University Bar Beer and Chips

FORM IS TEMPORARY, CLASS IS permanent—or so, apocryphally, did Steve Waugh appropriate a cricketer’s hundred year-old cliché. The aphorism’s also served as a common student politician’s reasonably witty running joke, punning on the Marxist sense of class conflict, and it’s served as at least one conservative candidate’s election motto, that I know about.¹

I’m certainly returning to my class roots at the moment. Though I have enrolled in my course in defiance of one of Sydney’s most enduring concrete boundaries of class, ethnicity, religion, influence and opportunity—ANZAC Parade—I find that things aren’t so different at Kenso. Higher education is as familiar an environment as I left it, rather like putting on an old pair of football boots. True, some things are different, thinking in particular of the ironed, well-dressed, made-up students who seem to have replaced the ones I recall who went unshaved to class in tracky dacks. Apparently journal articles aren’t accessed, these days, through heavy lifting and photcopying. And it seems that access to university IT services is a great deal more difficult and tedious than it was in the late 1990s.²

Some things, though, never change. All universities like to play on their status and boast to their students, professional jargon is a universal peacemaking language of love which unites cultures and warring peoples, the beardo wierdos still use 40pt Impact on A3 with the same clipart for their “forums”, decyphering classroom numbering is an ordeal you need a savant to do properly, the card-circle transport concession of a full-time local student is a prize more valuable than rubies, and always, always, at the bottom of the hill, lies a shitty, shitty bar to sell you expensive beer in plastic glasses.

I shared one this afternoon, rainwater sodden from the soles of my feet to the waist, with an old comrade N, who is forsaking a profitable lawyer’s career for teaching in high schools, and more power to him.

He reminded me that my enrolment in this degree makes me a student over three decades. Thanks, N. That was just the encouragement I needed.

—-

¹ “There had been ‘some restructuring done with the whole company’“.

² Blackboard, what excuse can you make for your own existence? None? That is just as I thought. I shun you. You are to me as a Gentile and a tax-collector.