Sunday, 19 July 2020
India: Where does one turn when law, political parties and the state turn their back on justice?
P B Mehta in The Indian Express
Anand Teltumbde, one of India’s important and courageous thinkers, just turned 70 in prison. He, along with Sudha Bharadwaj and others, is being held in the Bhima Koregaon case. They are being repeatedly denied bail. Varavara Rao, poet and Maoist intellectual, contracted COVID and has been subject to degrading and humiliating conditions at the age of 80. The overwhelming power that the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act gives to the state, the sheer impunity with which government can treat this group of accused, the Kafkaesque role of the judiciary in denying bail and making procedural safeguards ineffective, and the deafening political silence on their detention, all warrant deeper reflection. The accused in the Bhima Koregaon case are not the first to be victimised in this way; and they will not be the last. The UAPA is being used to target protest from Assam to Delhi.
Anand Teltumbde’s work, particularly “Republic of Caste”, presciently forecast his own condition. He, like the others, has drawn support from the usual petition-writing crowd of intellectuals. But his case provides a disturbing window on the political loneliness of a genuine intellectual in Indian conditions.
Here is a well-known Dalit intellectual being put in prison and yet no serious political protest, even from Dalit politicians. Teltumbde had, in another context written, “When Sudhir Dhawale, a Dalit activist, was arrested in 2011 on the trumped up charge of being a Naxalite and incarcerated for nearly four years, there was hardly any protest from the community.” This phenomenon of figures like Teltumbde not drawing broader political support requires some reflection. Teltumbde himself, in part, attributed this to divisions amongst Dalits, and their greater faith in the state. But his work points towards a subtler reason.
For all of India’s handwringing, that we need to escape identity politics, there is a great antipathy to anyone who tries to escape it. Teltumbde is one of those rare figures who argued that the Left and liberals failed to take caste seriously, and caste mobilisation failed to take class and economics seriously. But the result is a kind of suspension in between two constructions: Most of society does not get outraged because he is often reduced to being a Dalit intellectual; Dalits don’t get outraged because he becomes a “Left” intellectual. The blunt truth is that, if we leave the rarefied world of petitions, the only modality of protest that is politically effective is the one that has the imprimatur of community mobilisation behind it. If you can show a community identity is affected, all hell will break loose; without it, there is no political protest.
Teltumbde was also prescient about the way the term “Left” is used in India. Teltumbde himself is closer to the Left in his economic imagination. But the rhetorical function of the “Left” in India is not to describe the contest over the free market versus the state. The rhetorical function of the “Left” is to describe any ideological or political current that, while recognising the importance of identity, wants to escape its compulsory or simplistic character; so any broadly liberal position or a position that distances itself from “my community right or wrong” also becomes Left. For Hindutva, anyone who resists or transcends the narcissisms of collective identity becomes “Left.” But the same is increasingly true of other identities — Maratha, Jat, Dalit, Rajput. “Left” is anyone who complicates identity claims. That, rather than secular versus communal, is the big chasm in Indian politics. But the result is that if you are labelled “Left” in this way, you will have no political protection.
The charge of Maoism is the hyper version of this “Left” in the context of Adivasi mobilisation. Which is why the entire political class, and so much of India’s discursive space, keeps invoking the “Left” spectre. And Teltumbde was insightful in thinking that once you had been labelled Left in India, it was easy to secure a diminution in your legal and cultural standing. Even the Courts will turn off their thinking cap. It is in this that the genuine intellectual enterprise is a lonely one, whose disastrous political consequences Teltumbde is facing.
The Bhima Koregaon cases also throw a spotlight on so many state institutions. The UAPA, and its ubiquitous use is a travesty in a liberal democracy. The lawyer, Abhinav Sekhri, has, in a recent article (“How the UAPA is perverting the Idea of Justice”, Article14.com) pointed out two basic issues with the law. The law is designed in a way that it makes the question of innocence or guilt almost irrelevant. It can, in effect, inflict punishment without guilt. The idea that people like Teltumbde or the exemplary Bharadwaj cannot even get bail underscores this point. And second, the safeguards of our criminal justice process work unevenly at the best of times. But in the case of the UAPA, the courts have often, practically, suspended serious scrutiny of the state. What legitimises this conduct of the court is two things: The broader ideological construction of the “Left” as an existential threat. And the impatience of society with procedural safeguards. The UAPA has in some senses become the judicial version of the encounter — where the suspension of the normal meaning of the rule of law is itself seen as a kind of justice.
The state has been going after Varavara Rao for his entire life. He is a complicated figure. He is an extraordinarily powerful poet who made visible the exploitative skeins of Indian society; his poetry, even in translation, cannot fail to move you out of a complacent slumber. He was formidable in consciousness raising. Of this group, his ideological excusing of horrendous Maoist excesses, has been indefensible and disturbing. His moral stance once promoted a deeply meditative critique on the morality of revolutionary violence by Apoorvanand (“‘Our’ Violence Versus ‘Their’ Violence”, Kafila.online).
But the farce that the Indian state is enacting in pursuing Varavara Rao in the Bhima Koregaon prosecutions is proving him correct in two ways. First, in his insistence that what is known as bourgeois law is a sham in its own terms; the rule of law indeed is rule by law. And second, that repression and degradation is indeed the argument of a despotic state. Where does one turn when law, political parties and the state turn their back on justice?
Anand Teltumbde, one of India’s important and courageous thinkers, just turned 70 in prison. He, along with Sudha Bharadwaj and others, is being held in the Bhima Koregaon case. They are being repeatedly denied bail. Varavara Rao, poet and Maoist intellectual, contracted COVID and has been subject to degrading and humiliating conditions at the age of 80. The overwhelming power that the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act gives to the state, the sheer impunity with which government can treat this group of accused, the Kafkaesque role of the judiciary in denying bail and making procedural safeguards ineffective, and the deafening political silence on their detention, all warrant deeper reflection. The accused in the Bhima Koregaon case are not the first to be victimised in this way; and they will not be the last. The UAPA is being used to target protest from Assam to Delhi.
Anand Teltumbde’s work, particularly “Republic of Caste”, presciently forecast his own condition. He, like the others, has drawn support from the usual petition-writing crowd of intellectuals. But his case provides a disturbing window on the political loneliness of a genuine intellectual in Indian conditions.
Here is a well-known Dalit intellectual being put in prison and yet no serious political protest, even from Dalit politicians. Teltumbde had, in another context written, “When Sudhir Dhawale, a Dalit activist, was arrested in 2011 on the trumped up charge of being a Naxalite and incarcerated for nearly four years, there was hardly any protest from the community.” This phenomenon of figures like Teltumbde not drawing broader political support requires some reflection. Teltumbde himself, in part, attributed this to divisions amongst Dalits, and their greater faith in the state. But his work points towards a subtler reason.
For all of India’s handwringing, that we need to escape identity politics, there is a great antipathy to anyone who tries to escape it. Teltumbde is one of those rare figures who argued that the Left and liberals failed to take caste seriously, and caste mobilisation failed to take class and economics seriously. But the result is a kind of suspension in between two constructions: Most of society does not get outraged because he is often reduced to being a Dalit intellectual; Dalits don’t get outraged because he becomes a “Left” intellectual. The blunt truth is that, if we leave the rarefied world of petitions, the only modality of protest that is politically effective is the one that has the imprimatur of community mobilisation behind it. If you can show a community identity is affected, all hell will break loose; without it, there is no political protest.
Teltumbde was also prescient about the way the term “Left” is used in India. Teltumbde himself is closer to the Left in his economic imagination. But the rhetorical function of the “Left” in India is not to describe the contest over the free market versus the state. The rhetorical function of the “Left” is to describe any ideological or political current that, while recognising the importance of identity, wants to escape its compulsory or simplistic character; so any broadly liberal position or a position that distances itself from “my community right or wrong” also becomes Left. For Hindutva, anyone who resists or transcends the narcissisms of collective identity becomes “Left.” But the same is increasingly true of other identities — Maratha, Jat, Dalit, Rajput. “Left” is anyone who complicates identity claims. That, rather than secular versus communal, is the big chasm in Indian politics. But the result is that if you are labelled “Left” in this way, you will have no political protection.
The charge of Maoism is the hyper version of this “Left” in the context of Adivasi mobilisation. Which is why the entire political class, and so much of India’s discursive space, keeps invoking the “Left” spectre. And Teltumbde was insightful in thinking that once you had been labelled Left in India, it was easy to secure a diminution in your legal and cultural standing. Even the Courts will turn off their thinking cap. It is in this that the genuine intellectual enterprise is a lonely one, whose disastrous political consequences Teltumbde is facing.
The Bhima Koregaon cases also throw a spotlight on so many state institutions. The UAPA, and its ubiquitous use is a travesty in a liberal democracy. The lawyer, Abhinav Sekhri, has, in a recent article (“How the UAPA is perverting the Idea of Justice”, Article14.com) pointed out two basic issues with the law. The law is designed in a way that it makes the question of innocence or guilt almost irrelevant. It can, in effect, inflict punishment without guilt. The idea that people like Teltumbde or the exemplary Bharadwaj cannot even get bail underscores this point. And second, the safeguards of our criminal justice process work unevenly at the best of times. But in the case of the UAPA, the courts have often, practically, suspended serious scrutiny of the state. What legitimises this conduct of the court is two things: The broader ideological construction of the “Left” as an existential threat. And the impatience of society with procedural safeguards. The UAPA has in some senses become the judicial version of the encounter — where the suspension of the normal meaning of the rule of law is itself seen as a kind of justice.
The state has been going after Varavara Rao for his entire life. He is a complicated figure. He is an extraordinarily powerful poet who made visible the exploitative skeins of Indian society; his poetry, even in translation, cannot fail to move you out of a complacent slumber. He was formidable in consciousness raising. Of this group, his ideological excusing of horrendous Maoist excesses, has been indefensible and disturbing. His moral stance once promoted a deeply meditative critique on the morality of revolutionary violence by Apoorvanand (“‘Our’ Violence Versus ‘Their’ Violence”, Kafila.online).
But the farce that the Indian state is enacting in pursuing Varavara Rao in the Bhima Koregaon prosecutions is proving him correct in two ways. First, in his insistence that what is known as bourgeois law is a sham in its own terms; the rule of law indeed is rule by law. And second, that repression and degradation is indeed the argument of a despotic state. Where does one turn when law, political parties and the state turn their back on justice?
Friday, 17 July 2020
Self-fulfilling prophecies can be harnessed for good
But some predictions are false, no matter how much we wish they were true writes Tim Harford in The FT
It's 1963. A young psychologist named Bob Rosenthal conducts an experiment in which his assistants place rats in mazes, and then time how long it takes the rats to find the exit. They are housed in two cages: one for the smartest rats and one for rodent mediocrities.
The assistants are not surprised to find that the smart rats solve the mazes more quickly. Their supervisor is — because he knows that in truth, both cages contain ordinary lab rats.
Prof Rosenthal — he would go on to chair Harvard’s psychology department — eventually concluded that the secret ingredient was the expectations of his assistants: they treated the “special” rats with care and handled the “stupid” rats with disdain. When we expect the best, we get the best — even if we expect it of a rat.
The story is well told in Rutger Bregman’s new book Humankind. His interest in Prof Rosenthal’s work is not hard to explain. Mr Bregman argues that people are fundamentally friendly and self-motivated. But he also argues that when we expect more of each other then, like the rats, we rise to the occasion. If schools, police or corporations believe that people are sluggish, dishonest or lazy, they may be proved right.
Prof Rosenthal coined the phrase “the Pygmalion effect”, the name inspired by Ovid’s account of a sculptor whose infatuation with a statue brings it to life. But the Pygmalion effect is just one example of what the sociologist Robert K. Merton called “self-fulfilling prophecies”.
There’s the placebo effect and its malign twin, the “nocebo effect”: if the doctor tells you a drug may produce side effects, some patients feel those side effects even if given an inert pill.
Self-fulfilling prophecies are a staple of economics. A recession can be caused by the expectation of a recession, if people hesitate to spend, hire or invest. And a bank run is the quintessential self-fulfilling prophecy.
The self-defeating prophecy is just as fascinating, and a problem that bedevils economic forecasters. If I credibly predict a surge in the price of oil next year, the surge will happen immediately as oil traders buy low now to sell high later. The forecast goes awry precisely because people thought it was accurate.
The coronavirus era has brought us a vivid example. A vocal minority argues that Covid-19 is not much worse than the influenza we ignore every winter, so both mandatory lockdowns and voluntary precautions have been unnecessary.
A glance at the data gives that argument a veneer of plausibility. The UK has suffered about 65,000 excess deaths during the first wave of the pandemic, and 25,000-30,000 excess deaths are attributed to flu in England alone during bad flu seasons.
Is the disparity so great that the country needed to grind to a halt?
The flaw in the argument is clear: Covid was “only” twice as bad as a bad flu season because we took extreme measures to contain it. The effectiveness of the lockdown is being used as an argument that the lockdown was unnecessary. It is frustrating, but that is the nature of a self-defeating prophecy in a politicised environment.
One might say the same thing about Fort Knox. Nobody has ever tried to steal the gold, so why bother with all the guards?
Self-fulfilling prophecies can be pernicious; writing in 1948, Prof Merton focused on racism. For example, some said African Americans were strikebreakers who thus should not be allowed to join trade unions. Prof Merton pointed out that their exclusion from unions was the reason they had been strikebreakers. Sexism also drips with self-fulfilling prophecies. Since our leaders were usually straight white men in the past, it is all too easy to favour such people for leadership roles in the future.
Such prophecies can also be harnessed for good. Bob Rosenthal took his ideas into schools, where he found that what is true of rats being respectfully handled is just as true of pupils. Persuade a teacher that a pupil has hidden talents and the child will soon flourish.
Yet one can put too much faith in the self-fulfilling prophecy. Fervent excitement about the dizzy ascent of Tesla’s share price should help the company sell cars and raise funds but, in the long run, the value of a Tesla share will be determined by Tesla’s profitability.
Self-fulfilling prophecies are particularly tempting for politicians. It is all too easy to paint a project such as Brexit in Tinker Bell terms: if we clap our hands and believe in Brexit, it will not disappoint. Conveniently, all setbacks can be blamed on “Remoaners”.
The fact is that some things are false no matter how fervently we wish them to be true. We often plunge into projects with rosy views of how long they will take and how successful they will be, but our optimism only gets us started. It does not finish the job.
I think we should try to treat each other with kindness and respect, and not just because it worked for Bob Rosenthal’s rats. But there are limits to the power of sheer positive thinking. Even in the cartoons, Wile E. Coyote eventually feels the tug of gravity.
It's 1963. A young psychologist named Bob Rosenthal conducts an experiment in which his assistants place rats in mazes, and then time how long it takes the rats to find the exit. They are housed in two cages: one for the smartest rats and one for rodent mediocrities.
The assistants are not surprised to find that the smart rats solve the mazes more quickly. Their supervisor is — because he knows that in truth, both cages contain ordinary lab rats.
Prof Rosenthal — he would go on to chair Harvard’s psychology department — eventually concluded that the secret ingredient was the expectations of his assistants: they treated the “special” rats with care and handled the “stupid” rats with disdain. When we expect the best, we get the best — even if we expect it of a rat.
The story is well told in Rutger Bregman’s new book Humankind. His interest in Prof Rosenthal’s work is not hard to explain. Mr Bregman argues that people are fundamentally friendly and self-motivated. But he also argues that when we expect more of each other then, like the rats, we rise to the occasion. If schools, police or corporations believe that people are sluggish, dishonest or lazy, they may be proved right.
Prof Rosenthal coined the phrase “the Pygmalion effect”, the name inspired by Ovid’s account of a sculptor whose infatuation with a statue brings it to life. But the Pygmalion effect is just one example of what the sociologist Robert K. Merton called “self-fulfilling prophecies”.
There’s the placebo effect and its malign twin, the “nocebo effect”: if the doctor tells you a drug may produce side effects, some patients feel those side effects even if given an inert pill.
Self-fulfilling prophecies are a staple of economics. A recession can be caused by the expectation of a recession, if people hesitate to spend, hire or invest. And a bank run is the quintessential self-fulfilling prophecy.
The self-defeating prophecy is just as fascinating, and a problem that bedevils economic forecasters. If I credibly predict a surge in the price of oil next year, the surge will happen immediately as oil traders buy low now to sell high later. The forecast goes awry precisely because people thought it was accurate.
The coronavirus era has brought us a vivid example. A vocal minority argues that Covid-19 is not much worse than the influenza we ignore every winter, so both mandatory lockdowns and voluntary precautions have been unnecessary.
A glance at the data gives that argument a veneer of plausibility. The UK has suffered about 65,000 excess deaths during the first wave of the pandemic, and 25,000-30,000 excess deaths are attributed to flu in England alone during bad flu seasons.
Is the disparity so great that the country needed to grind to a halt?
The flaw in the argument is clear: Covid was “only” twice as bad as a bad flu season because we took extreme measures to contain it. The effectiveness of the lockdown is being used as an argument that the lockdown was unnecessary. It is frustrating, but that is the nature of a self-defeating prophecy in a politicised environment.
One might say the same thing about Fort Knox. Nobody has ever tried to steal the gold, so why bother with all the guards?
Self-fulfilling prophecies can be pernicious; writing in 1948, Prof Merton focused on racism. For example, some said African Americans were strikebreakers who thus should not be allowed to join trade unions. Prof Merton pointed out that their exclusion from unions was the reason they had been strikebreakers. Sexism also drips with self-fulfilling prophecies. Since our leaders were usually straight white men in the past, it is all too easy to favour such people for leadership roles in the future.
Such prophecies can also be harnessed for good. Bob Rosenthal took his ideas into schools, where he found that what is true of rats being respectfully handled is just as true of pupils. Persuade a teacher that a pupil has hidden talents and the child will soon flourish.
Yet one can put too much faith in the self-fulfilling prophecy. Fervent excitement about the dizzy ascent of Tesla’s share price should help the company sell cars and raise funds but, in the long run, the value of a Tesla share will be determined by Tesla’s profitability.
Self-fulfilling prophecies are particularly tempting for politicians. It is all too easy to paint a project such as Brexit in Tinker Bell terms: if we clap our hands and believe in Brexit, it will not disappoint. Conveniently, all setbacks can be blamed on “Remoaners”.
The fact is that some things are false no matter how fervently we wish them to be true. We often plunge into projects with rosy views of how long they will take and how successful they will be, but our optimism only gets us started. It does not finish the job.
I think we should try to treat each other with kindness and respect, and not just because it worked for Bob Rosenthal’s rats. But there are limits to the power of sheer positive thinking. Even in the cartoons, Wile E. Coyote eventually feels the tug of gravity.
Thursday, 16 July 2020
Ten years from graduating, I'm still not sure university was a good decision
I studied English, slept a lot and developed an aversion to ‘hard’ books. Was university anything more than an expensive blip? asks Eleanor Margolis in The Guardian
‘I suppose I’d say, ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’, but I was asleep the week I was supposed to read A Tale of Two Cities.’ Photograph: incamerastock / Alamy/Alamy
Under my bed, in a shoebox covered in dust, lie a disused strap-on and my degree. In a sense, this physical copy of my 2:1 in English literature from a middle-ranking university is the most expensive thing I own. This month marks 10 years since I graduated into a thumping recession and – joke’s on you, Student Loans Company – a whole decade in which I haven’t paid off a single penny of my student debt. A fact that has made me look back on those three years, all that time ago, I spent at uni and wonder – what exactly was that?
Obviously, I was incredibly lucky to go to university. Especially at a time when tuition fees were a third of what they are now. Or – perhaps more pertinently – at a time where a global pandemic wasn’t sending the entire education system into a very real existential crisis. I was lucky that my middle classness made higher education an inevitability. Like growing boobs and starting my period, university was a fact of life. When it came to choosing my degree, I simply went with the subject I’d always done best in at school.
It never occurred to me there was any other way. But this was when I was still a a perpetually horny, semi-closeted lesbian teenager with depression and anxiety up to the eyeballs, and the self-esteem of a naked mole rat that finds itself in a hall of mirrors. I was in no way ready to make a major life decision that would cost me tens of thousands of pounds. I had no idea who I was yet, let alone how I should be spending the next three years of my existence.
I assumed I’d muddle through it – just how I’d muddled through GCSEs and A-levels. You do the reading, you churn out essays, you progress to whatever the next thing is that’s expected of you. Plus, the work side of things was a minor consideration compared to the thought of all the other queer girls I might meet. It was going to be fun, eye-opening, vital.
It was and it wasn’t. Over the next three years I would date boys, become even more anxious and depressed, and cultivate a resentment towards “hard” books. To this day, I suffer from a sort of reading-induced narcolepsy. I’ve always been a painfully slow reader; being given a week to read Ulysses along with fluttering mounds of literary theory so dense you’d think it had escaped from the Cern lab, was not a recipe for happiness. When I’m stressed, I sleep. Even by students’ sleepy reputation, I was practically comatose for three-quarters of the time. On the flipside, I made good friends, learned what “dasein” meant, and came out as gay. I suppose I’d say, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”, but I was asleep the week I was supposed to read A Tale of Two Cities.
How much of life do we do simply because it’s the “done thing”? Last month, Euan Blair, the son of that guy who was very into the idea that getting more people into higher education was the best way to even the societal playing field, wrote in the Times that degrees are now “irrelevant.” His argument that we need to “retrain the nation” was especially spammy coming from someone who runs a tech startup specialising in apprenticeships.
Should I really have gone to university? I honestly don’t know. All the jobs I’ve ever applied for have required a degree, but then again no one’s ever asked to see the scrap of paper in the dildo box under my bed. What if I’d said I have a first in sub-linear aquatics from Mary Berry College, Cambridge, and ended up in a better position than I’m in now?
What I do know is that if I had the opportunity to go back to university, now would be the time I could actually make the most out of it. At 31, not only do I have a greater sense of who I am, but I know what fascinates me. I’m infinitely more receptive to learning now than I was at 18; and I wish I hadn’t so brazenly pissed my university experience up the wall. When I think of the seminars I turned up to without having done the reading, I feel queasy. If university has played no definable role in the 10 years since I graduated, and I didn’t have the awareness to milk it for everything it was worth at the time, then I ask – once again – what was it? Other than a very expensive and quite interesting blip.
And all the while, I could have just done a Marcus Rashford and become a world-class footballer, led a successful campaign against child poverty, and got an honorary degree – all without going to university. You know, the easy route.
Under my bed, in a shoebox covered in dust, lie a disused strap-on and my degree. In a sense, this physical copy of my 2:1 in English literature from a middle-ranking university is the most expensive thing I own. This month marks 10 years since I graduated into a thumping recession and – joke’s on you, Student Loans Company – a whole decade in which I haven’t paid off a single penny of my student debt. A fact that has made me look back on those three years, all that time ago, I spent at uni and wonder – what exactly was that?
Obviously, I was incredibly lucky to go to university. Especially at a time when tuition fees were a third of what they are now. Or – perhaps more pertinently – at a time where a global pandemic wasn’t sending the entire education system into a very real existential crisis. I was lucky that my middle classness made higher education an inevitability. Like growing boobs and starting my period, university was a fact of life. When it came to choosing my degree, I simply went with the subject I’d always done best in at school.
It never occurred to me there was any other way. But this was when I was still a a perpetually horny, semi-closeted lesbian teenager with depression and anxiety up to the eyeballs, and the self-esteem of a naked mole rat that finds itself in a hall of mirrors. I was in no way ready to make a major life decision that would cost me tens of thousands of pounds. I had no idea who I was yet, let alone how I should be spending the next three years of my existence.
I assumed I’d muddle through it – just how I’d muddled through GCSEs and A-levels. You do the reading, you churn out essays, you progress to whatever the next thing is that’s expected of you. Plus, the work side of things was a minor consideration compared to the thought of all the other queer girls I might meet. It was going to be fun, eye-opening, vital.
It was and it wasn’t. Over the next three years I would date boys, become even more anxious and depressed, and cultivate a resentment towards “hard” books. To this day, I suffer from a sort of reading-induced narcolepsy. I’ve always been a painfully slow reader; being given a week to read Ulysses along with fluttering mounds of literary theory so dense you’d think it had escaped from the Cern lab, was not a recipe for happiness. When I’m stressed, I sleep. Even by students’ sleepy reputation, I was practically comatose for three-quarters of the time. On the flipside, I made good friends, learned what “dasein” meant, and came out as gay. I suppose I’d say, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”, but I was asleep the week I was supposed to read A Tale of Two Cities.
How much of life do we do simply because it’s the “done thing”? Last month, Euan Blair, the son of that guy who was very into the idea that getting more people into higher education was the best way to even the societal playing field, wrote in the Times that degrees are now “irrelevant.” His argument that we need to “retrain the nation” was especially spammy coming from someone who runs a tech startup specialising in apprenticeships.
Should I really have gone to university? I honestly don’t know. All the jobs I’ve ever applied for have required a degree, but then again no one’s ever asked to see the scrap of paper in the dildo box under my bed. What if I’d said I have a first in sub-linear aquatics from Mary Berry College, Cambridge, and ended up in a better position than I’m in now?
What I do know is that if I had the opportunity to go back to university, now would be the time I could actually make the most out of it. At 31, not only do I have a greater sense of who I am, but I know what fascinates me. I’m infinitely more receptive to learning now than I was at 18; and I wish I hadn’t so brazenly pissed my university experience up the wall. When I think of the seminars I turned up to without having done the reading, I feel queasy. If university has played no definable role in the 10 years since I graduated, and I didn’t have the awareness to milk it for everything it was worth at the time, then I ask – once again – what was it? Other than a very expensive and quite interesting blip.
And all the while, I could have just done a Marcus Rashford and become a world-class footballer, led a successful campaign against child poverty, and got an honorary degree – all without going to university. You know, the easy route.
Tuesday, 14 July 2020
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