AFTERTHOUGHT
Revolting dons
JOHN WELLS
Stooping, sixty-eight-year-old Professor Marcus `Baldie' Ribbentropp was still in militant mood last night when he addressed an ad hoc press conference and sit-in by right wing Conservative MPS in the newly- occupied Students' Family Planning Clinic at Warlock University. He and his be- spectacled companions, he said, had fought for three hours with steel-helmeted Young Liberals to capture the concrete and glass building, and they would not be moved. Student leaders, he claimed, had already called in the police with dogs and cs gas to dislodge them, but be and his colleagues were awaiting the assault of the 'fuzz' with equanimity, passing the time chatting about university gossip in a frank and uninhibited way, and completing the Times crossword puzzle.
The trouble at Warlock began last Friday night, when a group of militant dons launched a 'pantie raid' on one of the women's halls of residence, smashing windows and 'occupying' several bedrooms in protest against what they have described as 'in- flammatory' statements by students to the effect that members of the senior common room were, from a sexual point of view, second-class citizens. One leading militant, Dr Horace Bellwether 73, poured fuel on the flames by citing examples of what he called 'bare-faced discrimination', and after a brief struggle part of Pankhurst Block fell to the dons' determined assault. According to an official communique issued by the Student Power Authority, some 'blackleg bluestock- ings' went over to the dons, and in the course of subsequent discussions and off the cuff negotiations, various letters were unearthed which mentioned Dr Bellwether, and others by name in a personal context.
The letters, written for the most part by former students to girls in the college, pur- ported to describe the sexual capacities and predilections of each of the dons in question. Professor Ribbentropp was said to be 'a proper terror', with an intimate knowledge of revolutionary movements, and Dr Bell- wether was 'violent', with a contempt for convention and accepted practices that had often resulted in his being hauled over the coals. Dr 'Grabber' Entwhistle, lecturer in Fr, was only accused of 'leaning to the left', while Professor `Snogger' Liston came under heavy fire as being an 'agitator' and disturber of the peace. The dons were re- ported to be 'hopping mad' after these dis- coveries, and it was only when they had torn many of the girls' nighties into strips and set fire to them in protest that they could finally be persuaded to withdraw.
However, they took the letters with them.
In only a matter of hours photo-copies were being passed from hand to arthritically quaking hand at High Tables from Peebles to Dungeness, detonating explosions of sav- age outrage that fanned nervously watching students with the hot breath of violence. The victims' themselves, though smarting at the attentions of what one of them called 'this jack-booted Interpol in petticoats', remained articulate. As Dr Bellwether himself put it: 'this was, surely, a prima facie instance of brief-overstepping on the part of the student
Whilst not wishing to deny for one moment the widest possible response in the held of value judgments to any under-
graduate, it would seem that the communica- tion of such judgments in the form of a re- port is unquestionably a dastardly act'.
The- 'occupation' of the Birth Control Clinic is seen here as only the start of a cam- paign to inflict a series of tiny pinpricks. At one meeting in the building, angry dons formed a violent splinter-group, called the Panthers in Mortarboards, dedicated to smash student collusion wherever they find it. Eighty-seven-year-old Dr 'Mad Dick' Schopenhauer declared amid hysterical applause and the throwing of gowns in the air that any attempt to shackle the sexual liberty or to denigrate the sexual dignity of dons would be nipped where it hurt. Violent public demonstrations of sexual arrogance by students would only invite an equally violent response. If necessary the legs of student beds would be sawn through, football rattles and smoke bombs would be employed to undermine the concentration of student fornicators, and the 'bucket of cold water' would prove to be no empty threat.
Meanwhile the students themselves have remained calm. Miss Volumnia Salvage, author of two letters about Dr Bellwether and several about Professor Ribbentropp, is quite unrepentant. 'If you'd been groped over by that short-sighted old Baldie Ribben- tropp on a wet night on Slag Beacon you'd wish to warn others, believe me. Old men like that are a menace to decent permissive girls. If I choose to communicate certain views of a purely confidential nature to a younger colleague drawing attention to his ghastly grabbing and unnerving tendency to fall over sideways when in the throes of lust then it's not for a lot of light-fingered thiev- ing dons to publish it, unless they positively wish to humiliate themselves.'
Today the Warlock campus is relatively calm. Uniformed students with riot shields and night sticks talk in low voices to the police behind the barricades, knots of students stand and talk or watch the family planning clinic, and only occasionally a don in a -flowing gown and mediaeval hood reels by under the influence of alcohol shouting abuse. But the police turn a blind eye. Inside the building, dons can be seen from time to time at the window making offensive signs at the waiting students and police, and some- times a bottle flies out of an upper window to smash on the concrete patio. But students are playing a waiting game, and one can only hope, like them, that sanity will eventually prevail in the Senior Common Room.
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