Wilfred De’ath
In the late 1950s, the sun would already be rising over the ancient stone buildings of Oriel College, Oxford, as I walked back to my rooms, having been up all night discussing with my chums whether the absurd, meaningless existence we had been given offered us any existential choice whatsoever.
That, for me, was what three years at university was all about. Getting a degree didn’t matter, though I did manage to get one – just.
Nostalgia for those far-off days returned rather poignantly to me recently when a kindly soul at Anglia Ruskin ‘Uni’ in Cambridge gave me permission to work in the library and café of the main building for a number of weeks.
The brutal modern architecture of ARU was more like that of a hospital or a prison than my idea of a university. It had no ‘atmosphere’ whatsoever.
The students around me in the café and the library were doing no work. They ate, drank, gossiped noisily, played cards and talked endlessly into their mobile phones. The one thing I never saw them do was study. I don’t know how they will be able to throw their mortarboards into the air when degree day comes around.
It was not all depressing. Some of the maidens were really beautiful. When I discovered them in a clinch with what I took to be their boyfriends, I shouted, ‘Get a room!’ at them, as I invariably do. It often turned out that they were fondling and being snogged by a member of their own sex.
The students’ lives, I noticed, revolved almost entirely round social media. They were astonished when they learned that I do not possess a smartphone, nor do I have any wish to. (I am a Luddite.) The students obeyed their computer. If it told them to go to the gym or to a lecture, they rose from their seats like synchronised flick-knives and set off.
God help them. As Kingsley Amis said of increased higher education, more will mean worse. You were right, Kingers!