Mid-term apathy is setting in, with class numbers dwindling. Those that manage to crawl into my 9am lecture are making it very clear it comes at a price, as they cough and sneeze enough bacteria and virus in my general direction to fluoresce an agar plate at 20 metres.
App Man, the I-Phone toting anarchist is in today, along with the Sloaney Blackberry Boys & Gals, all posh accents and attitude and looking particularly self-satisfied, whilst chatting animatedly to App Man about the Battle of Millbank, from which they’ve all just returned. Yes, it seems a sub-set of my class spent last week engaged in class war, texting and You Tubing on the banks of the Thames, as the still, almost uniformly, middle-class elite of the student movement took on the Proletarian Guard of the Establishment, otherwise known as the Met.

Yes I know I’ve moaned at length in Departmental Meetings for years about the apathy of the modern student. But this ain’t the Sixties with rioters in Trafalgar Square standing up for ideals and the less fortunate. Today’s student knows all about mercy pleas (ie “I was not able to perform at my best in the exam due to stomach/tooth/heart ache – delete as appropriate just make sure it’s vague enough for the doctor to sign something faintly plausible without contravening the Hippocratic Oath”) but little about mercy. One does not see them rioting for their brothers and sisters in distant climates against tyranny, war and such like.

But when things come closer to home with the proposed rise in University fees, our scholars suddenly find their voice (and fists and feet). Never mind that the character who bravely threw a fire extinguisher (from what was - unlike the bacterium that is now making me so grouchy - sniper range on the seventh floor) will, as a graduate, be able to command a far higher salary than his hapless, mostly non-graduate, intended victims below.

Just look at the earnings differential of graduates and non-graduates, the virtually unchanged demographic of students over the last forty years, and society that (with the exception of footballers and celebrities) values intellectual over physical ability. No matter which way you cut it, if university tuition is funded by taxation it necessarily involves those with above average intelligence being paid for by the majority without, who watch helplessly as those they’ve subsidized grab most of the top jobs!

So to App Man and the Blackberry Boys & Gals I say look to yourselves before complaining so vociferously about your own self-interest. Abandon your hypocrisy and make a stand against the virus that affects modern discourse on Higher Education funding. You go to university for yourself, no one else, and it’s up to you to pay the price and take the reward. Why is everyone so self-righteous?
P.S. Did I mention that when I got my degree there were no tuition fees and I received a full maintenance grant?