When I was a young punk, my favourite badge (we loved badges!) was a big white one which a reader sent me and which simply read I HATE STUDENTS YEAH! I wore it proudly pinned to the thigh of my skin-tight jeans for many a month, until I lost it in a 1977 scuffle with a police horse during an anti-fascist demonstration in Lewisham. (I trust that no wiseacre is going to ask which side I was on.)
A lot of people simply shouldn’t be at university wasting their time and money on Mickey Mouse degrees
But the sentiment has stayed with me throughout the decades and still remains strong; living in Brighton, with its manifold institutes of ‘higher’ and ‘further’ education, it’s very hard to avoid students.
My husband calls them ‘the Shrieking Violets’ as they generally have parlourmaids names and piercing voices; they and their male counterparts have colonised whole streets in the city, often ruining the neighbourhoods (they generally have a VOTE GREEN poster in the window and lots of trash in their front yards) with their uninhibited partying.
‘This is a student street now!’ householders are frequently told, should they have the temerity to object. I wrote here back in 2016 about an extreme case of such colonisation when families with young children were taking the step of booking into B&Bs when big bashes were imminent; a friend of mine had her daughter taunted during one bacchanal with bon mots such as ‘What are you qualified for – working at Morrisons?’
These were the kind who made Sussex University no longer a workable environment for Kathleen Stock, who resigned after student-led STOCK OUT protests in 2021. It’s funny that Doc Stock is now a journalist, having spent decades of her life in academia, both as a student and a teacher; she could have got stuck into the fun-filled fray of what once was Fleet Street straight away, and saved herself a lot of bother.
What must it like to be both sane and a student these days? The Jason Arday affair has highlighted the strangeness of academia, in which even the most prestigious and respected institutions of alleged learning often resemble the crazy worlds from the famous Enid Blyton book The Magic Faraway Tree; the Land of Silly School (‘a chaotic place with unconventional and backward lessons’) perhaps, or the Land of Do-As-You-Please (‘where people can do whatever they like, though it often leads to chaotic or funny results’). Or simply the worlds where Alice wandered; so many of Mr Arday’s colleagues appear able to have believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
Poor little students, putting themselves into lifelong debt to enter this LaLa Land – but so many of them seem laughably wet. Though it’s annoying that any young person becomes a layabout and claims the ubiquitous presence of the Mental Elf as a reason to live off the state at a time when they should be full of the rigour of youth, it’s also irritating that people who have freely chosen to put off working for at least another three years can’t even get their act together enough to remain reasonably sane while they while away the days doing what they have freely opted to do.
A young friend in higher education in the field of health told me: ‘I looked forward to the exam being in person, when apparently they’d give you a random body part to describe. But because that stressed students out so much, they’ve changed it so it’s an AI recording – you get the questions beforehand and can re-record it as many times as you like. This is the third masters I’ve done and without a doubt it’s the easiest; in my previous ones all the lecturing would be teaching, now we have teaching in the morning and in the afternoon teaching you how to pass the assignment. They basically tell you exactly what to do; I think it’s pretty challenging to fail, unless you’re really not paying attention.’
Of course, students today have reason to feel sorry for themselves in a way they didn’t when it was all free love and free tuition. AI’s obviously not going to be a day at the beach (unless you’re a robot lifeguard) and will no doubt wipe out swathes of work graduates would have once started out doing. But this has an upside; lots of people were not meant to go to university; indeed, poor daft Jason Arday is now their poster boy, if no one else’s.
That nice Tony Blair played an unwitting part in castrating the British working-class with his siren cry of ‘Education, education, education!’ thus requiring high migration of practical Poles and such to take the proper, well-paid jobs.
We fund the universities to the tune of around £20 billion a year; we should be requiring reasonable behaviour from them. We need to become practical in what we allow youngsters to study, and spend state money accordingly.
I was looked after last year by an extremely hard-working young nurse who this year went to Georgia (not the one in the USA, the one in the former USSR) in order to study to become a doctor; that it’s a world away from her friends and family and she doesn’t speak the language was nothing compared to the fact that it will cost her less than half of what it would here.
No level of drunkenness will ever wring such a confession from me
At the same time, we import (steal) thousands of doctors and nurses from poor countries which can’t afford to lose them; this harvesting of people is a strange twist on historic colonial grabbing of resources, but apparently something we are meant to become sentimental about.
A lot of people simply shouldn’t be at university wasting their time and money on Mickey Mouse degrees. (With apologies to M. Mouse.) Cambridge, founded in 1209, gave the world Newton, Darwin and Turing; now one can study courses like ‘Unsexed beings: constructing gender, humanness, and agency through the use of the word “unsex” in Late Modern British society and writing.’ That’ll come in handy! Professor Arday himself was apparently keen on referencing Australian soap operas and the lyrics of Beyonce.
Sadly, the universities are sinister as well as silly, and play a good part – or rather, a very bad part – in poisoning the body politic of our civilisation. The toxic obsession with the ‘rights’ of transvestites to tamper with themselves in female toilets can be viewed as comic, but many universities are not merely holding pens for poltroons; they are breeding grounds for anti-Semitic goons. Jewish students have spoken of feeling that hatred towards them has been ‘normalised’ on many campuses; incidents rose by more than 400 per cent between 2022 and 2024, according to the Community Security Trust.
But to bring it back to the antics of the nutty professor. Imagine the class actions (pun intended) that could take place!
Over the years I’ve met a few self-starters, like me, who when in their cups will confess that they will always regret not going to university. But no level of drunkenness will ever wring such a confession from me.
Looking back on fifty eventful years in my dream job, with no qualifications aside from an English O Level and a 200-yard swimming certificate, I couldn’t be more pleased that I got a head’s start on those who wasted time in academia. I’m a grown-up now, so I certainly don’t hate students anymore, but – unless they’re studying sensible subjects, in which case kudos to them – I do feel sort of sorry for them. But that wouldn’t look as good on a badge.
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