Confessions of a campus rabbit

Canterbury 1961 It's before Vietnam, The Pill, psychedelia, tinoranga tiratanga, the environment. We are all welfare bunnies. Nanny State is the guardian of the nation's social conscience, so we don't need our own. There will be jobs for all, mostly in the state sector. In the meantime, the blokes get pissed, the sheilas get Pimms. We chatter in duffel-coated hordes through lectures on useless subjects like Eng Lit and Sociology. We aren't paying the fees, so what the hell. Not an ideology or protest on the horizon. The reigning sociological guru is Talcott Parsons, a structure-functionalist who preaches that things are the way they are because that's how they have to be. Fine by me! I fold my paws and doze.

Cambridge 1968 The soundtrack is Dylan, Baez, the Beatles and the Stones. The lads sport peacock colours, birds are in mini-skirts; they guzzle LSD and The Pill. Liberation and repression intertwine as flower power meets fire power. Our American friends are in hiding from Vietnam. In Prague, socialism asserts its human face before being defaced by Russian tanks. In Paris, the students are at the barricades. Not to be outdone, Cambridge graddies sweep aside the sleepy Edwardian paraphernalia of punts, porters and proctors. Mass rallies bellow for the end of oppression in general and exams in particular. I stuff my fingers in my ears and study medieval allegories.

Aix-en-Provence 1978 The university has been split in two by a right-wing coup led by Economics and Law. With government blessing, they have expropriated all campus resources, from library books to the staff payroll. One side of the divided campus is economically relevant, officially approved and boring, the other useless, anarchic but fun. The two camps are separated by barbed wire. Students on our side sit on garbage-strewn floors with young, unpaid, punk lecturers, passionately talking literature and politics. Assignments are communal, students mark their own work and write novels instead of theses. Maoists prowl and scowl, dreaming of the glory days of May '68. I yearn for the social sanity of my youth.

Massey 1984 New Zealand is a feistier place than the one I left in the mid-1960s. A Ma¯ori consciousness-raising group has been stirring the ethnic pot. The Social Work Department is divided between neo-Marxists and the God Squad. Feminists debate the ethics of taking direct action against alleged rapists. In tutorials, I hide under the desk as a Trotskyite and a Ma¯ori radical verbally slug it out over whether colonialist or class hegemony takes ontological priority.
I only half-listen to the argument. I'm more concerned about why students aren't enrolling for my exciting new course on the 19th century novel.

Massey 2001 Forty years on, and the wheel has come full circle. Oh, on the surface everything is different. A market
consensus has replaced the welfare one. Non-vocational subjects such as Eng Lit and Sociology are haemorrhaging, while students in IT courses proliferate like computer viruses. When young, I was driven by intellectual curiosity, and stimulating lecturers were appreciated for their own sake. Now I notch up KPIs, and my teaching is judged by SECATs and EFTs.

Underneath, though, I'm back to where I started. After 40 turbulent years, things have gone unnervingly quiet. Mesmerised by labour market realities, students no longer hoot and skirl. Maybe there's a sit-in about fees, but that's self-interest, not idealism. Marxism collapsed with the Berlin Wall, Women's Studies are evaporating, Ma¯ori protest has become institutionalised. Our social consciences have been taken in hand by a new Nanny State: morality today is different from in the 1960s, but government is again instructing us how we should think, feel and act.

I suppose I should be happy. After all, "May you live in interesting
times" was intended by the ancient Chinese as a curse. I've lived through four pretty interesting decades, but secretly all I wanted to do was to potter unmolested around my burrow. However, now that the demands of the global economy have begun imposing market conformity on us all, I'm suddenly flooded with nostalgia for those uncompromisingly starry-eyed student rebels who used to challenge prevailing orthodoxies.

Today's reigning orthodoxy is 'the Knowledge Society', but the knowledge in question risks being narrowly defined as just market-relevant information and technical know-how. I don't query the academy's role in upskilling the labour force, but I am concerned that another dimension of university life may be sacrificed along the way. What's happening to intellectual curiosity and moral passion? Flushed out of my warren at last, this elderly academic rabbit rears up and squeaks out his own challenge to students: let's have a bit more rumpus on the campus!