A COLLEGE REUNION

IN THE CITADEL OF WOKEDOM

For whatever reasons - epigenetic, constitutional, emotional - I’ve a complex relationship with anything social and any organisation. I dislike formal events and love the randomness of pub evenings and ramblings. From my family history on the Greek side, of violence and exile, something anarchic has been handed down. In work terms, all I ever enjoyed was the unplanned, the disastrous and - above all - the amusing. I’m well aware that what I find funny appals many.

Add drink to the mix and my time at college was often explosive. Combine that with the drive to be academically successful - for its own sake, rather than to ‘get on’ or garner praise - and it’s no wonder I’ve mixed feelings towards my alma mater, though I’ve nothing but gratitude and affection for the excellent tutors I had at Jesus.

The early to mid-1980s was in fact a time of great conflict and the end of an era. It was both the last, last, last vestiges of the ‘Brideshead Oxford’ and also when Thatcherism was ushering in a mass-consumer society, which would badly affect our great universities. Decades later, they’ve now become cowardly market-places for ‘wokedom’ and are in fact mired in conflict with the few remaining true academics, such as the marvellous Nigel Biggar.

Oxford and Cambridge in particular have betrayed free speech and embraced every gimmicky fad. They’ve become drearily conformist when the country needs the opposite, their much-trumpeted diversity is shallow and group-thinking. Above all, they are more class-dominated than ever - with wokedom as an elite signifier, the language of privilege, as Latin was in pre-Reformation monasteries.

Possibly mine is just a late middle-aged man’s view and can be discounted as such; that’s certainly what ‘progressives’ would do. Still, the relentless and one-dimensional ‘be nice’ vacuity and hypocrisy certainly provokes me and many others now: Oxford just seems shallow and silly. Thankfully my negative feelings aren’t those captured by Larkin in his marvellous yet nihilistic Oxford poem Dockery and Son, since I’ve got a beloved child. And, in truth, I’d not encourage her to go there. I wasn’t really happy and my ambition for her is that she is. Maybe that’s hopelessly simplistic but the important things are the simplest though not the easiest.

So, to a gaudy, last Friday. A nice evening (thanks to the College) and good to see old acquaintances, but with those feeling of unease which I’m trying to articulate. Maybe it was only writing freely, marriage and family that could give me what I wanted.

I wrote this some time ago but it captures what I see now. It’s completely fictional, in case it seems a bit ‘close to the bone’:

ROGUES' GALLERY