Santa's here

Two people have left me presents in parcels outside my office door. One parcel contained three teen films (Drag Me To Hell, Girl, Interrupted, Clueless special edition), presumably because I'm always going on about what a great adaptation of Emma that film is. I have no idea who this present is from: the note said 'a student who reads', which implies that there are some who don't. I'm shocked, shocked at the very notion!

The other parcel contained something equally wonderful:

I don't want to encourage a culture of students giving staff presents because they have little enough money as it is, but as I can't thank you personally, I'll do it here. You're both very kind and I'm grateful. And thanks to the magic of anonymous marking, there's no chance your grades will be influenced in any way!

My perfect student

Feel free to weigh in using the comment facility…

I seem to spend a lot of time agonising about what makes a good academic, particularly when it comes to the teaching aspect of the job. I also occasionally mention the annoying and/or cute things students do as though they're a different species ('I swear, when you look into those big eyes, it's almost as if they understand what I'm saying'). Today for instance, two interesting and interested second-year students came to discuss an essay. They'd thought about issues and had picked useful examples. The one thing they hadn't done was read anything – it just hadn't occurred to them.

So I thought today I'd think a little about what we want from students and how we communicate this. Of course, the first thing to recognise is that all lecturers were students, often for much longer than most of ours will be. I have a BA, an MA, a PhD and a PGC so I've spent a long time on their side of the fence (note to self: there is no fence. Get over the fence). I've seen good and bad teaching and I've been a good and bad student. As all practice is rooted in experience, I should say a little about my time as an undergraduate.

Firstly, I turned up with little idea of why I was there. At no point did anyone sit me down and ask me about the future. I was told to apply to university. I only liked reading books and English classes were the only bearable moments in a miserable and undistinguished scholarly career thus far, so I put down for English and Philosophy (because I'd heard that Philosophers were cool – this turned out to be only partially true). I didn't visit any universities, read any prospectuses or do any research. I picked places that a) I might get in to and b) ones a long way from home. I also passed an audition for Trinity College Dublin's Drama and Theatre course but that's a whole other tale of woe and misery. Needless to say I'd never acted either. After some school-and-parent-related shenanigans including a Cambridge interview which didn't reflect well on anyone concerned, and a less than stellar A-level performance, I ended up at the University College of North Wales on an English course with Philosophy as the minor.

I'd got what I wanted: a place a very long way from home and virtually anyone I'd ever known. I had a box of books stolen from the school library the night before its stock was sold to a book dealer (thanks to the appalled librarian who had 'dropped' the keys in front of me) and the vague idea that I could spend the next three years reading and talking about books. As it happened, that's exactly what transpired. The only problem was the talking bit. Pretty certain that I was far less intelligent, experienced, cool and attractive than everyone else there (an accurate surmise), it took a long time to say a word in class. Any opportunity to speak, it seemed, was an opportunity to prove that I was indeed as dumb as everyone suspected.

And yet… What saved me was the sudden realisation that I was wasting my time. I'd come from a very restricted and insular background in which my opinion on any subject was very much not wanted on voyage, to the extent that I started to think that my forename was Shutup. I cared about everything we were reading about because I was a teenage idealist. Here was the chance to have all those passionate debates I'd read about and seen on TV (I didn't know any university students as a child, so only saw popular culture versions), and instead I was hiding in the corner.

I still remember the moment I cracked. It was a philosophy lecture lead by Maurice Charlesworth, a terrifying, noble and (it turned out) adorable figure. Clearly not a man who had ever endured a pedagogy training session, he sat there in total silence. For five minutes. Ten minutes. Perhaps an hour… who could tell? Eventually someone had to break the awful silence out of sheer embarrassment. That someone was me. 'Er…'. 'Yes?'. 'Er…should we do some philosophy?'. People stared at me. Relieved? Envious? Appalled? I still don't know. 'Alright', he said. 'You start'. Which serves me right, I guess. I stammered something, obviously enough for him to expose us all as teenage charlatans with no real understanding of what philosophy entails and then we were off on a tour of AJ Ayer and the Logical Positivists.

I can remember a little of that class's content, but everything about that exchange made me the teacher I am. I wouldn't dare try the Charlesworth Manoeuvre – still too polite – but I distinctly remember leaving knowing that I had opportunities which I was only denying myself by staying silent. However embarrassing it was, I was determined to talk, whatever my colleagues and teachers thought. I did have one advantage: I was inhaling books because reading didn't feel like work at all. It was only when essay time appeared (very rarely, I'm relieved to say) that I realised that some others found the course boring, or didn't read for pleasure, or skimmed. So for that alone I'd like to thank the school bullies for giving me all that time alone, to be filled with books.

After that, it was easy. I decided quite consciously to overcome my natural shyness and DO STUFF: before long I was on demonstrations, writing for the union's papers, taking part in student politics, taking a turn on stage. Tempus fugit, it seemed, and the answer was carpe diem. Not that I'd have put it like that. Very stressful, of course. Terrifying in fact - but the alternative was a form of non-existence. I admired those who did it all naturally, though later on I wondered if most of them were more like me than anyone admitted. Perhaps we were all faking it. Perhaps those who aren't faking it are the ones of which to be scared. I once asked David Miliband whether there was enough self-doubt in politics: when he didn't understand the question I knew he was a bad 'un.

Which brings me by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and my original question: what is the perfect student?

For me it's these qualities:
1. Enthusiasm.
2. A healthy degree of self-doubt.
3. Determination and the awareness that it's your education rather than ours.
4. An ability to put aside social cares and fears
5. A degree of obsession.
6. Curiosity.
7. Intellectual dissatisfaction: accept that you don't know everything, but never accept that this isn't a possibility.
8. Empathy.

Note that I don't give a damn about employability. A student who wants a degree certificate and nothing more is intellectually dead. What he or she really wants is training, and that's not what I do. To me, a student with the qualities listed above is already an ideal candidate for any job.

Note too that I haven't listed 'intelligence'. Apart from the fact that I distrust any of the common measures, I've seen too many bright but lazy students coasting through. I've far more time for the hard-working struggler scraping passes than quicksilver insights of people living by their wits.

You only need to do two things to succeed in my classes:

Read
Think
Talk.

The first is easy: start simply, and do a bit at a time. The second is harder, and it depends on me and your colleagues to make the class supportive and stimulating. But it also depends on you: you've got to make the effort. Sometimes we do make things too easy here, particularly by shaping classes around the assumption that students haven't done the independent work required. It avoids embarrassment but it lets students down in the long run.

Personally (and I know this is predictable) I blame the government. Its education policy aids the pursuit of league tables over intellectual development, while its industrial policy prefers conformist drones rather than quirky weirdos, which is a mistake. So students come to us without having made a life-changing choice, and expecting education to be a matter of grades and clear answers handed to them.

I wasn't the perfect student at the beginning nor the end, as my postgraduate tutors will happily tell you (not that my education has ended). I deferred to authority too much and struggled with the more abstract reaches of my subjects. But I was aware of my faults and determined to compensate for them. I had no concept of education as a route to money or a career (wisely, it turned out) and so in a sense had no external pressure to succeed. What was work to some was adventure to me, even when I got things wrong. I feel sorry for my students, despite most of them being clever and funny and interesting. They're trained to see education not as liberation but as the key to more distant goals: it's something to get through rather than the end of the quest itself. I didn't care about the future, so I was free in (privileged, bourgeois) way my students largely aren't. Their degree means different things: £50,000 of debt for a start. No wonder risk-taking isn't at the top of their list.

In the end, all I want in my seminars and in students' essays is a sign that they've thought about what we're talking about. I don't want to hear my ideas echoing back to me. What I'd love is a question I can't answer, or a student bringing up an article I haven't read. It happens, but not enough.

Have I ever had a 'perfect student'? Yes, several times. There are always some near enough, and I'd like to say this with added emphasis: they aren't always the ones who come out with First Class degrees. Some of the top-marks students are experts at playing the game, whereas some of those with Seconds or even Thirds have wrestled with the challenges of a complex and exciting subject to the best of their abilities. Some achievements can't be graded (something I'd like to tattoo on Gove's face).

The question is: how do we bring back the magic?

Bad Cover Version

Students: here's a clue. If you come in to university two weeks before the academic year begins because you're worried that you haven't done enough preparation for your dissertation, then you'll probably be OK. It's your colleagues who do exactly the same thing two weeks before the dissertation deadline who should be worried!

But it's lovely to see students like this. We had coffee, I saw their holiday photos, they fed me cake and I showed them a pile of (anonymised) previous dissertations and we talked about structure, and argument and most importantly of all, making the dissertation their own work, rather than a list of what other critics think about the primary text.

I said all the necessary stuff about time management and having something distinctive to say, but I have to confess that I've only ever had a marker's perspective on undergraduate dissertations: my own degree was assessed only by examinations. That suited me, being the kind of person who worked well under short-term pressure and afflicted by habitual lassitude when it came to sustained work over a period of time. It did mean that the MA and PhD dissertations were rather a struggle, however. I'd add one thing that sometimes gets overlooked: for your own sanity pick texts and lines of arguments you'll enjoy, because you'll be spending a whole year with them. Nothing will spoil a major piece of work more easily than boiling resentment. I know it's not always possible (every cohort contains some students who really don't care one way or another), but it definitely helps. I've recently marked dissertations of Foucault and Country House Mysteries (it was a blast), Milton and Pullman, Dystopian Visions, and (too many) World War 1 Poetry pieces.

Everything's worth writing about, providing you think about them carefully enough – the bane of any marker's life is the Fan's Dissertation. In English, that's usually about Tolkien, with the major Brontë novels not far behind. Here's a hint: 'Why Lord of the Rings Is Brilliant' doesn't cut it. However this year I am supervising a dissertation on Tolkien's notions of heroism, and it's looking good because it's analytical and located in JRR's cultural context.

The other thing that caught my eye today is this new line of 'classic' novels (i.e. famous ones that are out of copyright) published with pulp covers by Pulp The Classics.

Aesthetically, I like them a lot. One of my friends collects pulp novels just for the covers – I don't have the room to start another collection, but I can understand the attraction. I'm not entirely convinced by this range though: pulp is a very 50s thing, and I'm not sure a contemporary audience is being invited to re-assess the texts or pulp itself. Certainly there are plenty of 'classic' texts which would justify the pulp treatment, such as the 'penny dreadfuls' and 'yellow press' works of the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Varney the Vampire would do very well.

However, I do like the pastiche art and the wit evinced by this new line: check out the cover text on The Hound of the Baskervilles:

I do rather worry about this quote prominently carried on the publisher's website though:

'It is so great that you are doing this kind of publishing. Turning classics into fun.' - John Bird, founder of The Big Issue

'Classics' is a dubious category, and I particularly resent the idea that they aren't enjoyable per se. Do new covers affect one's reading? I guess they do because they set up a reader's expectations, but I'm not sure the cover would stay in my consciousness as much as the experience of reading the actual words contained in the text. Though on the whole I'm keen on attracting new readers to texts which might otherwise seem forbidding, which is why I'm a huge fan of Clueless, the greatest Austen adaptation (of Emma) in cinema history (oh yes it is).



Original pulp novels are fascinating, and not only for the art-work. They introduced to the reading public subjects unfit for 'polite' society: particularly anything sexual. For instance, lesbian pulp fiction was sold as shocking exposes of the perversion hidden within the midst of normality, yet isolated lesbians in 50s America read them for solace and solidarity, discarding the thin veneer of moralising. The freedom from the scrutiny of cultural gatekeepers was liberating (and perhaps lucrative). Hence The Price of Salt, a 1952 lesbian thriller by 'Claire Morgan', later unmasked as respected author Patricia Highsmith.

 They were often exploitative, badly-written and shoddily produced, but they acted as a social subconscious: while people liked to be seen with the 'classics', sales figures tell you a lot more about we really liked to read. Little-read current Nobel Literature Prize winners will give future readers a rich sense of our culture, but Fifty Shades of Grey's popularity tells us what everyone else was interested in.

Pulp publishers had an eye on the money, rather than literary quality. Sensation sold, hence the emphasis on eye-catching artwork. Always keen to save money, some of the original pulp houses had the same idea as Pulp The Classics. Elek's 'Bestseller Library' imprint, for instance, started publishing out-of-copyright 'classics' with often very misleading covers and straplines. They knew that to English-language readers, anything French or Italian was assumed to be Utter Filth (thanks partly to censorious Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks). As the customs officer at Dover remarks to the hero while confiscating his books,

If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.

The rule for buyers, of course, is caveat emptor: once the book is purchased, readers are very unlikely to return it complaining that there wasn't enough sauce, and the publishers knew that very well. No hassle from the police, no comeback from the reader who has accidentally bought some Literature. Even by the tamer standards of the period, The Decameron, the naturalism of Zola and Stendhal, and the stylised desperation of de Maupassant et al. aren't particularly racy: Fanny Hill is far more explicit.

Of course publishers aren't only after the Pervert Pound: they repackage all sorts of work for marketing purposes. I pick up Jane Austen reprints whenever I spot them. Because publishers think women and young people are scared of 'serious' work (and perhaps because they don't think women capable of producing it either, she's being sold as 'chick-lit', which sickens me. The notion of 'chick-lit' is patronising and thin enough, while Austen's work has to be read very much against the grain to force it into the conservative paradigms of stereotypical chick-lit. So the publishers take the lazy way out: pastel covers, handwriting-fonts, superficial blurbs.

Very much a 'classic' - but at least it doesn't trade on the author's sex

Still serious, but now trading on Austen's sex rather than the novel's content

Finally! A non-threatening 'girly' edition. Consider yourself marginalised, Ms. Austen.

Random opinions

You're probably expecting a pithy, contrarian comment on the Royal Baby from me.

Nothing doing. I have so little interest in the affairs of the hereditary rulers that I can't even be bothered to work up any outrage. It all reminds me of Diana's death. There I was, momentarily saddened by the death of a complete stranger who couldn't be bothered to use her seat belt, surrounded by ordinarily calm and reasonable people openly crying and lamenting the loss of someone they only every knew through the distorting lens of the media. I prefer to save me grief and joy for those I know, and for those less privileged. I'm a little embarrassed that the country has (at least according to the media) regressed to the 13th century simply because someone has managed to give birth.

So moving swiftly on. Other momentous events are afoot. I was all poised to collect my shiny new bike, but the day-long thunderstorms have reduced my enthusiasm… maybe tomorrow. I also got a cheque for £100 today - all for expressing my slightly unhinged opinions of R S Thomas's poetry in the latest edition of Poetry Wales. I don't know if anyone's told them, but the New Media age involves people writing for free while the outlet coins it in. Just look at the Huffington Post. PW is a small, beautiful literary periodical, not a globe-bestriding news maw, so it probably has an excuse not to pay its contributors, particularly as we academics are used to publishing for free (and in science, paying to be published). So hats off to Poetry Wales: old-school and lovely.

I was going to give you the gist of Paul Uppal's latest letter. After he voted against a carbon cap on the grounds that it wouldn't, er, cap carbon, I asked him to comment on the news that the UK's carbon emissions have gone up. Needless to say, his letter entirely fails to mention this. If I can face it, you can have it tomorrow, and I'm going to send him an even simpler letter, and one after that ad infinitum until I extract a single true, relevant and non-evasive sentence from him. Or until he's sacked at the next election, whichever comes soonest.

Finally, some bossy and exasperated advice to some students.

I'm sorry you're disappointed with your grade. I'm sorry you feel you've been treated unfairly and I'd like to talk to you about why this might be the case. Simply handing in an essay or a re-sit essay doesn't entitle you to a passing grade. Nor does putting in a lot of effort. Lord Lucan put in a lot of effort to bludgeon Sandra Rivett to death, but nobody thinks he should be given credit for it. It's what you've written that matters. But please don't throw accusations around until you've collected your work and read the comments. Don't tell me that your friends think it's a good piece of work: I've taken four degrees to qualify me to decide that (similarly, don't ask friends when work is due in: look at the module guide we give to every one of you). I still get things wrong and that's why two of us look at your work. We want you to pass, but it would be dishonest and a disservice to you to pass any work you hand in just because you think it deserves a pass. Essays aren't judgements on you as a person: there a means by which we assess how far you've got. We aren't out to get you, but we do ask that you pay attention to what's required and assume our good faith.

Rant over.

Be my friend?

Got the new album by The National today. It's pleasant enough - doesn't distract me from the dreaded marking – but not a lot more than that. Are they the Indie U2 these days?

Anyway, having got all that about discourse, capitalism and education off my flabby chest yesterday, today's question is: social media and students – yes or no? One of the meetings I attended yesterday discussed the university's proposed guidelines on using social media and pedagogy. For the most part, the guidelines are fine and practical.

However, what wasn't addressed was the wider context. Should a university be herding students into the arms of distant corporations who will wring them dry for marketable data? Is it equitable to make elements of teaching depend on platforms some students don't want to use? Who owns this information, do colleagues and students understand the privacy settings well enough? What if they want out, and what if they say something they shouldn't?

One of my colleagues ran a module which required students to blog about various taboo subjects: one came back a few years later and claimed that he'd lost a potential job because they'd Googled him and found him confessing to a minor crime. We told them not to boast about their nefarious deeds, but everyone makes mistakes. Was it his fault? Or our responsibility to delete such things?

I sometimes use Twitter in class. If the group is shy and silent, I'll give them a hashtag (such as the module code) and ask them to send me questions like that, promising not to follow them or look at their other Tweets. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Although a lot of students aren't on Twitter and it could be seen as exclusive, I tend to feel that such a use is additional – anyone not using the platform can simply speak in the class. But I wouldn't want to make anything dependent on an external platform – I want editorial control and to be sure that privacy settings haven't sneakily changed, or that the organisation hasn't gone bust. These things are ephemeral: the university spent a lot of time and effort on establishing a Second Life campus. Second Life? Perhaps you're too young. It was literally all the rage on Friday December 3rd 2003. Or something. Now it's tumbleweed. Facebook use is already declining…

It's hard for institutions to a) keep up and b) not seem like the creepy old man in the playground. We can't tell which sites 'the kids' are going to be using tomorrow, and if we go all-in to get down with the youth, they might find that intrusive – people are researching concepts of virtual space, and whether individuals consider them 'private' or 'public'. Do you want your teachers or the institution Tweeting you, or 'liking' your pub photos? I know I wouldn't. On the other hand, many students see e-mail as hopelessly passé and appreciate a Tweet when a class is cancelled or an assignment's due.

The fuzzier element is the issue of social capital, weak or strong. Say you follow your lecturer, or your lecturer follows you. There's an element of control with Facebook (apparently: I'm not on it, and I've ensured that the various platforms I do use are furnished only with dummy names and email addresses) but slippage is easy. Either party might be horrified to realise they've just announced that they're not in today because they're hungover rather than 'unwell'. I already get emails at 3 a.m.: do I want queries by Twitter at any time of day and night? Are there professional boundaries that shouldn't be crossed? I asked this via Twitter yesterday and got an interesting range of responses. Some people saw no problem: social media isn't 'real' friendship and can be seen as a more relaxed space. Others run institutional accounts like Bath Spa's English account, which is chatty and relaxed without over-sharing (my department is thinking of starting one, though the boss is rightly keen to avoid it being vacuous and self-promoting). Gloucestershire University also runs a decent, modest English Department blog. Others said that Facebook friendship is reserved for ex-students instead of current ones. One respondent said that she would friend or follow people she's comfortable getting drunk with, which struck me as both funny and quite wise. You get drunk with people who get your sense of humour and make allowances for context, whereas student-teacher relationships automatically come replete with power imbalances. Another Twitter friend put it like this:

Twitter I only follow peeps I am a fan of. On fb I only friend those I can say Fuck in front of. Rules out a lot of lecturers.

Social media = socialising. Some I want to socialise with others I don't and viceversa. Its not the place for officialdom. 

Some more responses from academics (students and teachers), anonymised:

Too messy; tho I don’t use FB as a personal space—too many “work” folks on there— & I don’t twitter follow current UGs

 Our students and the SU really appreciate @EnglishBSU - it's been cited as an exemplar of its kind (ahem!).

wayyyy more helpful than waiting two days for a reply to an email. Definitely useful. 

No. Former students maybe, but not current crop. Alters dynamics of relationship. 

I'm not, for work/life balance reasons. I'm not with current colleagues either. 

I think this is something that develops when lecturing. You need clearer boundaries.

I'll add students post teaching&colleagues that add me. Use it as a work tool not personal. I live in with students so boundaries v important 

I wouldn't want to be, and as a student still don't 'friend' faculty members/academics unless they 'friend' me. 

I'm generally horribly relaxed. Probably far too open. 

Not so long as you have responsibility for marking their work and pastoral care you shouldn't. Once graduated is different. 

I have student Twitter followers; I don't follow them back 

Think there's something about public nature of Twitter that mitigates the social media fail often seen on Facebook. 

current students? Absolutely not. Past students? Maybe. 

Definitely not Facebook. A few follow me on twitter; I do not follow current students but a few former students. 

My supervisor & I bcame Facebook 'friends' after I finished though & I think that was right. 

There are limits, but imposing them requires too much guardedness. Best for me to just keep them separate! 

I’ve found both twitter and blogging to be both helpful and productive.

For me, it's about duty of care - if I have that, I have a responsibility to be professional. 

Being able to unwind and vent in a safe space for *us* matters. 

It's definitely useful, but only with staff who want to be out there. It certainly wouldn't work if it were forced. 

As I have added collegues, FB has become less personal for me. Thankfully I have other spaces. 

I would (and do) add colleagues that I have a friendship with - i.e. are not just colleagues. 

Good question... I think it depends whether they are compelled to have more contact than is purposeful. (Creepy treehouse.) 

(Further reading: http://www.dustyoldbooks.net/2013/05/on-influences-and-beginnings.html and the "Creepy Treehouse" article which I found very useful. But this is a fascinating spread of approaches. We've never had so many opportunities to communicate with/mock/spy on our students and for them to do the same with us. The boundaries are very fuzzy and we're just feeling our way towards a useful working practice.

What do I do? Well, a few students follow me and I follow them back, but the vast majority do so after graduation and I really value the network that's evolved from that. Most are fairly discreet and I never, ever reply to or reference anything I think they might blush at if they realised I'd read it. I also keep my real name off the account and don't use it for professional work: better for me, better for the university. Nor do I share personal information about me, though I do quote terrible essays sometimes, which I'm beginning to feel bad about. Certainly my instincts are changing all the time.

I'd really like your comments on this.

Heartless bastard? Guilty as charged!

Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, an American academic in the UK is horrified to discover that British academics are nasty to their students. 'You're all going to fail', one professor told his students - a sentence which reminds me of Lorna Sage's primary school head lining up his rural charges and going along telling them all 'you'll be a muck spreader, you'll be a muck-spreader'…

Oh no! A little provocation to add some urgency to studies - not, I think, intolerable mental cruelty. As those of you unfortunate enough to have been under- or miseducated by Yours Truly may remember, I'm not mocking or contemptuous of your efforts. At least, not to your faces. Though I have been known to Tweet gems extracted from essays ('The Victorians invented luxury technology. Like furniture').

But to listen to Emma Thornton, you'd get the impression that we're all vicious sadists who despise our students and live to express our scorn for them. Not true. I have two objections to this accusation: I don't think it's true, and I don't think that an unalloyed diet of praise ('what a wonderful D grade that was, Johnny: one more push and you'll get a First') is helpful or progressive. We're not here to validate students' self-esteem: we're here to encourage them to do better than they already do. Neither fawning nor abuse are of any use.

I hope my students and colleagues know that I support and encourage struggling students to the highest degree. There is a group which doesn't earn my respect: the cheats. I understand the pressures on students which may lead to cheating. I know that certain forms of academic misconduct stem from misunderstanding what university work is about, but there's still a core of students who are so focussed on getting the certificate that they will lie and steal to get there. After an initial period of education, I have no compunction in communicating disgust very clearly indeed.

Nor do I think that telling students what they don't want to hear is abusive. Thornton cites this conversation.

 "Have I really not improved in six months?" she asked, her eyes wide with worry. "That's what my other professor told me."

Not a nice thing to hear, but if it's a) true and b) said diagnostically with the intention of helping, there's nothing wrong with it. I have students who haven't improved in their years here. They depress me, and my failure to help them improve depresses me even more. I feel awful when I have to deliver bad news, but the fact is that I don't fail students: students work fails students. It's not a punishment, it's guidance. A little empathy is what's needed. A teacher who takes pleasure in a student's failure shouldn't be here, but neither should those - and I know several - who enable mediocrity and distort standards by never speaking hard truths.

Thornton has some perceptive things to say about British academia:

Teaching in Britain is a grueling business, so bureaucratized that it makes one weep for the paperless society. There are endless self-monitoring forms to be filled out; syllabi not only have to list the course goals and assigned texts, but also state precisely what "outcomes" will be achieved by the end of the term, and what "transferable skills" students will acquire. I suppose there isn't much time leftover for caring. Still, the lack of it among professors here seems more pronounced than has been my experience among American academics.

She's absolutely right to point out that at conveyor-belt institutions like mine (massive classes, few rooms, diminishing resources, understaffed), it's hard to find the time for proper pastoral care, and that the REF exercise means that teaching is the poor relation, at least in Russell Group élite institutions. It's hard to learn students' names, which is why you won't find the Prime Minister's or Secretary of State for Education's children coming here - but she's dead wrong to imagine that there's some kind of cultural divide between Nasty Cruel Emotionally-Stunted British Academics (though I am emotionally stunted, as numerous friends will testify) and Lovey-Dovey New Age Yankademics. At least I hope so. I like most of my students. Some will be friends for ever. But that doesn't mean that they shouldn't be pushed. They're already disadvantaged: they're mostly poor, working-class, from ethnic minorities with below-average prior attainment. What many of them need is a tyranny of High Expectations. I don't see them as something getting in the way of research: they're my life (sad, I know) - and I wouldn't dream of belittling them in the way that Thornton's anecdotes indicate - but there are more ways to relate to them than treating them like adorable little kittens.

Thornton's perspective is revealed in this sentence:

If I told most people that I was going into a profession in which I'd produce a very small product aimed at very few people, and I'd concentrate on doing so to the neglect of a vast number of potential purchasers who would buy a slightly simpler but infinitely more valuable and desired product, they would no doubt suggest I reconsider my strategy. 

My students aren't purchasers. They're colleagues in the pursuit of enlightenment. Some are lazy bastards. Some are cheats. Most are motivated and hard-working, although not all will reach the highest grades. In sum: they're human. Thornton's approach is the synthesis of the market with the charlatanry of self-help nostrums about self-belief. My students aren't customers and I'm not trying to flog them some piece of tat by oiling up to them in a shop. My students are (hopefully) intellectual explorers and I'm their guide. I don't need to patronise them and they shouldn't want to be treated with kid gloves. I need to understand their starting points and their capabilities, and be able to push them when they're inclined to stay in their comfort zones. I shouldn't be afraid to tell them the truth in case they take their custom elsewhere, because then we won't be universities, we'll be degree mills.

Maybe there are a few academics who treat their students with contempt, but I find it hard to believe. Most of us are rendered insecure enough by the constant surveillance and judgement imposed by appraisal and REF to have much energy for treating others the way the system treats us. I suspect that many of us - including me - have developed a black and exclusive sense of humour for dealing with the repetitive and more gruelling experiences of our professional lives, like nurses, coppers and doctors (such as our delight in 'howlers'), but I'd be inclined to suspect that Thornton hasn't quite grasped the British sense of irony, in which what is said doesn't always exactly match what is meant.

But that's a very stereotypical view of our American cousins, for which I apologise.

Shamelessly stolen

Here's video of a presentation about a magnificent piece of research. Students were asked to cheat - individually or collectively - on a cybersecurity exam. They all succeeded, in ingenious ways - you'll laugh yourself silly with this one. Even better, they called the paper 'Embracing the Kobayashi Maru' - massive bonus points for a Star Trek reference.



You can read an early version of their paper here - the final version is in a paywalled journal, even though (as US military employees), American taxpayers have already paid.

Of course it's still rightwing nonsense - despite the US releasing Stuxnet, it's only 'our adversaries' who cheat. OK then… But the research is still valid.

Slaving away?

OK, students, here's a chance to boast or fess up. This is a chart from a report of students' claimed private study hours per week.

Here at The Hegemon, we assume that every hour in class should be accompanied by several hours' individual study, though of course we understand that our intake - lots of working students, parents etc - has a lot more going on than the 'traditional' student body. A few students probably get this much done, and a lot don't. Some might work regularly, some might cram sometimes. I know for a fact that many calculate what's possible - only reading texts they tend to write about, for instance. Understandable, though missing the wider educational point. I'm moderately well-educated because I read widely and make unexpected links and have a literary 'hinterland' as well as a focal point.

I can't honestly say I worked that hard as an undergraduate. I did an English degree, with education and philosophy minors. I went to all my lectures, because there were so few it would have felt rude not to (except the ones in which the lecturer handed out his text and then read from it, without deviation). It was warmer too! On the other hand, because virtually my only hobby was reading, much of what I thought was leisure was probably beneficial for work.

Certainly my academic life wasn't structured in any way. Assessment was by annual exams: my tutors wanted the occasional essay, but not very often and they had no impact on my degree. No dissertation or group work either - ideal for a fundamentally idle but enthusiastic chap such as myself. I honestly don't know how I'd have coped with the regular, significant work my students have to do.

So: how much study do you put in? Enough? Not enough? Are our expectations too high or too low?

Oh, Canada!

The UK's student protests seemed like a big deal at the time: some minor disorder, a lot of police brutality and the usual panoply of outrage from politicians and rightwing media commentators. From the coverage, you'd have thought it was 1968 all over again. 


However, we have the French - or rather, French Canadians - to thank for another reminder of how to do protest properly. Nobody pays any attention to Canada even though it's huge and very interesting (Marge Simpson: 'it's so clean and sterile - I'm home!'). Quebec's students are very unhappy about their student fees being raised from (by UK standards) not very much to a bit more than not very much. But being French, they have a righteous sense of principle allied to a firm belief that the first thing to do in any situation is to get out onto the streets. And they're right. 


The initial cause has fed into a general sense of social outrage. The Canadian Conservative government is one of the most unpleasant, self-righteous, reactionary and undemocratic the first world has seen more generations: Prime Minister Harper has taken George Bush as a role model and perhaps gone even further. The cuddly Canada of peacekeepers, William Shatner, Due South, Degrassi Junior High and Anne of Green Gables has been replaced by a vicious corporate puppet which seems to actively enjoy poisoning the planet through tar sands oil (Canada cancelled its Kyoto commitments a while back) while using its newfound muscle to welcome in the Corporate Century without any regard for its citizens (and yes, Canadian voters are responsible for this insanity). 





The Quebecois students have protested so loudly and effectively for so long (103 days so far) that the government has introduced a Draconian set of anti-protest measures which only start with techniques familiar here (kettling, mass arrests etc) and end with an assault on democracy in the form of Loi/Bill 78. The university year has been cancelled! In response, large sections of the Canadian population, whether or not they agree with the fees issue, have flooded the streets and taken up novel ways to mark dissent, such as banging pots and pans ('casserole en cours) every night. 

[Law 78] imposes severe restrictions on the right to protest. Any group of 50 or more protesters must submit plans to police eight hours ahead of time; they can be denied the right to proceed. Picket lines at universities and colleges are forbidden, and illegal protests are punishable by fines from $5,000 to $125,000 for individuals and unions – as well as by the seizure of union dues and the dissolution of their associations.

In other words, the government has decided to smash the student movement by force.

I'm stunned by most of this - and surely it isn't constitutional. A blanket ban on university picket lines means that - for example - university cleaners facing wage cuts couldn't picket at their place of work, whereas staff at any other organisation can carry on as usual. Giving the police the right to ban any protest will of course be used over and over again whenever anyone wants to protest: powers once given are always applied widely and permanently.


Rather amusingly, when the police demanded a protest route map in advance, the students provided one - and the march's chosen course was… interesting. 

Culturally, there's an interesting feature to this movement: it's massively dominated by the French-speaking student bodies - they seem to be far readier to protest than Anglophones, perhaps because French gives them access to the traditions and tools of Mai 1968, and perhaps because being a linguistic minority in an anglophone-dominated country is an inherently more political position than being in the majority. There's a lesson there for the UK too: Welsh students used to be very active in the 1960s-1970s as the language and devolution campaigns accelerated - time for them to recover that fighting spirit. 


Additionally, Quebec is a special case because it's a European-style social democratic state within a country rapidly and forcibly being converted into a cutting edge free-market fundamentalist one. Yes, the rest of the world is realising that our economic and social woes are the result of capitalist fundamentalism, but Canada's previous social-democratic policies and the tide of oil money have cushioned the Canucks from the multiple blows the rest of us have received. If Canada's corporate government manages to smash Quebec, that's the end of social justice in North America. 


Canada: more interesting than you think, eh?

Advice to students

I'm deep into the marking - one dissertation left to do, then it's the forty-odd English Renaissance pile, then further mountains of various others. One of the things that have hugely annoyed me this year has been the erroneous use of quotation: either simply badly typed, or deliberately distorted so that an innocent academic is misused to support something s/he never wrote.

Here's a little advice from Ælfric, a West Saxon monkish scribe and author from the turn of the first millennium:

Now I desire and beseech, in God's name, if anyone will transcribe this book, that he carefully correct it by the copy, lest we be blamed through careless writers. He does great evil who writes carelessly, unless he correct it. It is as though he turn true doctrine into false error. Therefore everyone should make straight that which he before bent crooked, if he will be guiltless at God's doom.

Sadly I don't have eternal damnation in the fires of hell as a sanction for lazy or dishonest students… though it's certainly deserved in the case of the one who told me that 'Paradise Lost is a post-modern novel'.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money

Not the most apposite aphorism for a blogger, you might think, but Samuel Johnson crossed my mind when I was thinking about my students this morning. And not just because he - like me - was a scruffy troglodyte ('shaking, twitching, pockmarked… distinctly careless about his dress' as Boswell put it).

Despite the small group who have told me that they 'don't like reading' - despite signing up for degrees in English Literature - the majority have been fine, admirable and charming people.

Each year, I mourn the graduation of another group whose like will never be seen again, only for another cohort to stake its claim on my admiration. This year, and last year, saw the departure of some very, very bright students who in a sane and rational world, would be pursuing postgraduate studies at our finest institutions. Instead, they're working in local pubs or as classroom assistants. Nothing wrong with that of course, but a total waste of talent. Our government forgets that to abandon decent education funding is to scandalously cast aside the next generation's critics, thinkers and creators.

What's the relevance of Johnson? Well, he was thrown out of university after a single year because he couldn't pay his bills and was forced to churn out hack work for people he didn't respect: we're now used to students withdrawing for financial reasons, and next year it'll be even worse. But more inspiringly, he was convinced that learning must and could be available for all, whether they worked as rowers or clergymen:

…a desire of knowledge is the natural feeling of mankind; and every human being, whose mind is not debauched, will be willing to give all that he has to get knowledge. 

My students already give all that they have. They're mired in debt with little prospect of every repaying it (a cynic might say that perpetual debt is the necessary condition for obedient wage-slavery). Many give up good jobs or take on bad ones. Relationships suffer and families take the strain, yet they carry on. Last year, I talked to the husband of one of my graduates. He inspected kebab shops for a living, and told me some horrible stories - yet he'd read everything his wife studied, because he didn't want a cultural gap opening up between them.

I hate the end of the year. As the economic and intellectual climate worsens, I see lovely, thoughtful, clever people returned to the dole queue from whence they came.

Better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied

said Mill. Perhaps that's where I can rest my hopes. My graduates aren't pigs or fools and hopefully they're intellectually, politically and culturally dissatisfied, enough to write songs and stories, lead riots and revolutions. I send them off into the dark and cold while keeping my fat arse parked on a comfortable seat. I'm the armchair revolutionary - they'll be on the front line. In Johnson's terms, I'm his old teacher, Richard Savage - less learned than they'll be but smugly safe, one of those who has 'slumbered away their time on the down of plenty'.

This is the worst year yet - I have more hugely talented students graduating who should be doing MAs and PhDs than ever before, and none of them can afford it. Still, at least the executive team and administrators all have iPads. And that's what matters.

Say hello to bonhomie

I'm unaccountably full of warm feelings towards my fellow humans today, a most unfamiliar sensation. Normal misanthropic service will, I hope, be restored soon.

Why so happy? Well, I took a group of students to Warwick Arts Centre last night, to see a stage adaptation of Vile Bodies, the Evelyn Waugh novel of aristocratic vacuity we're studying this semester.

The student production was rather good - despite a tight budget and and the lack of experience which comes from being young (damn their eyes), they handled a compressed narrative very well, particularly the change from superficiality to disaster in the second half of the novel.

I think my students enjoyed the play. I'm not sure how many had been to the theatre before, nor how many had read the novel yet, but they seemed to appreciate the trip (and had the grace to laugh when I pointed out that they still have to read the book). Lots of the novels' themes are particularly relevant in the era of phone-hacking and the Leveson Inquiry: the power of the press, our simultaneous love for and hatred of celebrities, the divide between the pointless aristocracy and the public which demands both to be entertained and be moralistic at the same time. It really is a novel for our times.

They're also an uproariously funny bunch - the gossip on the bus was hilarious, though I did have to develop selective, diplomatic deafness now and then. It was also a good reminder of how much student life has changed - so many of them juggle full-time study with work: in schools, in supermarkets, cafés and shops. I may have struggled for cash as a student, but I had such an easy life compared with them.

Finally - I never realised what a bunch of old lags my students are: seemingly expulsion from school is one of the entry requirements for The Hegemon!

Support your local students

They haven't gone away you know, as a great man once said. While the newspapers have been distracted, the students have been planning another big demonstration today (though there's no sign of it here at The Hegemon).

It's the same issues: fees, the effective privatisation of universities, and the government's decision to penalise future generations for the failings of the economic models they and their predecessors promoted. It baffles me: every government (rightly) talks about the need for a high-tech, knowledge economy - but no government will ever admit that this a) costs money and b) is a public good.

So what do they do? The Metropolitan Police have decided to put down the brown envelopes for a day, and have spent the last week loudly talking about using plastic bullets - like it's Ireland in the 1980s - and harassing those they arrested last time, whether they were charged with anything or not. Clearly they've missed the days of the Miners' Strike and the Poll Tax riots, and fancy a spot of teen-bashing.

Except, of course, that it's not just spoilt teenagers. My university's intake is 40% mature students trying to retrain themselves just as governments always tell them to. A large proportion have children or other dependents. The vast majority of our intake - of any age - is from the lowest economic centime: just the kind of people to whom the EMA, or a decent level of support, will make the difference. These people aren't scroungers, demanding something for nothing: they're the nurses, classroom assistants, teachers and social workers of the future, who quite rightly don't fancy taking on £50,000 of debt to qualify for a low-to-moderate salary and a slashed pension. Would you? They ARE the big society… and they're being cut off at the knees.

Follow the protests live here.

Meet the Tories' greatest fear

Here's a poster from the Norwegian Students' and Academics International Assistance Fund, which provides higher and informal education opportunities in the developing world. It sounds great.

Judging from this poster, it's exactly what our know-nothing government fears: opinionated, critical thinkers challenging authority. If only Michael Gove was in the cast of tyrants fleeing Mechastudent…

Dispute, Debate, Dissent: what a great slogan. If only my seminars took that line.

Teacher's watching you!

It's the first day of Induction Week, or Freshers' Week if you're young, and American. So there are two things on my mind: what do we do about all the terrorists in my classes, and am I still cool?

OK, terrorism first. There are a few loudmouths around: last year one student wandered about with a t-shirt depicting a man gesticulating with an AK47, and the word 'Mujahid' below the image. When I was a student, I was also a loudmouth on political matters. I still am, to some extent, but I can now tell the difference between an attention-seeker and a committed radical, whether thinker or doer. Mujahid man is very unlikely to be shipping himself off to Afghanistan for weapons training.

However, there is a serious point. This august institution has furnished Guantamano Bay with several inmates. As far as it's possible to tell, they were all either innocent or stupid. Either way, they didn't deserve kidnapping, torture and detention without trial. Be that as it may, there's a sense that universities like these have reservoirs of potential recruits - a large Muslim cohort, an active Islamic movement on and off-campus and what politicians euphemistically call an 'urban' demographic, by which they mean an intake largely of poor, multi-ethnic students.

The question for universities is what we should do about it. It should be blindingly obvious that the security services will be active on campus, both through open liaison with the university management, and covertly through infiltration and informers. But as an academic, I haven't been urged to inform anyone of any suspicions I might have.

I've clashed with the Islamic society recently: they invited a notorious pair of liars in to preach creationism: my overwhelming impression was that academic credibility meant nothing to the students because nobody has trained them to think critically and independently. But ignorance is not a crime (unfortunately).

The government wants us to spy on our students.

One of the government's counter-terrorism strategies,Prevent, has started to once again home in on British universities with a particular emphasis on Muslims. Officials from Prevent have asked university professors to give them details of any Muslim who might be a "threat", especially those who are isolated or depressed.

Apparently, if a Muslim is depressed, he or she is vulnerable to radicalisation. University staff are also asked to report students that have poor relationships with their families, are disgrunted by the government, and access extremist websites.  

Would I inform on students who sympathised with Islamic terrorism? No, probably not. I'd argue, just as I'd argue with supporters of any kind of terrorism. More importantly, I'd contextualise terrorism by examining the conditions and cultures from which it grows. That's what universities are for: not to tell people what to think, but to give them a range of ways to think about any subject.

As to the idea that I should tell the secret services whenever I meet an 'isolated' or 'depressed' student: pshaw! I haven't got all day! Have they met any goths? The answer to isolation and depression is to talk to them, and point them in the direction of the counselling services. If particular student groups think that their teachers, counsellors and student representatives are spying on them, they're going to stop talking to us. They won't trust us, they won't respect us and they won't listen to us. Alienation is the inevitable result - and that's more likely to lead to 'radicalisation' than airing debates in public (not that I think 'radicalisation' per se is a bad thing: except when it comes to violence and Tory free-marketeers, and we're sadly not being asked to inform on potential Tory students).

I'm certainly not going to pick out my Muslim students as though every one of them is a terrorist in larvae stage. They're falling into the trap of assuming that all Muslims are beardy fanatics (even the women), when it's the same as Christianity or Judaism. For every ranting ringleted heavily armed Orthodox Jewish settler, there are at least a couple bacon-sandwich munching Jewish slackers. How many Catholics listen to the Pope's advice on contraception? Not quite all, to put it mildly. Similarly, there are plenty of Muslims who manage to wake up and get through to breakfast without strapping on a dynamite jockstrap. But the idea that most Muslims are idle backsliders - or simply interpret their scriptures more loosely than bin Laden -  like their Christian counterparts doesn't sell newspapers, political parties or sophisticated electronic spying devices. (Nor does pointing out that the EDL is equally, perhaps more dangerous, and yet we're not being asked to inform on fascists in the classroom.

If I were a student at this university, I'd be demanding that the Students' Union disavows any co-operation with Prevent, and pressures the university to do the same.

Anyway, on to the second question, on my relative coolness. This one's informed by a fellow academic's sudden onset of competitive coolness. It's relatively straightforward. I'm not cool. I wasn't cool when I was a student, even in the subcultures to which I belonged. I wasn't even in the 'anti-cool' group. I knew this, and accepted it: but apparently some people, working every day with the young, thin, fashionable, with-it and cool, fall into the trap of craving their respect for matters other than intellectual.

This is what the students see. Embrace it.

Do not try to emulate these people.

It's easy to resist. Every time you feel a pang of envy and decide to throw in what you think is a topical reference, think back to when you were in school or at university. Did you shudder with revulsion when your teachers mentioned something you cared about? Then have the grace to remain silent. It's like my dad, who refers to 'The Google'. He thinks it displays his techno-savvy.

You become a rockstar in the classroom. You play interesting YouTube videos in your lectures and are occasionally spotted at shows by your students. A mythology grows up around your sightings about town. Students want to follow you on Twitter.

I live two minutes' walk from the university. Every drink I buy is served by one of my students, and occasionally I accidentally see a band liked by the despicable youth. This doesn't make me cool. Nor, I should add, is the queue for the gents the place to discuss why I gave you a D.

There are ways to gain students' respect: by treating them as intelligent, independent people whose admiration means nothing to you. Your interests are not their interests, though that may change, and you'll definitely find that you like some of them, and vice versa. But you won't impress them if you try to blind them with clothes, hip references or obscure ideas - that's a pathetic form of intellectual and social abuse. Every academic needs to know this: students' worlds do not revolve around their teachers - and that's a good thing. You're deluding yourself if you think that your existence makes the slightest difference to their inner lives. That is also a good thing. Get your own friends and avoid appearing like some kind of vampire, leaching vitality from your students. And try not to inform MI5 when they look a bit down or say provocative things to get your attention. They'll respect you for it. Before you know it, some of the students will genuinely become your friends. And you'll be cool without even trying.

On the other hand, if your self-image depends on validation by some teenagers, you are definitely NOT COOL. If your resolve wavers, ask yourself this: what the hell do the kids know about anything? The cool kids were morons when I was the same age as them. They won't have improved since then.

What happens on campus, stays on campus

Life in a university is exciting. It's stimulating… intellectually. There are also isolated cases of romance - or lust - blooming: last year several of us had to interrupt a young student couple who thought that meeting rooms were ideal trysting venues.

But life here is much more sedate than popular culture would have you believe:

Pulp novels are fascinating. They cover Westerns, SF, race, war, and obviously sex. The covers alone are often stunning. But they also tell you so much about the culture in which they appeared. Take this last one, Girls' Dormitory. Who's the audience? You'd assume it's heterosexual males, but Katherine Forrest's study Lesbian Pulp Fiction and Duke University's Sallie Bingham Center collection both suggest that this pseudo-moralising (see the bottom left of the cover) allowed gay women to develop a sexual identity completely closed to them in real life. This is presumably why gay publishing imprints have revived some of the 'classics': used to reading 'against' or 'between the lines', their readers easily ignored the moralising, and it's easy to see how these emotionally heightened, sometimes ridiculous texts were enfolded into camp culture as an ironic reclamation of lesbian and gay identity.

I don't know what proportion of pulp novels are set in universities, but it makes sense for the sex-related ones: residential institutions where men and women, and same-sex relationships can develop away from the prying eyes of disapproving adults must have been at a premium in more conservative societies (prisons are another popular choice). The moralising banner allows the reader (probably not students or teachers) to believe that such places - from which they are excluded -  are hotbeds of vice: an unattainable fantasy for the 97% of the population which would never attend college in those days.

This seems to have been an all-American fantasy though: campus fiction in the UK is usually comedy based on nerd-characteristics, the pursuit of power and the mad scientist. Academics are seen as socially inept and divorced from reality, students as privileged, arrogant, spoilt, naive or silly. Perhaps this is due to Britain's postwar history: America's students moved thousands of miles, didn't seem to work too hard, had big cars for romantic trips to the lookout, had white teeth and good weather under vast skies. Britain's students had rationing, rain, mackintoshes, bad teeth, couldn't get more than a few hundred miles away, and lived in cold, cramped conditions. Try making a fantasy out of that!

Pulp fiction still exists to some extent: for some reason railway stations specialise in soft-porn novels, though I'd hate to sit next to someone reading one, but the social and cultural contexts have changed to such a degree - particularly the end of censorship and the rise of the web - that it's harder to sustain this kind of sensationalist, titillating market. Certainly universities have had their erotic potential drained: there's no mystery when almost 50% of young people are students, and many of them live at home, or attend their local university. 

While this leering stuff isn't much to be missed, the narrowing of students' horizons certainly is: there's little scope for reinvention, escape and encountering new social groups and interests if you commute to and from your family home every day, and meet your schoolmates in lectures. 

And with that, I'm popping a piece of 'Bacon Bits Chocolate' (oh yes) into my mouth before heading off home to pursue the life of a sexy academic: reading today's book purchases (Edgeworth's Patronage from 1814 and Neil Postman's polemic Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness).

Students: up your game

The always interesting and provocative Tara Brabazon (whose books I recommend) has a checklist of ways to improve student performance in the THES.

Some of what she has to say may strike a chord with those of you currently in education:

First-year orientation programmes are boring. Sessions introduce timetables, plagiarism, electives, plagiarism, personal tutors, plagiarism, reading lists and, yes, plagiarism. Students arrive at university filled with hope, inspiration and aspiration. Within two hours, excitement is squelched from their minds.

Universities such as Duke in North Carolina use applications to feed logistical material to students’ mobile phones. Such strategies enable a better use of orientation time, with attention given to thinking, reading and writing. 

The article elucidates the problems of being a first-year student, and the checklist is a really quick and simple guide to eliminating the basic errors of essay-writing. If you don't mark essays regularly, you'll think it's hugely simplistic. You'd be wrong.

You can learn so much

…by wandering the corridors of your place of work.

For instance, I notice that one of our meeting rooms is now labelled 'Staff Use Only'. This, I suspect, is a response to the discovery that a couple of students were using rooms for rather more carnal than intellectual knowledge.

I also discovered this today:

The other notice I saw but didn't get a chance to snap was 'BA Hons (Social Work) Literacy Test. Oh dear. I'm starting to understand why social workers are in the newspapers so often. Do any other degree courses need literacy tests? I kind of assumed that literacy was to be expected from anyone applying for a degree (though marking always raises doubts).

The kids are alright, yeah?

What a fine young man:

The revolution begins here?

Well, if you read the Daily Mail and its allies. Some protestors damaged Prince Charles's Rolls-Royce after it drove into a protest area.

Let's not forget that the King and Queen were booed and jeered when they did their famous tour of the East End during the Blitz (an annoying little story which subverts the standard narrative of everyone being in it together), and Victoria was in serious danger of popular revolt until everybody went all soppy towards the end of her life - 7 assassination attempts. Before that, of course, the royal family were the butt of some outrageous satire.

Here's a Gillray drawing of the Royal Family, entitled 'The Monstrous Craw', in which the Prince of Wales - feckless, stupid, greedy and corrupt - is fed cash by his equally awful parents during a brief period of amity between them:

Is this treatment of Charles and Camilla worse than the cops yanking a man out of his wheelchair?

So let's all calm down. I assume that Wills and Kate - despite having degrees - weren't protesting, so it's about time the royals got a glimpse of life outside the bubble they're forced to live in. It's not all polo and Duchy Originals Organic Oatcakes. Melbourne, Victoria's Prime Minister tried to keep her from reading Charles Dickens because the novels feature 'paupers, criminals and other unpleasant subjects': do we want your rulers to be similarly shielded from real life?

I'm just desperately sad. I had a great free education and the chance to pursue my interests at postgraduate level. I struggled financially, but I don't have massive debts hanging over me, nor did anyone (except family and friends) question the value of my chosen degrees. The new generation will be forced into worse conditions, degrees and jobs they don't enjoy, and a lifetime of financial bondage - or they can skip university and take their chances in the low-wage 'flexible' economy.