Post by Moses on Feb 2, 2006 5:41:54 GMT -5
Another hard day in the library
Oxford is planning to introduce contracts requiring students to attend lectures and tutorials. But is that any way to spend your university years? Germaine Greer says some of her smartest students learned everything they needed from watching Friends, while John Sutherland laments the triumph of the 'swotocracy'
by Germaine Greer and John Sutherland
When I went to my first university in 1956, I knew that I had three tasks to accomplish there. I had to lose what remained of my Catholic faith, lose my virginity, and work out what to do next. Of rather less importance was the fact that I was committed to complete a combined honours degree in English and French language and literature. Once I had encumbered myself with this huge grab bag of a degree I was supposed to go and teach in Australian high schools, a prospect I preferred not to think about. If I screwed up, I was going to owe a fortune to the education department; that too, I preferred not to think about. The important thing was that I was there. I was at uni, where nobody could tell me what to do. I had been told by my grandmother about women who studied too much and went mad, so I had no intention of doing that.
If I doubted that people who studied too much went mad, I had my lecturers to prove it. Notorious among them was a professor who lectured with a pipe between his teeth or waved aloft in his left hand, while his right hand wandered about deep in the front of his corduroy trousers. His lectures consisted in reciting gobs of Paradise Lost, a process that moved him so deeply that cascades of rheum fell from his eyes and nostrils, joined the saliva foaming at the corners of his mouth and dripped off his chin.
I formed a rule; I would go to the first lecture of any series and if it taught me anything, I would go to the next, and so on. Though I rarely got past the first couple of lectures, there was one lecturer I kept going to because he was so astonishingly wrong. He lectured on Byron, whose work he misunderstood so fundamentally that I had to spend a year writing a research paper on Byron's comic verse before my accumulated bile was purged. That lecturer's woeful performance has convinced me of one thing; in the world of intellectual cut-and-thrust, a truly incompetent teacher can be of more value than a good one. "Surely not!" is a more salutary reaction to a statement from a teacher than "Precisely". As I used to say to my students, "Confusion is the most productive state of mind. Respect your confusions. Don't let me waft them away."
Oxford, it emerged yesterday, wants its students to sign contracts requiring them to attend lectures, a measure designed to protect it from students who later complain of receiving inadequate teaching. In truth, lectures, from the point of view of a student of the humanities at least, are a waste of time. There might be disciplines where it makes sense to prop up an expert and let him drone on for an hour, but I doubt it. The effort of sitting still and straining to listen to someone indistinctly reading a text, which has been written in unwieldy paragraphs, and has no chinks where the hearers' response might enter, is exhausting. If you doubt me, have a look at the gibbersih of any undergraduate's lecture notes.
In 2006, it would make more sense to issue the lectures on DVD, and spend the hour in the lecture room dealing with student's questions. In my day, students were supposed to be critical listeners: the worst thing you could do in your exam was to parrot the lecturer's view, if only because, through the medium of unconscious parody, you brought him up sharp against the weaknesses in his own position. Better to go for the jugular and trounce him thoroughly, while affecting a becoming hesitancy and the deepest respect. The very best teacher is the one who really enjoys being made to look a fool by a student.
Lectures are a misshapen survival of medieval pedagogy, which took authority as absolute and understood the teacher's sole duty to be that of expounding it. Lectures have no place in a system based on critical thinking but, as long as they are the most economical way of supplying students, aka clients, with the teaching they are paying through the nose for, they will go on happening. But it would be completely counterproductive to force students to attend them - supposing you have lecture halls big enough, and enough of them, to accommodate all the students.
Kids don't go to university to sit at the feet of their elders and betters; they go to university to meet each other. They will learn more from arguing with each other over cold coffee in the cafeteria than they will ever learn from the academic staff. Sure, there is the odd charismatic teacher they like to hang out with but if their heads are in the right place, they will take the piss out of the charismatic teacher too, when they are in their own space.
Because this is what uni is, the first time young people have their own collective space to organise or disorganise as they please. The schoolroom was ruled by strict imperatives and a rigid agenda; on campus, for the first time you get to budget your time and find out what you really care about, which could be astrophysics or reality television or playing online poker or becoming a nun. Dragooning undergraduates would be to delay their maturation still further, so that they never achieve the autonomy on which our whole political system should be based. They will have gone through their undergraduate years, head down, unaware of the stars and alienated from their own culture.
In the days before Jennifer Aniston ruined everything by marrying Brad Pitt, Friends was the standard text for one of the brightest groups of students at Warwick University. They were the ones who ran the bar, organised protests, made movies and videos and did OK at their exams. They also studied Friends, watching DVDs of the series over and over again, learning how to construct social interaction in their peer group, how to avoid turning into a prat. Sure, as one of their teachers, I might have wanted them to know the works of Aphra Behn as well as they knew Friends but, as it turned out, Friends has been of more use to them. Two are now scriptwriters for the country's best-loved soaps.
Oxford students chewing the fat in the college buttery might be surprised to learn that, as the law stands at present, they can sue the university and/or their college for wasting their time, if the standard of teaching falls below a reasonable level. Teaching in all our universities is wildly uneven. Most people do not realise how much of the Oxbridge teaching, in common with teaching at other universities, is done by research students who are not members of the faculty and may be only a year or two ahead of their students. These teaching assistants have rarely had any training in how to teach, yet they are often keener, more energetic and better able to interact with students than senior academic staff, many of whom stopped learning years ago.
The point of the proposed contract, which is being hurried through by the Oxford Conference of Colleges without consultation with students, must be to indemnify the colleges against the possible consequences of their own poor performance. The proposed wording is embarrassing in its obviousness: "The college will make such teaching provision for undergraduate students ... as it reasonably decides is necessary." The contract as worded would protect the colleges in providing as much or as little as they choose of tuition, IT support and library facilities. What is required of the student is notional and far less important than the preservation of the colleges' right to let students down.
For let them down they do. I spent my first term as an affiliated student on a Commonwealth scholarship at Cambridge in 1964 without any supervision at all; in my second term I was supervised by two very distinguished people of my own choosing, who took it in turns to meet with me, a total of one supervision a week - not much to have travelled 12,000 miles for. I also sat in on Leavis's practical criticism class, too much of which he wasted railing against his colleagues. After two terms I gave up trying to get Cambridge to teach me, stopped preparing for Part II of the tripos, and transferred to a research degree. I could have written my PhD in the British Library, but then I would never have been in Footlights or the Marlowe Society or been Actress of the Year, or written for Varsity, or been howled down at the Union, or found friends I have still. If your university is to be your alma mater, your sweet mother, you cannot really bind her to a contract. In her very failure may lie the seed of your success.
'Farewell, dreaming spires, hampers and champers; welcome to Gulag on the Isis'
"Hours of idleness" Byron called the verses thrown off during his undergraduate years at Cambridge. No more. From now on it's hours of lectures. Oxford, we are told, is in the process of introducing legally binding contracts to keep the undergraduate noses to the grindstone. Other institutions "are certain to follow". Farewell, dreaming spires, hampers, champers and the gentleman's third; welcome to Gulag on the Isis.
How, one wonders, would Evelyn Waugh - creator of those most idle fellows, Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder - get on in the new, contractually disciplined Oxford? Waugh got a third, which his tutor cattily informed him wasn't even a "good" third. He went on to call his memoir of university days A Little Learning. It was too good to last - the easygoing regime of the British university, in its gentlemanly sector (ie, not the sciences; those dull drudges have always worked). Six hundred years of institutional idleness. One can't complain. One of the anecdotes enshrined in Oxford lore is that of a student, falling asleep during one of Lord David Cecil's tutorials on Ruskin, waking up and finding his tutor in the Land of Nod as well. They slumbered on happily together until the hour of release.
Academic idleness, of course, is a complicity thing, and the hardest-hit victims of the new contractual regime will be the teachers. No more snoozing on the job. If those traditionally absentee slackers start going to lectures, it's then that the lawsuits will fly. As the lecturer mounts the podium and pulls out the yellowing sheaf of text that has served him (it's usually a him) for decades, there will be the awful realisation that he has in front of him that most alarming thing for any public performer: a hostile audience. As far as his bleary eye can reach, there will be rank upon rank of bolshy, overcharged consumers, all asking the same thing: "We're paying for this nuts? Get me a lawyer."
Although it's the student contracts that have got the headlines, there is another kind of contract on the cards in the windswept precincts of the University of London. Staff will, it is rumoured, be obliged to sign work agreements effectively surrendering tenure in return for an enhanced salary. The catch will be the Damoclean sword over their head - if they don't, henceforth, fulfil their publication norms, it's the jobcentre and the abyss: supply teaching in Bethnal Green.
So it's grindstones all round. No more relaxed tutorials in which you pretend to be omniscient about a work you dimly recall reading 30 years ago and which the student claims, unconvincingly, to have read last week and which you "discuss" until you can move on to more general topics ("Seen any good films recently?").
No more of those occasions on which you good-naturedly accept that dogs have a ravenous appetite for essays, or that grandmothers can have three funerals a year. Kenneth Tynan recalled that his tutor at Oxford, CS Lewis, was in the habit of breaking off the tutorial to piddle, noisily, in a nearby chamber pot. What with the sherry and the pipe-stuffing, it helped get him through the hour. I'm not a pipe-and-piddle man myself, although I used to arrange with a friend to give me "Bunbury" phone calls during tutorials on particularly taxing texts ("Excuse me while I take this - it's important").
I felt the cold wind of the future whipping round my ankles when my institution, three years ago, introduced log books for graduates in which they monitored their progress, goals achieved, brake linings, etc. Obviously it upped their game and gave the necessary assurances on value for money. But, somehow, things seemed a lot less fun when you logged them. Like sex, in a way.
One of my more impressively shiftless colleagues was Grey Gowrie. He taught along the corridor from me at University College London in the early 70s. There were always students outside his office. "The bugger's at his club, or having a late lunch at the Caprice," I would mutter as I passed, doing my punctual teacherly duty with a sense of grim professional righteousness.
After a while I realised that the students were outside Gowrie's door because they really wanted to talk to him, so interesting and rewarding was he on the subject of literature Gowrie went on to serve in the Tory government). His going was the university's loss. He would, I suspect, have gone a lot sooner had contracts been flapped in his face.
At the end of the day, in the "reading" subjects, is the standard of work higher if you apply the lash to students' backs and terrorise their teachers with the fear of losing their jobs? If Waugh had got his first and we hadn't got Brideshead Revisited, would the world be better off?
According to George Orwell, the most offensive term in the English language was "nosy parker". In universities it's "swot". The Swotocracy has arrived. Swot on.
JS
How hard did you work at university?
Sarah Teather
Lib Dem MP
I slept through whole terms of nine o'clock lectures and missed an entire neurophysiology course. I lived with a blues boatie, who would wake me up early in the morning, after which I would sleep through my alarm. It didn't do me any harm in the long run; I got a 2:1 in Natural Sciences. I learned two valuable lessons at Cambridge: wing it when you need to and photocopying someone's notes is no substitute for actually reading them. If I did it again, I would be an awful lot more focused on my work, but at 19 you have different priorities.
Terry Eagleton
Professor of cultural theory, Manchester University
At Cambridge in the early 60s, hardly anybody went to lectures, apart from to hear the star lecturers - we had the f*g-end of FR Leavis, George Steiner, Raymond Williams. They went simply on a "How exciting is it?" basis. I did work, in a rather conscientious and nerdy way. I'd see my tutor once a week and he would say, "Go away and read some Ibsen." It was alarmingly, but excitingly, unstructured, so different from school. I'm not sure how workable it is, but I would defend the principle. When I was lecturing at Oxford, I just hoped people would turn up. In my last term, I chose a topic so obscure, the minor works of a minor eighth-century Irish writer. Then, to my horror, 12 people turned up. I thought briefly of running away, but I went in and announced it was a joke. They looked at me very sternly.
Martha Kearney
Political editor, Newsnight
At university, I learned how to make a little information go a long way and how to write under pressure late at night. The perfect credentials for my role on Newsnight, some might say. I did not attend lectures as assiduously as I should have (though, in fairness, eight weeks of metre in Greek verse was a bit hard for an 18-year-old to stomach).
Tom Hodgkinson
Editor of the Idler
We used to get up at lunchtime, watch Neighbours, then sit in coffee bars, read the NME and smoke cigarettes. I definitely used the time to do other things. In my second term I stopped doing any work. Occasionally, when a weight of guilt and responsibility had built up, I would go to a lecture. The greatest pleasure was going to the library and a friend whispering, "Fancy a coffee?" It was great fun, but part of me thinks it was wasted - you're surrounded by all these great professors and libraries and things. If someone said to me now, "Go and study English for three years", I'd jump at it.
Baroness Mary Warnock
Philosopher and writer
When I first went to university I was very conscientious about lectures because attending them all was the only way I could see myself getting through the exams. I was an undergraduate twice over due to the war and by the end of the second time, I became picky about which lecures I'd go to. When teaching at Oxford, I became annoyed by undergraduates not turning up for my tutorials. If you do that, you don't write the essay and then you won't be able to do the exam. The days are gone when students can claim they're going to learn about life. If that's all they're after, they shouldn't go to university. People go to university to learn about the subject they're studying.
Nicholas Lezard
Writer and critic
I didn't work hard at all. My job as a literary critic now is to make up for all the reading I should have done when I was at university, when I was busy having too much fun. University is not only about getting a qualification. An English degree is hardly a qualification in first the place. You're learning about life through the books you read. The degree is to tell you which books you should read when you're grown-up enough to do so.
Tristram Hunt
Historian
I was always quite good about going to lectures. There was a particularly good lecturer at Cambridge, Quentin Skinner, who always did lectures at 9am on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. And I always went to them. They were performances. They had a strong intellectual narrative, so if you skipped a couple of weeks, you missed out - it was like a good EastEnders storyline, starring Thomas Hobbes.
Elaine Showalter
Professor of English, Princeton University
I cut a lot of classes at college and became quite notorious for it. Some of the professors were senile and extremely rude. Virtually all colleges in the US have student evaluations, so there is a lot of feedback to the teaching staff about what students think of their courses. I can't see what good a contract would do. In the long run, I think it is better to have a collaborative approach between students and academic staff.
— Germaine Greer and John Sutherland
The Guardian
2006-02-01
Oxford is planning to introduce contracts requiring students to attend lectures and tutorials. But is that any way to spend your university years? Germaine Greer says some of her smartest students learned everything they needed from watching Friends, while John Sutherland laments the triumph of the 'swotocracy'
by Germaine Greer and John Sutherland
When I went to my first university in 1956, I knew that I had three tasks to accomplish there. I had to lose what remained of my Catholic faith, lose my virginity, and work out what to do next. Of rather less importance was the fact that I was committed to complete a combined honours degree in English and French language and literature. Once I had encumbered myself with this huge grab bag of a degree I was supposed to go and teach in Australian high schools, a prospect I preferred not to think about. If I screwed up, I was going to owe a fortune to the education department; that too, I preferred not to think about. The important thing was that I was there. I was at uni, where nobody could tell me what to do. I had been told by my grandmother about women who studied too much and went mad, so I had no intention of doing that.
If I doubted that people who studied too much went mad, I had my lecturers to prove it. Notorious among them was a professor who lectured with a pipe between his teeth or waved aloft in his left hand, while his right hand wandered about deep in the front of his corduroy trousers. His lectures consisted in reciting gobs of Paradise Lost, a process that moved him so deeply that cascades of rheum fell from his eyes and nostrils, joined the saliva foaming at the corners of his mouth and dripped off his chin.
I formed a rule; I would go to the first lecture of any series and if it taught me anything, I would go to the next, and so on. Though I rarely got past the first couple of lectures, there was one lecturer I kept going to because he was so astonishingly wrong. He lectured on Byron, whose work he misunderstood so fundamentally that I had to spend a year writing a research paper on Byron's comic verse before my accumulated bile was purged. That lecturer's woeful performance has convinced me of one thing; in the world of intellectual cut-and-thrust, a truly incompetent teacher can be of more value than a good one. "Surely not!" is a more salutary reaction to a statement from a teacher than "Precisely". As I used to say to my students, "Confusion is the most productive state of mind. Respect your confusions. Don't let me waft them away."
Oxford, it emerged yesterday, wants its students to sign contracts requiring them to attend lectures, a measure designed to protect it from students who later complain of receiving inadequate teaching. In truth, lectures, from the point of view of a student of the humanities at least, are a waste of time. There might be disciplines where it makes sense to prop up an expert and let him drone on for an hour, but I doubt it. The effort of sitting still and straining to listen to someone indistinctly reading a text, which has been written in unwieldy paragraphs, and has no chinks where the hearers' response might enter, is exhausting. If you doubt me, have a look at the gibbersih of any undergraduate's lecture notes.
In 2006, it would make more sense to issue the lectures on DVD, and spend the hour in the lecture room dealing with student's questions. In my day, students were supposed to be critical listeners: the worst thing you could do in your exam was to parrot the lecturer's view, if only because, through the medium of unconscious parody, you brought him up sharp against the weaknesses in his own position. Better to go for the jugular and trounce him thoroughly, while affecting a becoming hesitancy and the deepest respect. The very best teacher is the one who really enjoys being made to look a fool by a student.
Lectures are a misshapen survival of medieval pedagogy, which took authority as absolute and understood the teacher's sole duty to be that of expounding it. Lectures have no place in a system based on critical thinking but, as long as they are the most economical way of supplying students, aka clients, with the teaching they are paying through the nose for, they will go on happening. But it would be completely counterproductive to force students to attend them - supposing you have lecture halls big enough, and enough of them, to accommodate all the students.
Kids don't go to university to sit at the feet of their elders and betters; they go to university to meet each other. They will learn more from arguing with each other over cold coffee in the cafeteria than they will ever learn from the academic staff. Sure, there is the odd charismatic teacher they like to hang out with but if their heads are in the right place, they will take the piss out of the charismatic teacher too, when they are in their own space.
Because this is what uni is, the first time young people have their own collective space to organise or disorganise as they please. The schoolroom was ruled by strict imperatives and a rigid agenda; on campus, for the first time you get to budget your time and find out what you really care about, which could be astrophysics or reality television or playing online poker or becoming a nun. Dragooning undergraduates would be to delay their maturation still further, so that they never achieve the autonomy on which our whole political system should be based. They will have gone through their undergraduate years, head down, unaware of the stars and alienated from their own culture.
In the days before Jennifer Aniston ruined everything by marrying Brad Pitt, Friends was the standard text for one of the brightest groups of students at Warwick University. They were the ones who ran the bar, organised protests, made movies and videos and did OK at their exams. They also studied Friends, watching DVDs of the series over and over again, learning how to construct social interaction in their peer group, how to avoid turning into a prat. Sure, as one of their teachers, I might have wanted them to know the works of Aphra Behn as well as they knew Friends but, as it turned out, Friends has been of more use to them. Two are now scriptwriters for the country's best-loved soaps.
Oxford students chewing the fat in the college buttery might be surprised to learn that, as the law stands at present, they can sue the university and/or their college for wasting their time, if the standard of teaching falls below a reasonable level. Teaching in all our universities is wildly uneven. Most people do not realise how much of the Oxbridge teaching, in common with teaching at other universities, is done by research students who are not members of the faculty and may be only a year or two ahead of their students. These teaching assistants have rarely had any training in how to teach, yet they are often keener, more energetic and better able to interact with students than senior academic staff, many of whom stopped learning years ago.
The point of the proposed contract, which is being hurried through by the Oxford Conference of Colleges without consultation with students, must be to indemnify the colleges against the possible consequences of their own poor performance. The proposed wording is embarrassing in its obviousness: "The college will make such teaching provision for undergraduate students ... as it reasonably decides is necessary." The contract as worded would protect the colleges in providing as much or as little as they choose of tuition, IT support and library facilities. What is required of the student is notional and far less important than the preservation of the colleges' right to let students down.
For let them down they do. I spent my first term as an affiliated student on a Commonwealth scholarship at Cambridge in 1964 without any supervision at all; in my second term I was supervised by two very distinguished people of my own choosing, who took it in turns to meet with me, a total of one supervision a week - not much to have travelled 12,000 miles for. I also sat in on Leavis's practical criticism class, too much of which he wasted railing against his colleagues. After two terms I gave up trying to get Cambridge to teach me, stopped preparing for Part II of the tripos, and transferred to a research degree. I could have written my PhD in the British Library, but then I would never have been in Footlights or the Marlowe Society or been Actress of the Year, or written for Varsity, or been howled down at the Union, or found friends I have still. If your university is to be your alma mater, your sweet mother, you cannot really bind her to a contract. In her very failure may lie the seed of your success.
'Farewell, dreaming spires, hampers and champers; welcome to Gulag on the Isis'
"Hours of idleness" Byron called the verses thrown off during his undergraduate years at Cambridge. No more. From now on it's hours of lectures. Oxford, we are told, is in the process of introducing legally binding contracts to keep the undergraduate noses to the grindstone. Other institutions "are certain to follow". Farewell, dreaming spires, hampers, champers and the gentleman's third; welcome to Gulag on the Isis.
How, one wonders, would Evelyn Waugh - creator of those most idle fellows, Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder - get on in the new, contractually disciplined Oxford? Waugh got a third, which his tutor cattily informed him wasn't even a "good" third. He went on to call his memoir of university days A Little Learning. It was too good to last - the easygoing regime of the British university, in its gentlemanly sector (ie, not the sciences; those dull drudges have always worked). Six hundred years of institutional idleness. One can't complain. One of the anecdotes enshrined in Oxford lore is that of a student, falling asleep during one of Lord David Cecil's tutorials on Ruskin, waking up and finding his tutor in the Land of Nod as well. They slumbered on happily together until the hour of release.
Academic idleness, of course, is a complicity thing, and the hardest-hit victims of the new contractual regime will be the teachers. No more snoozing on the job. If those traditionally absentee slackers start going to lectures, it's then that the lawsuits will fly. As the lecturer mounts the podium and pulls out the yellowing sheaf of text that has served him (it's usually a him) for decades, there will be the awful realisation that he has in front of him that most alarming thing for any public performer: a hostile audience. As far as his bleary eye can reach, there will be rank upon rank of bolshy, overcharged consumers, all asking the same thing: "We're paying for this nuts? Get me a lawyer."
Although it's the student contracts that have got the headlines, there is another kind of contract on the cards in the windswept precincts of the University of London. Staff will, it is rumoured, be obliged to sign work agreements effectively surrendering tenure in return for an enhanced salary. The catch will be the Damoclean sword over their head - if they don't, henceforth, fulfil their publication norms, it's the jobcentre and the abyss: supply teaching in Bethnal Green.
So it's grindstones all round. No more relaxed tutorials in which you pretend to be omniscient about a work you dimly recall reading 30 years ago and which the student claims, unconvincingly, to have read last week and which you "discuss" until you can move on to more general topics ("Seen any good films recently?").
No more of those occasions on which you good-naturedly accept that dogs have a ravenous appetite for essays, or that grandmothers can have three funerals a year. Kenneth Tynan recalled that his tutor at Oxford, CS Lewis, was in the habit of breaking off the tutorial to piddle, noisily, in a nearby chamber pot. What with the sherry and the pipe-stuffing, it helped get him through the hour. I'm not a pipe-and-piddle man myself, although I used to arrange with a friend to give me "Bunbury" phone calls during tutorials on particularly taxing texts ("Excuse me while I take this - it's important").
I felt the cold wind of the future whipping round my ankles when my institution, three years ago, introduced log books for graduates in which they monitored their progress, goals achieved, brake linings, etc. Obviously it upped their game and gave the necessary assurances on value for money. But, somehow, things seemed a lot less fun when you logged them. Like sex, in a way.
One of my more impressively shiftless colleagues was Grey Gowrie. He taught along the corridor from me at University College London in the early 70s. There were always students outside his office. "The bugger's at his club, or having a late lunch at the Caprice," I would mutter as I passed, doing my punctual teacherly duty with a sense of grim professional righteousness.
After a while I realised that the students were outside Gowrie's door because they really wanted to talk to him, so interesting and rewarding was he on the subject of literature Gowrie went on to serve in the Tory government). His going was the university's loss. He would, I suspect, have gone a lot sooner had contracts been flapped in his face.
At the end of the day, in the "reading" subjects, is the standard of work higher if you apply the lash to students' backs and terrorise their teachers with the fear of losing their jobs? If Waugh had got his first and we hadn't got Brideshead Revisited, would the world be better off?
According to George Orwell, the most offensive term in the English language was "nosy parker". In universities it's "swot". The Swotocracy has arrived. Swot on.
JS
How hard did you work at university?
Sarah Teather
Lib Dem MP
I slept through whole terms of nine o'clock lectures and missed an entire neurophysiology course. I lived with a blues boatie, who would wake me up early in the morning, after which I would sleep through my alarm. It didn't do me any harm in the long run; I got a 2:1 in Natural Sciences. I learned two valuable lessons at Cambridge: wing it when you need to and photocopying someone's notes is no substitute for actually reading them. If I did it again, I would be an awful lot more focused on my work, but at 19 you have different priorities.
Terry Eagleton
Professor of cultural theory, Manchester University
At Cambridge in the early 60s, hardly anybody went to lectures, apart from to hear the star lecturers - we had the f*g-end of FR Leavis, George Steiner, Raymond Williams. They went simply on a "How exciting is it?" basis. I did work, in a rather conscientious and nerdy way. I'd see my tutor once a week and he would say, "Go away and read some Ibsen." It was alarmingly, but excitingly, unstructured, so different from school. I'm not sure how workable it is, but I would defend the principle. When I was lecturing at Oxford, I just hoped people would turn up. In my last term, I chose a topic so obscure, the minor works of a minor eighth-century Irish writer. Then, to my horror, 12 people turned up. I thought briefly of running away, but I went in and announced it was a joke. They looked at me very sternly.
Martha Kearney
Political editor, Newsnight
At university, I learned how to make a little information go a long way and how to write under pressure late at night. The perfect credentials for my role on Newsnight, some might say. I did not attend lectures as assiduously as I should have (though, in fairness, eight weeks of metre in Greek verse was a bit hard for an 18-year-old to stomach).
Tom Hodgkinson
Editor of the Idler
We used to get up at lunchtime, watch Neighbours, then sit in coffee bars, read the NME and smoke cigarettes. I definitely used the time to do other things. In my second term I stopped doing any work. Occasionally, when a weight of guilt and responsibility had built up, I would go to a lecture. The greatest pleasure was going to the library and a friend whispering, "Fancy a coffee?" It was great fun, but part of me thinks it was wasted - you're surrounded by all these great professors and libraries and things. If someone said to me now, "Go and study English for three years", I'd jump at it.
Baroness Mary Warnock
Philosopher and writer
When I first went to university I was very conscientious about lectures because attending them all was the only way I could see myself getting through the exams. I was an undergraduate twice over due to the war and by the end of the second time, I became picky about which lecures I'd go to. When teaching at Oxford, I became annoyed by undergraduates not turning up for my tutorials. If you do that, you don't write the essay and then you won't be able to do the exam. The days are gone when students can claim they're going to learn about life. If that's all they're after, they shouldn't go to university. People go to university to learn about the subject they're studying.
Nicholas Lezard
Writer and critic
I didn't work hard at all. My job as a literary critic now is to make up for all the reading I should have done when I was at university, when I was busy having too much fun. University is not only about getting a qualification. An English degree is hardly a qualification in first the place. You're learning about life through the books you read. The degree is to tell you which books you should read when you're grown-up enough to do so.
Tristram Hunt
Historian
I was always quite good about going to lectures. There was a particularly good lecturer at Cambridge, Quentin Skinner, who always did lectures at 9am on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. And I always went to them. They were performances. They had a strong intellectual narrative, so if you skipped a couple of weeks, you missed out - it was like a good EastEnders storyline, starring Thomas Hobbes.
Elaine Showalter
Professor of English, Princeton University
I cut a lot of classes at college and became quite notorious for it. Some of the professors were senile and extremely rude. Virtually all colleges in the US have student evaluations, so there is a lot of feedback to the teaching staff about what students think of their courses. I can't see what good a contract would do. In the long run, I think it is better to have a collaborative approach between students and academic staff.
— Germaine Greer and John Sutherland
The Guardian
2006-02-01