Lay to one side any
academic qualification that a person might obtain from spending three
years at one of the UK's fine higher education establishments, and
consider for a moment the kind of individual these faculties will
eventually unleash upon the unsuspecting world.
English universities have
long been places where young men and women, who have mastered the art
of passing A levels, are granted an opportunity to slip free from the
shackles of parental expectations, along with any dismal real-life
persona they developed during seven concurrent years of puberty and
secondary school. It's a period of experimentation - a time for
trying on new and colourful identities, prior to settling on a less-grating personality - one that won't get you punched too frequently
after you graduate.
On campus, hilarious
stereotypes abound. I used to walk to lectures from my hall of
residence, my footsteps dogged by a female black metal fan, whose
smudged corpse paint, which covered her entire face, left her
resembling an undead panda. You don't get that quality of individual
in the dreary world of minimum wage 'work-till-you drop' jobs that I
now inhabit.
There are common pairings
too – certain types of people who seem preordained to be friends
with each other. One half of an on-campus bro-mance that I used to
encounter regularly was the young man whose recently-grown,
shoulder-length hair, and newly-acquired leather jacket, hinted at
clumsy exploratory forays into the world of goth metal, and possible
ownership of a Type O Negative album. Riding on the rebellious
vapour trails of this proto-edgelord would be his lanky, wire-haired,
ginger-bearded sidekick – who had confounded society's expectations
of lanky, ginger-headed men by opting for a degree in the soft
humanities, as opposed to, say, Geology or Archaeology.
One morning a small group
of us converged around four pushed-together tables in a room
adjoining the corridor that comprised our university's Philosophy
Department.
The younger, slightly more
twattish, version of myself, who was fond of quoting Rimbaud and,
when drunk, randomly bellowing “PARKLIFE!” at the top of his
voice into the ears of unsuspecting strangers, had just concluded
what was, as I recall, a masterful summation and critique of selected
passages from Aristotle's
Nicomachean Ethics.
That was when mock-Goth
boy chimed-in:
The gist of his
counter-argument was unremarkable enough to have been lost in time,
but I do remember its conclusion where he summarised my presentation
as “a load of old cock-swallow.”
I felt a boiling tide of
anger rising inside me. My knowledge of Aristotle had been openly
challenged in front of people who I hardly knew and barely respected.
How dare this cretinous streak of piss with the ginger-headed best mate
disagree with me.
- This contemptible
archduke of wank, clad in a leather jacket that now bore Tipp-Exed
quotes from Milton's Paradise Lost.
- This human skid mark,
whose key to unlocking the underwear of impressionable female
students was the one song he had mastered on his acoustic guitar,
which he would play incessantly. That song was Under The Bridge
by The Red Hot Chilli Peppers.
This was nothing better than a playground scrap re-contextualised in
a peer-reviewed setting, among the stunted, swamp-bound spires of
Reading University.
Fortunately for me battles
in this environment are won and lost, not with flying fists and
off-balance attempts at roundhouse kicks, but with finely-nuanced
rhetoric, forged in the molten crucible of minds honed from four
years of GCSEs and A Levels. A world of the intellect where witty and
insightful rejoinders spring readily to the tongue:
“Did you just call me a
cunt?”
We were in an educational
setting so the words came out in dressed in academic vernacular –
'Sir, either by design, or through your pitiful intellectual
shortcomings, you have grievously misunderstood the tenor of my
argument. The statements that you have made in support of your rebuttal
are flimsy in construction and unlikely to stand up to the crushing
weight of my response,' etc.
None-the-less, the
underlying meaning of my reply was clearly evident in my tone of
voice.
Rising to the moment, I
continued, stabbing at the air with my finger as I launched into an
impassioned speech that would have dazzled the Roman orator Cicero
with its power to sway the hearts and minds of my rapt audience. I began by
positing the hypothetical scenario upon which I intended to construct
the arguments that would utterly demolish my opponent:
“What if an alien from
the planet Cock-swallow were to venture down to Earth...”
Others in our small group,
sensing that civilisation was about to disappear into a gaping sink
hole, began to wade into the discussion with their own inane theories
and opinions. This was no longer a finessed debate – the
exploratory back-and-forth of two duelling fencing masters, each
feeling out the other's weaknesses, always meticulously plotting two
or three moves, or counter-moves, ahead of their opponent.
This was a
'post-five-nil-at-home-defeat-at-the-hands-of-the-shittest-team-in-League-Two- full-on-pub-brawl' with students chucking bits of Platonic
dialogue and Aristotelian maxims around like empty Grolsch bottles,
while figuratively kneeing each other in the bollocks.
Spirited discussions like
this are what I miss most about university. They were safe spaces
where you could argue vociferously, and sometimes crudely, back and
forth without fear of any long-term consequences.
Many of us were from
middle class backgrounds. We had been told, almost as a matter of routine,
by our parents that we were brilliant, and had experienced very
little adversity in our lives. Being thrown into a situation where an
essay that you had worked hard on would be openly challenged and torn
apart by your peers if you didn't stand up and fight your corner,
bred within us the resilience and the reserves creativity that we
would tap into in the face of future adversity.
These bare-knuckle
scuffles made me come alive. I am sure that I was wasn't the
only person to leave the room at the end of a debate riding high on a crest of Adrenalin and exhilaration.
Two decades on, safe
spaces mean something different. Cultural paradigms in academia have shifted
alarmingly in the direction of political correctness, which has taken
a hammer and a chisel to free speech, with potentially damaging long-term social consequences.
Sanctions for perceived
misbehaviour on campus have, at some higher education establishments, become draconian
and out of step with wider society. A student must now consider not only the strength of their argument but the way they express it and whether this will cause offence or contravene any university policies on free speech. The young man who, in the early 1990s, glibly referred to my
presentation on Aristotle as “a load of old cock-swallow” could, in 2015, credibly find himself suspended for sexual harassment, or for
triggering a student who found his off-kilter terminology offensive.
I never graduated from university but what I did learn
there was invaluable in preparing me for the harder world that
awaited just off campus.
I wonder what impact the
neutered debates that increasingly characterise the modern university
experience will have on the current student cohort as they leave
education and enter the workforce.
