Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Cambridge’s ‘hard work’ don is wrong – but so are his snowflake critics

We all know, I think, what we’re meant to make of the Cambridge don who sent round a memo to his students to tell them they’ve got to do some work only to find the snowflake undergraduates calling his remarks ‘extremely damaging’ with mental health activists getting especially worked up. Most sensible people will feel that he deserves some sort of award. Personally, I’m with the students.

Anyway, to flesh out the details, Professor Eugene Terentjev, plainly a scientist of the old school – he’s Russian – has sent an email to his undergraduate natural science students at Queens’ College to tell them that:

‘You can ONLY do well (i.e. achieve your potential, which rightly or wrongly several people here assumed you have) if you are completely focused and learn to enjoy the course. People who just TAKE the course but enjoy their social life can easily survive in many subjects – but not in this one.’

This might seem like pure sanity, especially when you consider the reaction from mental health campaigners at Student Mind Cambridge, who say ‘we are very concerned that this could be extremely damaging to the mental well-being of the students concerned’.

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