Sunday, November 28, 2010

University blues

Ah, the sight of students protesting - it brings a warm nostalgic feeling. It makes a change from careerism and this, though Robert McCrum nails it when he says of the demonstration that, The whole event was middle-class, self-interested and respectable. '68 it ain't, though I am with David Mitchell:
Not many people warm to moaning undergraduates, even if they've been moaning undergraduates themselves. Maybe it's because students have got their whole lives ahead of them that it looks so churlish when they complain. Or is it society's inherent ageism that makes it unbearable to listen to someone much younger than you saying that they know best? My inner Victorian thinks they should be seen and not heard. But I don't mind seeing them piss through the letterbox of Nick Clegg's constituency office.
Amidst the protests, the anguished op eds and the worries in Universities about being thrust into a market where their funding is determined by the number of students they recruit, instead of the present position where their funding is determined by the number of students they recruit, the more reasonable concern would appear to be that of students who will be asked to fund their own studies wholly, after they have graduated and started earning, rather than everyone paying for them through general taxation.

However, even the most assiduous market theorist seems to have missed the big market incentive in the proposals. Want a free University education? Dead easy. Study something that you love and is totally useless. Then use it to become a community activist, freelance writer, semi-pro musician, political agitator, poet, anything like that. Keep doing it for thirty years before you sell out. I can guarantee that you won't earn more than £21,000 so you will never have to pay a bean back. This new funding wheeze is the biggest hippy creation project in the history of education. Every cloud ...

5 comments:

Anton Deque said...

Peter from where I stood, '68 was middle class. I also remeber that one (infamous) photograph of two anti-Vietnam War protestor's kicking a policeman turned out not to be registered students, not that that mattered to the newspaper's.

Laban said...

Our £21,000-for-30-year students will also never own a house, and perhaps may never have children. Back in the day a hippy could pick up a house for not very much. In the mid 70s you could buy a house in Hebden Bridge or Todmorden, or mid-Wales, for £1,000. Up in Alston and Nenthead hippies were buying whole terraces. No more.

The Plump said...

The real ones squatted!

George S said...

Glad to see you encouraging the poets of the future, Peter. I happen to have a few in my pocket, not one earning over £21,000. It's winter. Put out a few breadcrumbs for them and they'll sing for you.

Laban said...

Not outside London, surely - and what real hippy lived there? Not many absentee landlords or empty houses in the Pennines or Wales.

My London squatter friends ended up doing a deal with the local authority and getting ownership of houses which turned out to be worth up to a million pounds...