Campaigning on the campus

Do campus novels reflect the reality of university life? When I was a Fellow of Peterhouse, back in the Eighties, I was asked with tedious regularity whether the experience resembled Porterhouse Blue, Tom Sharpe’s grotesquely overblown satire. But even as I (truthfully) denied it, a few vignettes would slide past my mind’s eye — such as my very first Governing Body meeting, when, sombrely robed, the Fellows debated, hotly and with manifest ill-will, whether the vomit by the chapel was beer- or claret-based.

This was, of course, a matter of college politics. In every faculty or university, you will find the progressives ranged against the traditionalists, the puritans against the cavaliers, the utilitarians against the idealists, left against right, science against humanities. The vomit might have been left-wing (a by-product of the Students’ Union bar), or right-wing (spewed out by the would-be toffs of the Pitt Club). Divisions in Peterhouse in that era ran deep and rancorous.