Some students even no-platform themselves…
The National Union of Students doesn’t make it easy for reasonable people to take it seriously. This week, though, it set a new benchmark for folly. Gathered for the NUS annual conference in Glasgow, one group of students began to grow frustrated at what they said was an inordinately slow pace of debate.
There had been hours of wrangling over procedure, “in an outrageous display of manipulation and bureaucracy”, Cambridge student Angus Satow told The Tab, the student tabloid. They were losing precious time to debate motions that he and his friends thought important, including one on abortion in Northern Ireland and another on student sex workers.
There was, of course, only one way for these disgruntled students to express their rage. They decided to occupy their own conference. That’s right. The whole thing came to a standstill for two hours as 150 students sat on the stage chanting and shouting in protest at bad timekeeping.
As noted by Tom Harwood, a bemused Durham student: “I suppose what happens when you run out of people to no-platform is that you start no-platforming yourself.”
Curious, I had a look at the list of motions that these students wanted to discuss. To my surprise, the document listing them runs to 186 pages. I could not understand why, until I started reading. Every niche angle on an issue requires a separate motion. So rather than holding a comprehensive debate on the cost of student housing or degrees’ value for money, the union holds dozens of debates on niche angles of similar issues. There are at least six motions on free speech and hate speech, five on mental health, five on housing, six on other degree costs, six on access and participation by different minority groups and seven on procurement or living wage issues.
If and when the conference gets around to it, these motions are voted upon by roughly 1,200 attendees, then trumpeted as representing the views of seven million students.
Among the other motions on the list are several complaining that student unions do not have enough resources to do everything they want to do. I wonder why.
An Assyrian protective deity, or lamassu, has been installed on the fourth plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square. The sculpture of the god, represented by a winged bull with a human head, is a recreation of one that was destroyed when Isil vandalised the contents of Mosul Museum in Iraq. The artist, Michael Rakowitz, constructed it out of 10,000 date syrup cans, in reference to a once-thriving Iraqi industry damaged by war.
The sculpture gives a rather garish impression when you see it, each coloured tin shining in the London rain. My instinctive reaction was to recoil. It’s not half as tasteful as similar statues made from plain, yellow stone, which you can see in the British Museum. Then I reconsidered. This gaudy apparition is probably much closer to how the statues would have looked originally, brightly painted and positioned imposingly on the walls of Nineveh. The ancients, from Babylon to Assyria to Rome, liked bright colours and gold, rather than the understated white marble or monochrome that obsess modern tastes.
I once went to an exhibition in which a museum had created a replica of a Greek statue of Diana, the divine huntress, and then coloured it in along the lines of how it might have looked. The effect was rather shocking. It actually looked vulgar to my unaccustomed eyes, the colours totally obscuring the amazing sensitivity of the sculptor in depicting the softness of skin and the ripples of muscle that were apparent in the unpainted version.
I am therefore trying to get used to London’s new, date-can lamassu. It’s a reminder not only of Iraq’s destroyed heritage and humanity’s indomitable desire to reclaim it from the wreckage of war, but also of how historical relics are always coloured by present-day fads and prejudices. It’s a reminder, in other words, not to take ourselves too seriously.
A study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology says that compulsive smartphone photography is destroying our ability to remember things. Actually, it’s not memory as such that is the problem, but the fact that we haven’t experienced the thing we’re photographing in the first place. Rather than looking at the object or landscape in question, we’re looking at a camera lens, and it’s rather hard to remember something you haven’t actually looked at.
This plague is everywhere. More than once at a music concert, I’ve found my view of the stage cut off by a forest of smartphones recording the distant figures. These amateur videographers almost certainly remember little of what they’ve filmed. I myself have been guilty of taking too many snaps sometimes, usually featuring impressive holiday sights that I don’t want to forget. The focusing and clicking is an effort to nail it all down, to affix it in time and in the memory.
A better strategy might be to try drawing things. I recently came across the work of an artist, Stephen Wiltshire, whose phenomenal visual memory allows him to recreate accurate and incredibly detailed cityscapes in pen after just half an hour of observing them. The resulting drawings are very impressive – and yet, despite admiring them, I couldn’t help thinking to myself: “He could just take a photo.” FOLLOW Juliet Samuel on Twitter @Citysamuel; READ MORE at telegraph. co.uk/opinion