STUDENTS - INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 2004

In the late 80’s Margaret Thatcher, the then prime-minister, took a tour of our University. In a library she stopped and asked a young woman what she was studying. “Norse literature,” she replied. And Thatcher said, “What a luxury.” Now, Njal’s saga might not be to everyone’s taste, but in a civilised country surely we can make a space to allow someone to be the receptacle for such knowledge. As a hard and fast rule, we should judge a society by the value it places on Viking literature and the ladies drawn to learn about it.

I became a student in 1986. I got a full grant to go to St Edmund Hall college, Oxford University, to study English literature. I probably wouldn’t become a student today. Even though it is much easier to get good A Level grades now than it was twenty years ago, when everyone going to university was much cleverer and more attractive and all pop music was better, the student debt would scare me off. I wanted to learn stuff for its own sake. I didn’t necessarily see a financial relationship between study and a well paying career. As a teenager, for some reason, I actually wanted to learn about Anglo Saxon poetry, even though I ended up being the worst at it in our group. A knowledge of Anglo Saxon poetry doesn’t necessarily put anyone in a great position to pay off a £15,000 loan. Inevitably, today’s students have to think about whether what they are learning will, literally, justify the expense. This inevitably wipes out a whole strata of genius airheads and makes further education, and by extension the world, a much duller place, full of estate agents and e-businesspeople.

This is not simple prejudice or rose-tinted nostalgia. Within a year of graduating I was a stand-up comedian. I did hundreds of gigs at student unions throughout the 90’s and, after a three year layoff, even found myself headlining a Fresher’s Event last month. Student unions today feel utterly different to how they did nearly 20 years ago. In the 80’s we escaped provincial high street club culture, where everybody dressed up to queue for drinks promotions on Friday nights, for dank places with simple subsidised beers and strange entertainments. Now Friday night student unions feel like the very places they were once a refuge from. As a stand-up, fifteen years ago you could adopt a faux-reactionary position to have fun with a consensus of disapproval. Now the same lines would get cheers from the young people. And the last flowering of 60’s feminism meant young men had to negotiate their way through a sisterhood of women as likely as not to be wearing earrings depicting scissors cutting penises in half. This seems absurd, but was obviously better than contemporary lads’ mags with their Naked Student Of The Month triple page photo spreads. ‘Cathy is studying Economics in Sheffield and here is a picture of her arse’. Now, I like looking at pictures of naked teenage girls with average to bad A Level results as much as the next thirty-something man, I admit, but if you don’t at least begin your adult life with a set of unsustainable principles where will you be, ideologically, in twenty years time?

There’s a convincing argument that the obvious wrongness of contemporary global politics is re-radicalising student culture. This may be true. But the other fact is that the selfishness of the 80’s, and the practical considerations of simply needing to balance the books caused by student loans, has changed the flavour of the campus. Sometimes, I feel like we caught the last rays of a golden age. Nostalgia is a crime, of course. But so is being a right wing student.