Diary - 18 October 2012 | The Spectator

In the October sunshine I have been watching the academic year’s new debtors unloading their electronic possessions from the cars of mothers with hair in 50 shades of grey. After nearly 40 years of teaching in Oxford, I am enraged that the undergraduates have been rebranded. They are now ‘consumers’ and from their first day they are being saddled with debt at a high commercial rate of interest, piling onto the capital sum they also owe. Not one of us has had the chance to vote on this mean-spirited reform. Unlike the vice chancellors and David Willetts, I live daily with the debtors at ground level. When consulted, more than half of them say they will emigrate rather than repay. Otherwise, they are condemned to a nine per cent rate of surcharge on their income tax every year for the next 30 years. The coalition will lose every marginal seat in a university town, including fickle Oxford, and most of the votes of intelligent people between the ages of 18 and 23. I went to bed in May 2010 thinking that at last we had a moderate Conservative government of the type I have pined for all my adult life. Instead we got callow wreckers.

Not that my university has ever been a model of generosity. Over dinner in Brooks’s club I learned from a graduate of 1940 that the wartime route to an MA was a year of study in Oxford, then two years in the forces. When he wrote to the stay-at-home senior tutor of my college to ask for his MA after surviving front-line shelling until 1943, he was told he could have it — if he paid the two years of college dues he had incurred in absence.