and the hostel becomes a living classroom, discipline shaped into growth, rules refined into responsibility. But put a clerk in that chair, and the curriculum shifts: hierarchy is inverted, professionalism diluted, growth denied.

Greta always referred to the students as “kids” during meetings with wardens or administration. Infantilising the student body was her brand of governance, the trick that let her crown herself as the messiah of welfare. She often invoked her own children as evidence of empathy, as if motherhood were an administrative credential. To keep her grip firm, she had to keep them small. She managed a nursery with institutional stationery. But these were not children. They were future scientists, CEOs in the making, architects of tomorrow’s industries. What they deserved was professional regard, not paternal indulgence. And professionalism isn’t stitched in coat, tie, or shiny boots: it’s measured in the seriousness granted to their growth.

A professor with vision sows futures; a manipulator hoards power. One builds institutions. The other builds walls around a chair. Under Greta and her doorman, students learn not to rise, but to retreat; not to aspire, but to avoid. When professors kneel before clerks, the chain of respect collapses. Students carry that erosion with them, stamped invisibly on their CVs, echoed in interviews where posture and tone betray the absence of institutional discipline. To appoint a clerk as a Chief Warden, while professors stood overlooked, was not mere oversight. It was a sabotage of the academic value system, a quiet mockery of hierarchy, and a wound to the institution’s moral spine stitched in silence.

One of Greta’s first moves as Dean was to restructure the Disciplinary Committee. She included faculty who barely spoke and faculty still on probation. Their job insecurity secured her job. Justice, under her gaze, was not blind—it was selective. If the accused student belonged to her inner circle, the case evaporated; if not, the hammer fell hard.

In her hands, leadership became enterprise, and student welfare, a low-return investment. When students complained of rubber chappatis, the Chief Warden nodded with bureaucratic grace and muttered his sacred refrain, “I’ll speak to Dr Greta.” That sentence was both a promise and a curtain call: nothing followed. No resolution, no update, not even the courtesy of a second lie. His method was simple: delay, then deny. It was the classic strategy of the low-ranking loyalist: drain time until the protest dies of exhaustion. The students, who had paid exorbitant hostel fees under the glossy banner of ‘customised support,’ now chewed rubber dressed up as dinner.

Come summer, the rooftop water tanks turned into cauldrons. When students requested cold water, the cooler gasped into reluctant service like a prisoner on parole; then mysteriously went “under maintenance.” The doorman met student requests with the bureaucrat’s holy trinity: a fixed smile, a vague assurance, and a vanishing act. “It will be resolved very shortly” became the hostel’s new anthem. Those who persisted were met with the Chief Warden’s snub: “Winter is approaching. What’s the point of cold water now?” The faculty warden came to know the truth from one of the electricians. There was no maintenance issue. The cooler had been switched off deliberately to cut electricity costs. When he tried to raise this, he was reminded of his place, not in words, but in silence. He became a mute witness to the falsity and deception festering under Greta’s reign, forced to redirect every student back to the clerk-in-command—her supreme foot soldier. The truth was buried beneath protocol, and the protocol was scripture written in Greta’s name. This was not mere incompetence; it was a culture. The Chief Warden, a clerk by rank and reflex, did not solve problems; he postponed them into oblivion.

Someone pasted a poster in the hostel, “O hollow Dean / grow your spine.” When student protests reached the Vice-Chancellor’s email inbox, the silence finally cracked. Prof Stephen convened a wardens’ meeting. Of the three hostel wardens, two were obedient clerks—her chosen footnotes—and one was a faculty member who still believed students deserved truth over tyranny. That was enough for Greta to sound the alarm. Any flicker of dissent, any murmur from the corridors, she pinned squarely on the faculty-warden’s shoulders. The VC wanted to gauge the temperature of the institution. Greta, sensing a performance opportunity, deferred the briefing to the faculty warden, not the Chief Warden. They crafted the scene so the Chief Warden appeared overburdened, heroically holding the hostel together, while the faculty warden was painted as the negligent root of every problem under that roof.

The faculty warden, armed with facts and quiet integrity, laid out the full account. Greta and her supreme foot soldier, however, dismissed it with a powdered smile. According to them, the food was exceptional, and only a few disgruntled students had made a fuss.

When the VC asked for solutions, Greta and her clerk-in-command performed their usual duet: an elaborate sigh, a pained shrug, and a unanimous conclusion, “We’ve tried everything.” It was theatre masquerading as administration. But the faculty warden, unswayed by theatrics, proposed a practical fix: replace the vendor with HomlyFood, a reliable caterer with institutional experience and student approval.

That suggestion hit a nerve. The Chief Warden dismissed it instantly, claiming he and Greta had “already explored that option, but the owner refused to supply.” What they didn’t mention, of course, was the hidden commission they enjoyed from the current vendor. Suppressing student voices wasn’t mismanagement; it was bad business for those profiting from student hunger.

When the next semester started, the students expected a change of vendor. It began with murmurs in the mess hall: rubbery chappatis and boiling tap water had punished patience long enough. The students were told to “focus on academics”, and disciplinary violation was slapped against a few students. The faculty warden happened to meet the owner of HomlyFood and casually asked why he had refused to supply chappatis to the hostel. The owner looked genuinely surprised. “Refused? No one ever asked me,” he replied.

She pioneered a new mode of governance. WhatsApp administration. She was the admin of multiple groups where verdicts were typed, not deliberated, and authority arrived with double blue ticks, not due process. She lacked the stamina to officially communicate through emails, but fired decrees from her digital throne.

One evening, without notice or rationale, she decreed that the university’s main gate be locked after 10:30 PM. The Facilities Division received her whisper of authority. The students, as usual, were left uninformed. Her clerk-in-command was on annual leave; the faculty warden was in charge, and not informed. The security guards were new, clueless about campus culture and unarmed before student rage. Just a night before, students had stepped out for food, especially after late labs or internships, after 10:30 without issue. But the next evening, they returned to locked gates.

Confusion bred anger. Revolt stirred in hunger. Greta, of course, had no crisis protocol for the fire she’d fanned, only a manual on how to disappear when the smoke reached the VC’s office. Instead, she passed the burden to the hostel wardens. She instructed that students must seek their permission from the hostel warden to exit, and instructed the wardens not to allow the students to exit. When students approached her, she redirected them to the warden. When the warden approached her, she pointed to the Facilities Division. When they contacted Facilities, they were told: “Ask Greta. She gave the order.” No clarity, no channel, no strategy—only layers of avoidance. Calls came in from the gate, students pleading, guards clueless, and wardens confused. This was her method: obscure the rules, then watch the system collapse under her command. And when it did, she blamed the pieces for not knowing how to hold themselves together.

A group of students misbehaved with the faculty warden. When he reported the incident, Greta demanded a formal report—her tone clipped, bureaucratic. But the moment he suggested gathering witness statements from the security guard and hostel caretakers, she waved it off, “No need.” After weeks of denial and deferral, meanwhile, her doorman had just returned from vacation, armed with nothing but a leave slip and an inflated sense of entitlement. “I’ll look into it,” he said, smirking with the confidence of a man promoted beyond his station. That flicker of amusement at the corner of his mouth betrayed the farce. He knew the necklace he wore was borrowed prestige, pearls strung around a monkey’s neck. Her request for a report from the warden, while dismissing statements from actual witnesses, was itself a signal, a quiet suggestion of an insidious design. Yet, when the faculty warden finally submitted his report, Greta took no action. He was well acquainted with her theatre of deception. He suspected she had already written the script, cast the blame, and set the stage. In a place where facts are dismissed and clerks wear crowns, truth is not a document. It is a trap.

When law and order in the hostel began to fray, Greta briefed the higher authorities with her usual flair for fiction: the faculty warden, she claimed, was inciting rebellion. Her doorman and other Trogadoland loyalists started scanning the faculty warden all around the campus like undercover agents in a bad spy film. Her evidence? An “intel report” from trusted hostel sources, code for her loyal whisper network fluent in flattery and fabrication. The VC responded by calling a townhall meeting, not for dialogue, but for theatre. Warnings were issued, threats were scattered, and fear was fired. At the centre of these movements without meaning stood Prof Stephen, misled not by enemies but by those he called his compass. The irony? The needles never faced the North Star.

Prof Stephen had more than just a taste for authority. Funds meant for laboratories reappeared in a shiny sedan. When Professor Nelson Grieves, a member of the Purchase Committee, began to expose the irregularities, Greta jumped into action. She was a member of the Committee Against Sexual Harassment and Gender Sensitisation. She weaponised the role. Two students from Trogadoland, under her subtle influence, became the voices behind the sexual harassment accusations.

The charges against Professor Grieves rang hollow. Financial irregularities against Prof Stephen Matthew were finally proven. The day he left the university, the corridors were moist with the tears of Trogadoland sycophants. They mourned not the man, but the end of their patronage. They never earned the stairs; he installed a velvet elevator stitched from regional sycophancy. After all, he had handed office to those who never earned it. His fall was not theirs alone; it was the collapse of a system that mistook loyalty for merit and meekness for wisdom.

Greta didn’t need weapons: she choreographed silence with a doorman of velvet deals, like a prompter in a corrupt opera. Hers was not governance, but grooming when dissent was a risk and silence a promotion. In this quiet brothel of ambition, it wasn’t the body that was sold: it was the ethical spine. She was a reminder that institutions collapse not when tyrants enter, but when power forces the spine to bend. The university did not fall into bottomless perdition. It was seduced into sleep. It was a marketplace where ethics were sold in whispers behind office doors. The university did not crumble, it curtsied. Before the throne of convenience, under the sheets of bureaucratic seduction, with intellect tucked beneath the soft mattress.

The final lesson Greta taught was offered without attendance, credits, or a cumulative grade: that the most dangerous prostitution happens not in beds, but when intellect bends its spine to power. The real prostitution was not of the body or of the flesh, but when thinkers kneel.