Education
Essex—the end of the honeymoon
Andrew Stephen
This is always the best time of the year at Essex University. The grey tower block monstrosities, around which North Sea gales whistle icily during the winter months, become almost tolerable in the summer: in lazy post-exam haze student couples walk handin-hand to feed ducks and swim in the two campus lakes, and the scent of the newly-mown grass mingles easily with the occasional waft of pot.
But tranquil and relaxed though life apparently is at Wivenhoe Park — not too different, one sometimes feels, from when Constable painted it 150 years ago — there is acute concern at all levels of the university. For students, of course, it is the calm between the storms, with exams completed but the results still to come: amid the usual seething campus exam tensions, over 8,000 exam scripts were frantically scribbled. Some of us, it is to be hoped, will emerge Shortly with a scrap of paper announcing that we hold a degree from the University of Essex.
Such a period of pre-results neuroses inevitably brings introspective doubts — whether it is worthwhile, for example, to spend three or four years at any university in the 'seventies in quest of that piece of paper. But is an Essex degree less valuable than from Brand X or Y University? Sadly, many seem to think the answer is yes. The UGC recently announced that the intake of students to Essex would be doubled — to over 4,000 — by 1976. Normally that would have delighted the university, but instead the decision brought despondency and alarm: now senior officials and staff are having to ask themselves Whether 4,000 adequate students Will want to come to Essex in 1976. They are even hastily making a film in an effort to persuade sixth-formers what a marvellous Place it really is, nothing at all like the squalid and unacademic 'Sex and Drugs Campus that most of the press would have the public believe. That, it seems, is precisely what the public — and, more important, the headmasters and careers masters — do believe, for applications have slumped alarmingly since what are eupheMistically known as the Essex troubles 'of 1968.
A decade has now passed since br Albert Sloman delivered the
BBC Reith Lectures, unveiling his plans for Essex to an excited world. The press immediately latched on to the fact that he was the country's youngest vice-chancellor, and the youngest man ever to give the Reith Lectures: much was made of the dynamic whizzkiddery of Essex, and there was excited talk of Italian-style piazzas and a bustling night-time campus atmosphere. Old-fashioned disciplinary offices such as that of proctor would not exist: there would be no need, for students and staff would work alongside in a scholarly atmosphere, united by their mutual thirst for knowledge. Students would live in closelyknit communities in twenty-seven high-rise tower blocks, where intellectual and philosophical discussion would proliferate.
Today, as the university proctor considers the cases of students caught' water-bombing 'from the towers on to other students below, and as builders put the final touches to new low-rise student accommodation on a nearby housing estate (the towers plan having been abandoned, with less than a quarter built), an air of
grim reality pervades Essex. The heroic days when the university was exciting and unpredictable, when apoplectic Telegraph readers would splutter in rage over their cornflakes, when even Guardian readers would murmur in surprise over their muesli, have passed.
For the past two years the university has adopted a low profile, concentrating on pushing students through the degree machine, and staff through the publishing machine: the non-controversial, results-getting technological departments (Com puting, Telecommunications) have boomed, while other social studies departments (Economics, Sociology) have faded.
With this change in approach, there has also been a change in student life: a bland, characterless campus atmosphere has taken over. Political activity — excepting a handful of stout-hearted Communist Party activists — is virtually nil. The Essex County Standard's claim seven years ago that Essex was a " hotbed of socialism ' is now more ludicrous than ever: ' hotbed of apathy' would perhaps be a better description. It may be significant that by far the most successful student organisation is the Film Society — one that requires only the most passive involvement from the vast majority of its members. Otherwise student life revolves around tower-flat cliques, for there is no central union building — a fact which the university psychiatrist has publicly bemoaned.
Not that there is anything hugely wrong with Essex. It is just that its long honeymoon period, flirting with new-found academic and social glamour, is over. Now, as it settles down to being just another British university, rumours abound that Dr Sloman is seeking fresh pastures — in Euroacademic Administration, it is suggested. As the authorities reconcile themselves to accepting lower ' A ' level standards from applicants, and the rather unpalatable fact that Essex now holds third place in the national UGC League of Unemployed Graduates — the compilation of which has been furiously criticised by Essex officials — the relaxed summer post-exam euphoria has produced a droll new joke doing the rounds among certain students: 'What use is an Essex degree?" "You can hold an intelligent conversation in the dole queue,"
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