MUCH CHATTER THIS WEEK HAS REVOLVED AROUND the prankish behaviour of some students who came to London on Tuesday to protest about a measly increase in the “fees” they pay to their universities for putting up with their ignorance and attempting to teach them. The government had little choice over this matter: universities have been whingeing and whining about being penniless for years, and one of the methods of answering this is to allow them to increase the money they receive from miscreants. This is obviously better than making all of us pay.
YET MANY PEOPLE WONDER WHY universities need money at all. The scandal, for the general public, is the salaries academics receive for working one or two days a week for between sixteen to twenty weeks a year. What the common man does not understand, of course, is that when we are not teaching, we are hard at work thinking, sometimes even when we are asleep. Thus the number of working hours is far in excess of those punched on the clock. (One may wonder, however, what some of us are thinking about.)
OUR STUDENTS WERE SOMEWHAT EXUBERANT this time, and it appears that some of them managed to give the peelers the slip and go on a jaunt about London, spraying shop windows with foul language, frightening Christmas shoppers and, most alarmingly, attacking the vehicle carrying Prince Charles and Camilla Duchess of Cornwall. It is reported that there were cries of “Off with their heads!”, and, indeed, Charles III will have to be on his best behaviour if he does not wish to go the way of his namesakes when he becomes monarch.
ON A MORE PERSONAL NOTE: questions are being asked of Home Secretary Theresa May on all of the Sunday political talk shows as to whether Camilla was “poked with a stick” on Tuesday. I suppose the only person who knows whether she was poked, besides Camilla herself, is Prince Charles.
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