Cyril Squirrel
Sussex has certainly had some excellent press coverage recently with the wonderful news of Sir Harry Kroto becoming a Nobel laureate. However in the big wide world more generally, education, having been selected by the conservative parties as a suitable tilting ground within which to seek favours, has had some rather less positive coverage. While this mainly means schools, there has been some news of universities both too shocking and too delightful to overlook. First the shock.
The groves of academe are not what they were, but then again perhaps they are. On the not side, a 'nameless' Vice-Chancellor was recently quoted as saying, "12 universities are extremely wealthy, 70 are extremely poor and the rest are doing okay. Of the 70 poverty-stricken institutions, half could go to the wall at any time." However, as long as we remember that the DfEE is after all only the educational wing of Coopers and Lybrand then I feel sure that with some judicious downsizing and merging we'll all pull through - as long as we can attract students that is.
In this I think we need to be more creative. A cousin who inhabits the beautiful park at Greenwich dreamed of students being offered small piles of crisp tenners to help them settle in. While his cousin at a more urban university heard tell of a sponsorship deal where, if you can get a few mates to sign up, then some help with fees or maintenance is not seen as inappropriate. A comfy hole in a beech bole and the promise of nuts in May is no longer sufficient inducement to entice the modern rodent of intellectual resource.
Not that the last seems to be required any longer. Another article in a reputable broadsheet notes that it is widely thought that universities are "prepared to admit any young person with a detectable pulse." Which as an admissions policy at least has the virtue of simplicity and more or less meets with the demand for equal opportunities.
Amidst this doleful tale of financial stringency and surrounded by the dreadful sound of falling standards, I was very much cheered to read, again in a 'reputable broadsheet' of a Durham postgraduate striving unstintingly to preserve all that is fine and noble in academic life. When an undergraduate student myself I always tried to be up by mid-day and was mercifully kept out of the pubs until 6 o'clock by the old licensing laws. However, my privations pale beside the heroic rigour of the regime I am about to describe.
Emily (not her real name) rises at 9am and breakfasts at 9.30am. Then its off to university to read her stars in the Daily Mirror before succumbing to the demands of email. Lunch is followed by coffee at 2.00pm to discuss arrangements for tea at 4.30pm. Then life gets serious for the inter-prandial period from 2.30 until 4.30pm which is, "my time for serious study." Tea, "lasts no longer than 45 minutes", before its back to checking the email followed, perhaps, by a jaunt to the gym. In the evening, "we might all go out for a nice meal or see an art film." Despite the appalling severity of this regime, which makes cleaning out the Augean stables look like light housework, our heroine will, "rarely nap in the day. Only when I'm sleepy." I can just see the elder squirrelette, having checked her pulse, reaching for the telephone to book a sleeper to Durham.