Showy displays of wealth are all too common at Cambridge Howard Lake

Of all the online articles I can find on the assault of the gown-wearing student a couple of weeks ago, there’s not one which doesn’t also mention the money-burning incident which hit national headlines not long before. Dr Paul Hartle, the Senior Tutor at St. Catharine’s, seemed to think the two events might have been linked: he sent round an email which suggested that it was the “gown which may have occasioned the incident, given recent unhelpful local publicity about the stupidly arrogant behaviour of a particular student (from another college)”, adding, “it might be prudent for a while at least not to wear your gown about town.”

Nobody can tell to what extent the assault might have been made out of some sense of retributive justice – and even if was a politically motivated act, attacking someone who happens to be wearing a gown at 9am on a Sunday morning hardly seems the soundest or most helpful form of social protest.

But there’s something very interesting in the assumption, shared by the national press, that someone might see gown-wearing and money-burning as similar things, both symptoms of a shared culture. There’s no denying that it takes a staggering bout of sadism to burn £20 in front of a homeless man, and I do believe (call me an optimist) that whatever twisted logic made the perpetrator feel legitimate in doing that is really pretty alien to the vast majority of the student body. Objectively, though, putting £20 towards something which brings no tangible reward but your own satisfaction, and doing so in plain sight of someone who doesn’t have enough money for a roof and a bed, is not unusual here. It is not insignificant, for a start, that the money-burner was dressed in white tie.

A gown is an amazingly useless piece of clothing: it contributes nothing to keeping you warm, and impedes pretty much anything you try to do in it. Its single purpose, for centuries, has been to classify its wearer as someone who is cleverer than other people (with variations in design to show degrees of cleverness: furry lining = much cleverer; furry hood = much much cleverer, and so on). The simplest gowns cost upward of £30 to buy, even second hand. Wearing one definitely features among the many examples of money spent on self-satisfaction in the public eye.

“You can't really make out the homeless man in the video, but he doesn't look that shocked to me.”

It’s the fact that students find themselves obliged by the University to wear them (I imagine the assaulted student hadn’t just put it on for fun) that makes this an issue endemic to Cambridge. The boundaries of what is OK to do and even wear in public here make extravagant and wasteful displays of wealth seem very much the norm. Students parade in front of the homeless of Cambridge in their coats of many colours, costing God knows how much, all through May Week; they keep them awake with the din from their £200-a-ticket May Balls.

This would be problematic if the money being spent had been earned. It is infinitely more problematic when so few students here are funded solely by themselves, unaided by the financial support of other people. What sense of entitlement students might feel by virtue of how much academic work they do doesn’t hold much weight in real terms. There are plenty of people in the world, plenty in this city, who work harder than Cambridge undergrads and don’t seem to share this entitlement. The tireless Big Issue seller outside Sainsbury’s, for a start, definitely works harder than I do, and funnily enough I’ve never seen him walking the streets in white tie.

In a sense, then, isn’t public money-burning a near relative of public gown-wearing? (Albeit with the caveat that the latter is vindictive, geared towards the suffering of the onlooker in a way gown-wearing isn’t, but one which is also more honest) You can’t really make out the homeless man in the video, but he doesn’t look that shocked to me.

I’m not saying that the money-burning should be excused in the slightest, or that the intention behind it doesn’t make it the uniquely spiteful act it has been received as. But let’s not, in our condemnation, ignore the fact that the attitude it buys into, the attitude which sees absolutely no problem in publicly wasting wealth – the vast majority of which is as of yet unearned – is deeply embedded in the culture of this university. It’s telling that the gown, that pointless and expensive garment of self-congratulation, is metonymic of the student body in discussion of uni-city relations (though admittedly this is mostly just because it rhymes with ‘town’).

On the other hand, it could well be said that really all public displays of wealth are more honest versions of private displays of it, and that the problem will never be abated while wealth levels continue to differ so drastically. That doesn’t mean, however, that there isn’t something pernicious in the visibility of it – just as the in-your-faceness of burning money makes it worse than wearing white tie – or that it’s altogether surprising when that perniciousness provokes a reaction