University

There are several frustrating things about American college campuses, just one of which is the sheer volume of column inches they take up. Whenever an American campus has an ‘occupation’ because the students want veto powers over foreign wars, the world media study their actions with great interest. Whenever a group of farmers or truckers complain about the loss of their livelihoods, whatever media attention does arrive comes from people eager to dismiss the protestors as know-nothings who are on to nothing. I told them that while they may know something, the chances are that people older than them know more Still, in recent months Columbia University in New York

Next year, Exeter University will offer an MA in Magic and Occult Science: the first of its kind in a British university. The new course has led to newspaper headlines about a ‘real-life Hogwarts’ and questions as to whether magic is as worth studying as say, economics. The course director, Professor Emily Selove, refused my request for an interview – with polite apologies, although one could hardly expect the convenor of Exeter’s Centre for Magic and Esotericism to be anything but esoteric. A similar tension, it turns out, is at the heart of the debate about the degree. For all the media snideness, the most serious objections come from Britain’s

I don’t remember much of freshers’ week at Edinburgh. Friends have helped to fill in the blanks. I vaguely recall a police officer handing out vodka shots to show how easy it was to fail a breathalyser test. A famous DJ had his set in the union cut short because he played the song ‘Blurred Lines’. It had been banned by student politicians. I have hazy memories, too, of my first interactions with posh English women. One assumed I must be gifted since I’d made it into university from a Scottish state school. Another asked if I was limping because I’d overdone it at the ‘introduction to reeling event’ (I

My default mood at the moment is bleak despair, although it can sometimes be triggered into nihilistic loathing, which I think I mildly prefer. The most recent occasion this happened was last Monday when I drove through torrential rain to three retail parks in search of an item which – as I found out later – didn’t actually exist. While turning the car around to drive home I switched on the radio and Stephen Fry was bashfully admitting to some fawning sap of an interviewer how bloody brilliant he was. Triggered, right there, at the roundabout where you enter the old coal-mining village of Pity Me. It took ages for

Whenever the right gets itself in a froth over ‘Mickey Mouse’ degrees, I keep my head down. You see, I am the holder of such a qualification: a degree in film and television studies. I rush to point out that my student days preceded the global financial crisis. There were so many jobs sloshing around that we could dismiss criticism of these courses as a tabloid trope.  I wouldn’t change my ‘rip-off’ degree for the world Let me describe the labour market that awaited meedja students in the mid-2000s. Every Monday, I’d pick up the Guardian at the student union. This was the old frumpy Guardian, before it slipped into a sleek little

University vice-chancellors will find some uncomfortable reading in their New Year in-tray today. Last month the chairman of accountancy giant PwC pointed out that more and more middle-class teenagers are walking away from old-style university studies and embracing degree apprenticeships and other forms of on-the-job learning. Already the number of those taking up degree apprenticeship is nearing 10 per cent of university admissions, and this figure is still set to grow. Although many such apprenticeships boast an element of university involvement and some even a qualification called a ‘degree’, their emphasis is quite different. Learning happens predominantly by working; the academy is not the centre of the process, but merely

As a first year university student from a disadvantaged background, I know all too well the constant struggle students can face to make ends meet. Before starting my studies at Durham, I worked three jobs to keep food in my mouth and clothes on my back while in full-time education. Living in group homes and emergency accommodation, I saw those around me searching desperately for any way to earn a living, even if it meant endangering their health and their lives. So it was both surprising and disturbing to find when I arrived at Durham that the university’s student union was encouraging young people down an incredibly dangerous path by

When I first started at Churchill College, Cambridge, I was proud that I had joined an institution whose very existence was a testament to the legacy of a personal and national hero. As I walked around the college grounds, I felt that I was now part of a community that was much bigger than myself; a community partly defined by the life and times of our country’s greatest leader. Standing for the college toast at my first formal dinner, the words ‘To Sir Winston, and the Queen’ almost made me believe that my own life was now, in a small but important way, linked to the life of the great