Cyril Squirrel
The fees debate seems to be hotting up. There is some anxiety, though as yet faint, over the apparent fall in university applications for l998 - is it the fees? Or is it the awful thought of having to pay them back forever? Although I'm sure that nice Baroness Blackstone is right in saying its all more equitable and less painful than before, from here it just looks like a price hike. But there are alternatives. A private university in America charges no fees but employs the students to do all the work on campus. Most start off as 'custodians' - which makes one wonder precisely what sort of college it is - and work up from there. The college also runs an hotel and has a manufactury producing marble games, brooms, puzzles and wrought iron decorations. This seems to me an excellent idea and one that could be extended to campus enterprises. I've often thought the chalky slopes around us would be ideal for wine making. A few hectares of Muller-Thurgau and Sylvaner, turned into something refined yet provocative, could make all the difference to our fortunes, with the added bonus of alleviating sobriety among our hard pressed students.
Speaking of enterprise - surreal goings on at the Refectory really have taken a most bizarre turn. First there was the suggestion that the Refectory should cease to be so named, presumably because people might think they were in a medieval monastery and start donning dun habits and going to vespers in large numbers. Now the two major troughs have fallen into the delusion that they are no longer the works canteen but real restaurants, wittily and thematically called The Laines and The Downs. Happily this bid for real world status is only superficial and soup numbers one to seven are all reassuringly both excellent and familiar.
That undoubted jewel of campus life and architecture, the library, has grown yet again. After a summer of rubbing shoulders with pneumatic drills and suffering severe disorientation as the collections swirled about before settling down in some entirely new location, the extension is with us and Sussex's answer to the Sainsbury Wing is open. The difference is dramatic. From feeling that the library was near to capacity, if not a little past it, the vast acres of new space invites agorophobia. Little banks of work stations rise from the massive veldt of grey carpet where students can meet and swap travel stories of how they managed to get there. Indeed it might be an idea to establish way stations, with emergency flasks of number three soup for the weary traveller making her way from the metropolitan density of sociology to the hinterland of law.
The last time it looked, Harvard had amassed $11 billion in endowments, which even nowadays is a lot of faloosh. However, unlike Sussex it cannot look forward to the bequest of the Andrew Morton papers. This seems to be something of a delicate matter. Will these papers be open to prurient attentions? Will the librarian have to keep them under his bed for security reasons? Are these really scholarly papers? As Andrew Morton is an alumnus he must be a scholar, ipso facto so must his papers be scholarly. I'm sure that clever marketing of such a haul could make us rich beyond the dreams of Harvard. Who else might we like to leave us their papers? Ron Dearing, David Mellor, Christine Hamilton, The Spice Girls - perhaps we should give them all honorary degrees?