Even in the early 70s it was whiteboard and blue marker, used sparingly. Libraries were alas trendily modern - Sterling’s History Faculty Library building is a crime against learning - or else small and snug, like the Classics library in which one could 1) smoke and 2) enjoy a glass of wine while studying. And why not?

Of my drinking supervisors, they tended to favour whisky. The thing about being supervised one-on-one by a world-class scholar is that he knows from your essay what bits you haven’t read properly, and so can focus in on them and make you feel like a bloody fool. Fun for him, salutary for you. Though it’s an amazing feeling when he tells you you’re on the right track and well done.

On the subject of Scottish Americans and on the subject of the university system, I was reading a book specifically about the former though which at the end touched on the latter, and seemed to be quite serious about the need for Britain (Scotland in particular) who did so much to found the American university system (Scotland in particular) to now learn something from the Americans (Scotland in particular) and separate themselves from the freaking state which keeps them so tied down (Scotland in particular). It also mentioned that there was only one private college in all of England, and I have no idea what that might be.

So it’s very strange that this strike happened, because the news has been full of the idea of separating the universities from the state. I feel so topical!

I think I’ve heard of a memorial like that, but it’s not that one and I have no idea what the one I’m thinking of is… But it’s bothering my mind.

I’ve always been a fan of the Laura Ingalls/Anne Shirley model of education. Though I have a problem imagining something as pedestrian as chalk at a place like Cambridge. I imagine that they all do their learning in great gothic libraries and in wood paneled rooms sitting at the feet of some eminent academic in a comfortable chair over a glass of sherry.

The reason why the event is held in the Gardens is because that’s where there’s a socking great monument to Americans of Scottish descent who fought in the the World Wars. It cost $50,000 in 1923 so it weren’t cheap. It’s a good feeling being there and taking part as the bored , uninterested and plain ignorant wander past having a quiet gawp and listen. Broadens their horizons. Momentarily at least.

On the subject of Harvard, an alumnus of my college at Cambridge founded Emmanuel, the college attended by John Harvard. So it’s Harvard’s grandparent in a sense. My college recently raised £15 million to bulk out the existing endowment of £76 million (not huge even by Cambridge standards but there are only 500 people in the whole place) with the express intention of funding places for the deserving poor after the University leaves the State system. The deserving poor are, however, even as we speak turning into the deserving middle classes. With the abolition of academically selective and really rather rigorous grammar schools which enabled working class oiks like me to compete effectively, my college is now more socially exclusive than it has been in a century. As a Fellow of the college observed to me, no-one had expected that the State system would collapse quite the way it has done. But over the past 30 years that’s what’s happened, to the great benefit of the dimmer children of the middle classes.

There has got to be a buck in that idea.