Term (reprise)

Here at the university, we are now—Deo gratias—half way through the first semester. Term is always a trial; it calls for much patience and the exercise of heroic virtue.

It shouldn’t be like that, but it is; and right now, Melancholicus could not be less motivated.

Melancholicus was tardy in his rising this morning, and consequently arrived on campus after nine o’clock. A good deal after nine o’clock, if the truth be told. He then spent a most unhappy hour wasting precious petrol and clocking up unnecessary miles on his car circumnavigating the campus in a vain search for somewhere—anywhere!—to park. In the end he found somewhere well off campus, involving a twenty-minute walk back to campus and the same twenty-minute walk to his car again when he shall have finished his day’s labour this evening. Let us hope that it won’t be raining.

It is a sad truth that if one has any business at this institution one must arrive on campus well before nine if one wishes to park one’s car, since (owing to the economic prosperity of recent times) every undergraduate and his or her flatmate now has a car. Not a few otherwise penniless students seem to drive cars much bigger and faster than what Melancholicus can afford to drive himself. On Tuesday Melancholicus beheld a bleach-blond and track-suited student parking a 2007 VW Golf. Those cars don’t come cheap—they can be up to or over €30,000 depending on engine size and trimmings. How could the fellow have afforded such, unless he is the son of Daddy Rich? Melancholicus drives a 2006 KIA Picanto, a much smaller, less powerful and less ostentatious vehicle; it is his first car, for he could never have afforded to drive when he was himself a student and had to depend instead on the likes of this. Melancholicus’ idea of a student car used to be a twelve-year old, third-hand, three-door Fiat with missing hubcaps, faded paintwork and a myriad dents and scratches, yet not a few turn up to their lectures driving gleaming new or nearly new Alfa Romeos, Audis, Toyota Corollas and Volkswagens.

Such is the struggle for parking spaces on campus, and the refusal of the authorities to implement a workable parking permit system (for fear of the reaction from the Students’ Union?), that yesterday Melancholicus travelled to work by bus—and in the process was rudely reminded of all the reasons why he stopped using the bus in the first place. Speaking of buses, he recently discovered that Dublin Bus refuses to serve the campus after 8pm, owing to the danger presented to the transit company’s staff by the hordes of drunk and disorderly students that roam the campus each evening, a danger which recently resulted in at least one assault.

Even at the university we are witnessing the results of the breakdown of society and the disintegration of social mores owing to the reluctance of modern parents to put much effort into the raising of their offspring.

The recent downturn in the economy has prompted the Irish government to consider the re-introduction of fees for third-level education. Needless to say, the students are not happy about this proposal. Third-level education has been technically free in this country since 1995. Melancholicus did not benefit from this abolition of fees, since he graduated in 1993, but his sister did, and so has nearly everyone who entered a third-level institution since then. The then minister for educaction Noel Demspey attempted to re-introduce fees in 2002, whereat students marched in protest, and in 2003 Mr. Dempsey was compelled to admit defeat. In the same year, a report revealed that—interestingly—only 20% of school-leavers from the lowest income bracket went on to university, compared with 97% of school-leavers from more privileged backgrounds.

So we can see who it is really that has benefited most from the abolition of fees, and that Noel Dempsey had the right idea.

The abolition of fees has had two principal effects: it has greatly increased the amount of ready cash at students’ disposal (not always a good thing—students, like the clergy, should be poor), and it has inculcated an attitude of relaxed carelessness among many. For if education is free, there is not much incentive to study hard and win top marks; there is, in fact, very little incentive to pass at all—the dropout can do his thing with a clear conscience, knowing that he will not be accountable to parents or benefactors displeased at the wasting of their money, and knowing he can always go back to study at any time. College becomes one long party, in which the student can save his money for recreational activities and devote himself to bedding as many similarly empty-headed young women as he can manage to seduce. And at the end of it all he will graduate with a degree hardly worth the parchment whereon it is printed, for the abolition of fees has led necessarily to extensive cutbacks and educational dumbing-down. Once upon a time, a degree was the distinction conferred upon a student who showed the required academic aptitude throughout a rigorous course of so many years’ study. Today, graduating with a degree is taken almost entirely for granted; only the spectacularly useless, the terribly unlucky, those with serious problems of one sort or another, or those who choose to withdraw will leave the university without one.

Yesterday, a student protest against the re-introduction of fees took place outside Leinster House, necessitating the presence of the Gardaí, since if students are prepared to act boorishly when out enjoying themselves, they will surely act boorishly when angrily protesting in large numbers.

Melancholicus did not attend the protest, even as an observer; he was teaching at the time, and was quite impressed to notice that the protest seemed not to impact on the levels of attendance at his lecture. But he would not have attended the protest anyway, for Melancholicus welcomes the re-introduction of fees, and hopes that the Irish government will have sufficient gumption to stick to its guns and not be intimidated by the prospect of ensuing unpopularity or the aggressive bawling of students and other leftists.

It is alleged that the re-introduction of fees will discriminate against students from lower economic backgrounds. It need not do so; fees might be imposed only on the fat cats—those who can afford to provide their sons and daughters with brand-new VW Golfs and suchlike. Working-class students could be exempted. We have already seen that the clear majority of students, even in these days of free education, are of middle-class extraction anyway; they are protesting, not (as they might pretend) on behalf of their less-well-off cousins but on behalf of themselves—and their cars. Consider: little Jimmy, from a comfortably well-off middle-class family, gets a good Leaving Cert and decides to go off to college. Good for him. Since his parents are relieved of the obligation to fork out €3,000 per annum in fees, amounting to €9,000 to €12,000 across the three or four years needed for little Jimmy to take his degree, they can afford to buy their son a car. So little Jimmy gets a new (or nearly new) Nissan Almera or, if he’s the son of Mammy and Daddy Rich, an Audi. Of course the parents of little Jimmy’s friends are likewise equipping their college-bound sons and daughters with fast and flashy autos, with the result that university employees with a job to do have to compete with the most non-commital undergraduates for parking facilities, and it is impossible to drive anywhere in Dublin within a reasonable time period because the streets are clogged as everyone has a car.

Roll on the recession!

Now imagine that little Jimmy’s parents have to shell out a considerable sum in annual tuition fees; little Jimmy probably wouldn’t get his new Almera—and, given the money being pumped into his education, he would be under considerable pressure to deliver academically—or explain to a furious Daddy why all his money was wasted.

Hardly surprising that the students oppose the bringing back of fees, for it would impact every aspect of their lives—they would have to depend on public transport to get to and from college; they would have to scrimp and save for their beer money; they might actually have to spend time in the library instead of the bar; they might have to support themselves instead of relying on allowances from munificent relatives.

It might be good for them.

They might grow up a little.

Term

The new academic year has begun at the university.

It always comes as a shock after the quiet of the summer months; one becomes used to the peace, the silence, always being able to find a space in the car park and not having to queue with a horde of loud-mouthed, bespotted and hormonally-driven adolescents for one’s sandwich and coffee.

Now that the term has begun, it is almost impossible to park one’s car if one arrives on campus any later than 8.30am, and in making one’s way from one building to another one must thread one’s way through vast crowds of gormless-looking youth. No offence intended to any students that might be reading this; Melancholicus was once himself a student (in fact the greater part of his adult life thus far has been spent in study) and he is merely voicing his discontent at the rude shattering of the summer calm. Of course he knows that you’re not all gormless. At least for the most part.

But please do try to attend your lectures regularly, and be punctual, for goodness’ sake. I am tired of having to distribute the same handout and announce the same particulars three lectures running because there is ALWAYS someone who missed it the first (or second) time around.

Once the students return to the campus, so do the inevitable student events; the round of balls and parties and plays and games and frivolous debates and all that sort of thing, which are advertised by typically objectionable posters and flyers stuck up on walls, pillars and noticeboards all over the house. Some form of sexual imagery or innuendo is invariably included in these advertisements; it is as though those who advertise these events feel they MUST include some gratuitous sexuality so as not to appear staid or stuffy. Melancholicus is at a loss to understand why the female cohort of the student body is not mortally affronted by the content of some of these posters, as the attitude to women evinced therein is the attitude of the playboy, the pimp and the pornographer. Speaking of pornography, the annual ‘porn debate’ is likewise in the offing. I say annual, because the students have a porn debate every year. Melancholicus has never attended any such debate, since the arguments (if one can call them such) propounded both pro and contra at such a thing are sure to proceed from mere opinion and personal view rather than being grounded in any coherent philosophy of being—and, consequently, not worth listening to. Then there are the socialists, ever active on campus and, most cult-like, preying on the lonely, the vulnerable, and those who otherwise slip through the cracks. These have pasted up a flyer inviting all comers to the inevitable public meeting so beloved of left-wing activists, proclaiming “Why You Should Be A Socialist”, replete with a beefy and somewhat intimidating young woman in dark glasses raising her fist in the air in the classic image of incipient socialist violence.

Now that the Arts Café has completed its renovations and re-opened afresh (with vastly inflated prices, whereat Melancholicus shall no longer buy his coffee there) throngs of students once again sit out in the courtyard till all hours, laughing raucously and for the most part talking nonsense. How does Melancholicus know they’re talking nonsense? Because his second-floor office looks down on the courtyard and the noise rises up and filters in through his window. Roll on November, with its long hours of darkness and its pluvial weather, which will help to keep the students indoors, for he has enough of listening to their indecencies. Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!

And roll on exam time, too! Melancholicus loves the exams. Not out of malice—he has sat enough exams himself for one lifetime—but the proximity of the exams renders the students quiet and studious and otherwise inoffensive. December is always a quiet month. ’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Studenti saepe in horto vacant

I am sitting in my cell in the university, alone. One hour more, and I will be able to retire to the country for the weekend. From the quadrangle below, the noise of recreating students of both sexes rises to my open window. I call it a quadrangle because of its shape, but it isn’t really, at least not in the sense of those one finds at Oxbridge colleges—merely a four-sided open space around which the Newman building rises. This space is overlooked by teaching rooms and staff offices, and is hardly a private place. Due to the fact that the Arts Café opens onto this area, with tables and chairs provided for the convenience of those who wish to take their coffee or their lunch in the open (weather permitting), it is often a hive of activity, with groups of students gathering to socialize and chat with one another. The walls of the building on each side channel the sound of chatter upwards, whence it enters through the windows of those whose offices overlook the courtyard. The sound being naturally amplified by these surroundings, what are ostensibly private conversations inevitably become public, whether the speakers desire it or not.

I am not disturbed at my work by the chatter itself, but by its content. Every day I have to listen to some disagreeable account of the beer-soaked debaucheries of someone’s night before. These tales, typically told to an audience of at least three sitting at the same table, and doubtless exaggerated for narrative effect—or at least I hope so; God forbid that much of the nonsense I hear should actually be true—are recounted at an invariably loud volume, interspersed with guffaws and liberal uses of the f-word, not to mention blasphemies against the Most Holy Name. And the worst offenders seem always to be women, inasmuch as their tales are more explicit in that domain regulated by the sixth and ninth commandments. Women they may be, ladies they are not.

The din and the hooting and the obnoxious braggadocio about matters which are more appropriate to the confessional than to a social gathering in the public forum reminds me of one of those Irishman’s Diary columns by Kevin Meyers in The Irish Times. This piece was published some years ago, and the point that Mr. Meyers was making therein escapes my memory, but one particular sentence struck me when I first read it, and it has stayed with me ever since. It was about students—my bread and butter, since I make a living teaching them—and how they have changed with the passage of the years. As is the case with society generally, the standard of ettiquette and public behaviour among members of the student body seems to have coarsened to the point of the children of tomorrow not having the faintest notion how to comport themselves in front of other people, or at least in front of others not as amused by their antics as are their peers. Nor does it seem to have occurred to our dear juniors that they ARE in public, that they ARE being observed, and that the way they behave in front of others speaks volumes about the kind of people they are—as well as the kind of people their parents are; a decided lack of respect for people generally is evinced by the carry-on of those who remain unaware that they ought to behave differently in public to how they behave in the company of their closest friends.

Such persons seem—if their public bragging is anything to go by—to spend their free time constantly searching for their next fix, be that fix alcohol, drugs, or the pleasures of the bedroom, and it appears to be a matter of competition to see who can come up with the most crude and ribald account of the previous evening’s debauchery.

Mr. Meyers, having noted this tendency among the students of whom he wrote in the 1990s, asked this pointed question: What does the average 19-year-old student of today, easy and libidinous, equally familiar with sex and drugs, equally unfamiliar with religious convictions or political ardour of any kind, have in common with his counterpart of seventy, fifty, or even thirty years ago?

Good question. Only thirty years ago, dear Kevin, the world was a different place. I am still a young man—well, youngish—and I have seen the change in my own lifetime.

Now I will be accused of generalizing, and in fairness I must agree that there are many admirable and upstanding young men and women at the university who do not deserve to be bracketed with the yobs. But the yob element is so pervasive, both within and without the university, as to be ubiqitous; and of course they make more noise than quiet, well-mannered and properly brought-up studious types, and so attract more notice.

The weather this November has been mild and generally pleasant, with the result that the students sit out in the courtyard every day; the noise of their recreations typically starts around 10am, and continues without a break until the Arts Café finally closes in the evening. I find myself longing for colder weather, and the return of the rain, both of which will help to keep them indoors. I have grown tired of hearing about their menstrual cycles, and their emergency contraception, and the casual encounters they enjoyed the previous weekend, and the blinding fits of vomiting that so-and-so suffered having had a few too many. Is there not anything better, more worthwhile, more intellectual to talk about than this, for goodness’ sake? After all, they are supposed to be studying at a third level institution.

And that is the end of my peevishness for today. It is now time to depart to the country...