Selling out the students

Last week we reported on the University Library’s potential re-naming after a donor. This week we have revealed the Music Faculty’s plans to rent their concert hall to an evangelical church, to the serious detriment of student performances. If this worrying trend of selling out continues, then students will be left wondering whether they remain the primary concern of the University.

It is undeniable that University buildings need to find extra ways of raising capital. We have long been members of conference centres which occasionally act as Colleges, and although this makes it near impossible to secure vacation residence, it is accepted as a necessary means for Colleges to keep in the black.

However, raising money should only ever be a secondary concern, in service of the University’s primary function of education. So when this secondary concern directly impinges upon education, as with the Music Faculty’s plans, a depressing precedent is set. Music is a unique subject as extracurricular performances are vitally important to the course, and the students consequently partake in an admirable variety of activities which lend our University a dynamism and excitement. To impinge upon these activities in favour of Peterborough Evangelists from is ridiculous.

It is yet another example of the market’s unwelcome encroachment on University life. Coleridge may have come last in our Greatest Cantabrigian poll, but he had some pretty clever things to say about society. If the “ideology of greed” was to rule us, Coleridge claimed it must be counteracted with a collectivising and civilising “Spirit of the State”. Universities in his view were key to this. By naming its buildings in honour of donors and selling its spaces from the students, the University of Cambridge is beginning to counter-act one of its prime purposes.

Raising the Bar

It’s easy to forget how much bureaucracy goes on in College. When socially sipping in your doorstep watering-hole, you may think all you’re doing is harmlessly enjoying a ridiculously cheap Carlsberg, but you may in fact be helping to endanger your loved abode’s charitable status. To keep any College-related fun running smoothly always involves the toeing of a pretty draconian line, and the result of adhering to these dictatorship-like rules usually equals a subtraction of said fun.

Poor Sidney. The last independent bar is facing the authorities’ wrath. It is doubtful that’s there is even a grain of truth in the suggestion that a cheap, accessible bar contributes to lower exam results. If you want to drink, you’ll find a way to drink wherever and whenever. It would, after all, only take a Sidney member a minute more to cross the street and buy a six-pack themselves.