I walk onto Grange Road. The posters of the communist parties flail in the wind like the spittle of the nineteenth century. Gestures of protest in Cambridge have become a kind of repetition compulsion: the faces of Luigi Mangione and Zohran Mamdani are put alongside that of Marx in a sort of burlesque carnival, conjoined with the same sombre slogans of old. This is only one symptom of the political sleepwalking in which Cambridge students remain entranced.

The finest diagnosis of this problem comes from On the Poverty of Student Life, a pamphlet published illegally by radical situationist students at the University of Strasbourg 60 years ago. It is strange that it, of all things, should offer a compelling analysis of our dilemma, but what is politics in Cambridge if not farce?

Admittedly, the text bears its age: its account of the class structure of the universities and of titanic debates between Sartre and Camus have about as much relevance to us as the prophecies of the Sibylline Books. Its identification of the roots of the issue, however, remains strong. Its sense of the student’s life as one which “goes on outside of history, cut off from social reality” is just right. It is particularly true for Cambridge, a place that keeps up anachronism less because anyone genuinely believes in it and more to preserve its own sense of self: to stand amid these arches and steeples and obscure customs it is almost possible to delude yourself into believing that nothing has changed and that this is still some fine school of old where learning has not yet been cudgelled by greed.

“Most common is a reflexive liberalism which affects concern with social justice by stoking continual fury at each evil and compromise of the world”

The same sense of unreality lingers over our politics, which consists largely in different varieties of somnambulism. There are the aforementioned ‘revolutionaries’, engaged in a hollow restaging of the past. There are the merely apathetic or uninformed. Most common is a reflexive liberalism which affects concern with social justice by stoking continual fury at each evil and compromise of the world. It is basically an ideology of negation: the damning of reality, the refinement of the soul into an object so frail and translucent that it looks as though at any moment it might turn into a shard of glass. It achieves little: the marches pass by, the profiteers and bureaucrats return to their business, and we walk away with our conscience appeased. In Cambridge the intensity of term and the poverty of time it induces mean that the rebel must also be a hypocrite: they denounce the establishment, and then squeak back to their supervision essays and their interminable revision.

In this regard we are even worse than the generation lambasted by On the Poverty of Student Life. The source remains the same, though: “Being a student is a form of initiation […] The student leads a double life between his present status and his future role.” Immediately behind us is the discipline of the secondary school, immediately ahead the promise of wealth and independence. The university offers a kind of bribe by which we can move from one to the other: the student enrols, indebts themselves, and in return it hands them the pass to a privileged position in consumer society. Rebellious and ‘politicised’ students are only playing their assigned part in this initiation: a few execrations and impotent protests are enacted, while deep down the student knows not to disrupt their path to fortune, that in old age they will look back on all this as nothing more than youthful folly.

“We are left to ask ourselves whether we ever cared for this place or only cared for the money and status we saw in it”

If this is true of anywhere it is true of Cambridge, a place which pledges to coat its members with privilege and status and burnish them with its own reputation in return for the absence of any challenge to its authority. It holds out in promise a quietly prosperous future: sitting chained to a desk, working for someone else, earning the right to maintain the relentless purchase of material pleasures by which we shroud the hollows of our hearts and stultify our minds: “The student really knows how miserable will be that golden future which is supposed to make up for the shameful poverty of the present […] tomorrow will be like yesterday”.

Ben Lubitsh is therefore right to note the countervailing advantages of the breakdown of the implicit contract between Cambridge and its students, as the secure employment promised to us dissipates like dew beneath the Sun. This is more, however, than a tool by which we can pursue some pure education untainted by commerce; three years of ‘true’ learning before entering the ‘real’ world is little less reactionary than the present system. Rather, it is an opening for a student politics which questions the purpose of a paymaster no longer even capable of dispersing bribes.

The gulf between us and the situationists is that in the 1960s the university was still the centre of a social bargain by which hard work and a good education provided a path to a solid job, a steady income and a better life than that enjoyed by one’s parents – a bargain for which places like Cambridge stood as the epitome. Now this contract is falling apart, we are left to ask ourselves whether we ever cared for this place or only cared for the money and status we saw in it. Its dissolution is thus a chance for the critique of the university that the situationists demanded so long ago, an awakening from our husky apathy and the critique of a society which, loosed from all morals, would judge us by profit and loss alone and treat human beings as though they were bars of silver.