Ah, here we are again. Summer has gone and winter is coming; the wheel of student life is set to roll once more.
For many, this is a time of great hope. Much like with New Year Resolutions, feelings of ambition and confidence can run freely through the soul spared from the burden of reality. Hope and expectations know no bounds and I shall try not to encage them: that is neither my desire nor duty, and it is something which, most of the time, happens completely naturally.
For those students joining us this year, you have most likely arrived filled with hope and sprinkled with nerves or filled with nerves and sprinkled with hope, but whatever the case, at least you did not arrive to a mob of egg-throwing protesters.
This was the fate destined for the freshers of the new private university set up in central London by A.C. Grayling. The university officially opened on the 24th of September boasting impressive “star lecturers” such as Richard Dawkins and Niall Ferguson. The students were greeted by chants of ‘bourgeois scum!’ but since they are willingly – some may say even enthusiastically – paying double the 9k a year so many students fought so vehemently against, it is quite hard to feel sorry for them.
This is less the case with Tom Beardsworth, the Oxford Student who has recently been the victim of a vicious personal attack by VICE Magazine after allegedly plagiarising ‘The VICE Guide To Dating Rich Girls’ for the Oxford Student. Tom, whose article is entitled ‘A Guide To Dating Posh Girls’, denies plagiarism. As to whether he did or not, it is not my place to say, but VICE’s reaction was nonetheless over the top. Vice Staff unleashed a tirade of venomous twitter-abuse on poor old Tom. Clive Martin, a regular VICE writer, started it by tweeting: “some Oxbridge wanker has totally ripped off an article my colleagues and I wrote. Send him some hate plz.” Yet before long it had escalated to Clive later tweeting that Tom was going to “love the new arsehole we rip him on Monday”. Poor old Tom.
Then again, Tom’s treatment pales in comparison to the poor little hamster who so unfortunately found its way into the hands of a 21 year old “York student”, as reported by the BBC. Whether “York student” means he is a student at the University of York, or St John’s, or even a student from anywhere in the world that merely lives in York, remains unclear. But nevertheless, there is a real possibility which we must not ignore: there may be a hamster-killer among us. In fact, he could be sitting next to you right now.