When it comes to telling fibs, you can’t beat undergraduates

Like many, I enjoyed the account of a university teacher faced with not one student out of 400 turning up for her morning lecture, despite said oration boasting the winning title: “Demystifying Marking Criteria and Assessment.”

Back in my youth, in 1924, I spent a few years teaching English at Oxford: Renaissance lit, literary theory, that sort of thing. I feel rather inauthentic as I say so, given that these days I can hardly remember my own name, let alone obscure Gallic theorists. However, the one thing I do recall are the undergraduate excuses: rich, florid, a thriving sub-genre all of their own.

One term, a now rather distinguished student came up with the perfect justification with which to present a young female tutor for not handing in her essay: the poor soul

Alas, she didn’t count on her elders comparing notes

had had an abortion. My sympathy was boundless; there were tears, tea, sisterly shoulder clutches. We were both deeply moved.

Alas, she didn’t count on her elders comparing notes. By the end of the eight-week term, she had numbered three such procedures, which seemed as unlikely as it was unfortunate.

I once witnessed a colleague presented with a student who was vociferous, if rather eccentric, in his reading of Foucault. “Danny,” my friend inquired in those pre-snowflake days when questions like this could be hazarded, “have you actually read any of his work?” There was a pause. And then came the reply: “No, but that’s actually an advantage as it’s because I haven’t read Foucault that I haven’t swallowed his ideology and been indoctrinated, unlike you with the oppressive burden of your familiarity.”

Another pause followed, and then the magisterial response: “I think the phrase I’m searching for here is: ‘Shut the f--- up, Danners’.” He did.