Hours of Idleness

Basement Jaxx and Coldplay might never have existed if we had forced our students to study too hard

John Sutherland. The Guardian

Watching the Mercury music awards last week, I was rooting for Basement Jaxx. Not because they were the best (the Streets would have had my vote) but because they were the home team - the group with University College London connections. Simon Ratcliffe, one of BJ's two-man brainbox, was previously an undergraduate at the Godless place in Gower Street.

The roll-call of previous Mercury award winners and also-rans confirmed that UCL is (as the Guardian once asserted) Cool Britannia's coolest university - alma mater to Brett Anderson of Suede, Justine Frischmann of Elastica and, of course, all of Coldplay.

As the new academic year cranks up, incoming students could do worse than contemplate UCL's superband when looking for role models. Coldplay came together in Ramsay Hall, a dour student barracks, lodged primly among Fitzrovia's numerous knocking shops, with canteen food of legendary awfulness. When the IRA blew up the adjacent Post Office tower, closing forever the revolving restaurant at its top, one resident of the hall told me that he wished they had packed another couple of hundredweight of sodium nitrate into the truck bomb and taken out Ramsay kitchen while they were at it.

The lads destined to become Coldplay are remembered by contemporaries sitting on the stairs at Ramsay, sourly digesting whatever insult had been served up that evening, and working out their musical strategies. Chris Martin spent a summer cleaning rooms there for the minimum wage.

Knobhead students that they were (the Gallaghers' unkind description), Coldplay suspended all gigs for three months to revise for finals. Martin duly got a first in ancient world studies (suck my knob, Liam).

There are lessons here for those who run Britain's universities. However naturally talented you are, you don't get to be musically pre-eminent in the way Coldplay are without thousands of hours of practice and rehearsal.

The traditional university course, particularly in the humanities, made room for such work on the side. It used to be said that one "read" English or history or whatever. You didn't "study" it. And, under the old dispensation, you had time for other worthwhile, or less than worthwhile, pursuits. You didn't have to grind your nose away, day and night, at your "subject". Some did, of course; but it wasn't mandatory.

Hours of Idleness, Byron called his Cambridge poem. Without that lazy studenthood, would the mad, bad lord have gone on to write Childe Harold? The director Chris Nolan, a former student at UCL, spent time that could usefully have been devoted to Chaucer, watching movies. But with his film Memento in mind, were Nolan's idle hours in the picture palace really wasted - or invested? Mark Lawson, I recall, watched an awful lot of crappy TV as an undergraduate. Sometimes the idle apprentice knows best.

Like A-levels, degree results get better every year. Despite the suspicions of Tory pessimists, this is not an examiners' conspiracy. Once allowed to amble through their course, nibbling at the wayside, undergraduates are now trained like racehorses. They do not learn; they are taught. Taught what texts mean; taught communication, problem-solving, IT and teamwork skills. And, at the end of it, they are not taught, in any worthwhile sense, but programmed. Programmed, primarily, to excel in examinations, covering their institutions and teachers with glory. Racehorses don't race for themselves but for their owners and jockeys.

The most pernicious reform introduced into higher education over the last 40 years is "continuous assessment" (also called course unitation and modularisation). It is the pedagogic equivalent of CCTV, a monitoring and measuring of student performance from freshman to finalist.

Traditionally, you slacked for eight terms and worked like stink through the ninth, "revising" for the nightmare of finals week. Now you are examined from your first undergraduate essay onward. Hell starts on day one. Modularisation does for higher education what the conveyor belt did for automobile manufacture. No more hours of idleness. And, I fear, fewer like Chris Martin and Chris Nolan.

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