Will Heaven

This horrible, mean-spirited (but tongue-in-cheek) article was originally published in Nouse - credit to Liam O’Brien for the wonderful picture

I always knew there was something off about Gail Trimble. It was the jumpy hair swoosh, the chipmunky teeth and the nervous way she would look down – or slightly to the side – after saying a correct answer. Something didn’t add up. Now the truth has emerged, and it has proved my deepest suspicions to be true: Trimble is a cheating hag, who masterminded the biggest game show fraud in the history of University Challenge. What makes it worse, is that this soon-to-be Dr. Evil seems to have got away with it.

Sam Kay – Trimble’s spiky haired, overweight team-mate – is an accountant working with PriceWaterhouse Coopers. He is not, despite his nefarious claim, “Sam Kay from Frimley in Surrey, studying chemistry”. Trimble will have known this – if you are clever enough to answer two-thirds of your team’s answers, you can probably manage the University Challenge rule book. So why has she not been vilified? Why has this good-for-nothing swindler not been sent down? Because, dear York students, she is studying at Oxford. And, if you study at Oxford, you are simply better than normal people. Or so you think.

James Delingpole is an Oxford graduate and the author of a funny novel called “Thinly disguised Autobiography”, in which he pretty much confesses to having shat himself while losing his virginity. But let’s not dwell on that. Last week he wrote a blog, in which he worried that the Trimble saga would give “class warriors, anti-intellectuals and Oxbridge rejects” reason to believe that “Oxford and Cambridge are really no better than the redbricks and former polytechnics”.

And that, really, is the problem. To people like Delingpole, anyone who didn’t go to Oxbridge might as well be a Sun-reading striking miner who burns books with more than three syllables in the title. Well here’s some news that might disappoint you, James. Not everyone wanted to go to Oxbridge.

Ok, fine. There are a few “rejects” at York – some who, would you believe it, desperately applied twice. There is even a crowd of class warriors, probably the same stinky lot that twattishly wander around campus banging on bin-lids and calling for Heslington Hall to be re-erected in hemp.

Yes, the University of York is lacking in – what is it, again? – “dreamy spires”, or quadrangles that are mown daily. And it’s true, Sebastian Flyte would probably look out of place, teddy-bear under arm, sitting in McQs. We don’t have a boat race or many former Prime Ministers among our alumni. Nevertheless the vast majority of students at York wanted to study here when they applied for a place, and would still rather be here than at Oxford or Cambridge. Why?

For starters, York is academically an extremely good university. I study English and Philosophy, two departments which consistently rank in the university league tables alongside – or frequently above – their corresponding departments at Oxbridge. But that’s not really the point. For students, how good a university is does not only depend solely on its academic merit – three years at York nurtures more than a sense of bookishness. We don’t have 17 essays a term so we actually get to have lives away from the library, and explore extracurricular activities and the sorts of careers that we might end up doing after university. It’s not anti-intellectual to say that a work overload can stifle the brightest minds.

It’s why York’s campus media – from Nouse to YSTV – is probably the best in the country. It’s also why entrepreneurs flourish here. Look at Twitterfall.com, for instance. It was created by a couple of second year computer scientists. They will probably sell it and make a fortune. At Oxbridge, they would have been stuck in the library.

Having free time, and having to deal with less stress, makes us a happier university population. Fewer York students commit suicide, and few of us end up dropping out. We are more balanced – not in a fluffy, lefty, way that James Delingpole would disapprove of – but in a way that shows in confidence and employability.

I know what Oxbridge students will be thinking. “You wish sunshine. Everybody knows that we are the elite.” Well you might be. But quieten down, and get back to the library. You’ve got to start revising for next year’s University Challenge. Remember? It’s that time each year, when you desperately try to prove that you really are the cleverest – come to think of it, I’m not even sure how you apply for the York team.

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