It’s been around 84 years since Virginia Woolf wrote that she was over men running around Oxbridge with ‘trays on their heads’. She thought it was facile and silly. Later she would have a go at judge’s wigs and bishop’s mitres too. According to her, they were basically all in the same costume bag of paternalistic patriarchy. But on the cusp of 2012, we find the same old wardrobe’s alive and well, and the egos therein are just as present. What’s going on? Does the fabric woven slavishly by Ede & Ravenscroft contain a substance bound to endow the wearer with a fragrance irresistible to the executive board of the Wellcome Trust or some such funding organisation? Maybe. Or maybe old Woolfy had a point there, doing dot-to-dot with the other heavily decorated white men on the ruling committees of the world. In the following I’ll be drawing a very boring dot-to-dot picture amounting to one line – from the more recent wardrobe addition, generic white guy politician suit, to the more archaic, but (frankly) fetishized, Cambridge University gown. And when I’m done it’ll just be a line, that’s for sure, but it’ll be a line in the sand for me, and one I won’t be crossing any time soon.
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This is the section where I unreservedly defend the actions of CDE against Willetts as, not least, a challenge to the symbolic order on an institutional level that included and includes the University. In November of 2011 a group of us got together to chase David Willetts out of Lady Mitchell Hall and shut down a talk he was supposed to give on his ‘Idea of the University’. It went swimmingly. For the record, Willetts has already said quite a lot on the subject of the university – and other things besides! But don’t be alarmed, because that tends to be the case when you’re in a senior governmental position. Especially a semi-elected Tory one. Some of his gems have included blaming feminism as the “single biggest factor” in preventing social mobility, justifying batons rounds at protests as “operational decisionmaking”, and urging students not to be frightened of £70,000 debt because it’s just a “lifetime of payments”. This kind of bullshit would be horrifying if it was just some guy with a platform being able to speak his mind to the populace the whole time. But it’s a lot worse than that. Willetts makes policy. His opinions become the facts of people’s lives. I know, right! Outrageous. But that’s democracy! And man do people go crazy about this thing they perceive to be democracy. It must be a very potent set of ideas to convince people to believe in something so hollow and shit such that they would rather speak out against a bunch of students curbing Willetts’ ‘right to free speech’ than offer a word of outrage against his White Paper. I should elaborate on the latter: the White Paper is basically like the apocalypse for the public university. There are more than four horsemen featured so I’ll quit there with that analogy. The White Paper, in the dullest, most insidiously complex and managerial style imaginable, seeks to bankrupt public universities then allow private companies to buy them off and pocket the profits. It seeks to narrow the HE curriculum down to a set of STEM subjects (by financially privileging them re: funding) – STEM stands for science, technology, economics and maths, by the way. It describes students as ‘customers’, it does away with the block grant for the Higher Education Funding Council, it justifies shifting the burden of financing undergraduate degrees by invoking the deficit. It attempts to filter this consumer-focused rhetoric down to high school level: “we want schools and students to understand which GCSE and A-Level choices lead to which degree courses (and ultimately which careers, and what those careers pay)” (2.19). The White Paper is not only shit for everyone, but specifically shit for people who are not rich, white, or male. It favours exactly the demographic that are in power, and bolsters the elitism of already-elitist universities e.g. Cambridge. The subjects that it favours are historically and unchangingly associated with masculinist, ‘rational’, ‘scientific’, and competitive (read: combative) industries and environments. The White Paper is sexist. The government is sexist.
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This is the section where I attempt to tie in my rant against the White Paper with the revulsion I reserve for the habit of gown-flaunting and suit-wearing. When we shut down Willetts there were two types of solidarity in the room. One was between those who were involved in the action and those that supported it. The other was between Willetts and anyone else in there simultaneously wearing some sort of uniform and occupying a position of authority. The indignance of Willetts practically emanated in waves, flapping up the Gandalfian sleeves of Simon Goldhill’s gown (and, indeed, beard). Had I been listening closely and not yelling I may have even detected a splutter. I feel sure that, with the technological equipment of the ilk employed in Frozen Planet, I may have even picked up the dry smacking of a slobberless chop. The conspicuous silence of patriarchy ricocheted off the wood panels and floor. I was glad it was making them uncomfortable. Throughout the evening we remained in the company of uniforms. They filtered out, until finally we were left with ourselves and the building. First went the business suits, then the academic gowns, then the proctorial gowns, then the porters’ suits, then the high-vis security guard jackets. In the week that followed, the democratic mechanisms of the university sprung into life and the spirit of association involved in condemning the lunatic lefties holed up in Lady Mitchell Hall would have made de Tocqueville weep tears of joy. My did we get some angry tweets. Those tweets cut deep. And the emails! The statements of condemnation! We were named totalitarians: freedom of speech had been bludgeoned out by the sickle of authoritarian communism. Simon Goldhill was apparently ‘very upset’. The CUSU president, Gerard Tully, practically cut his own head off with rage and possibly even threatened his own employees with death* if they didn’t try to wipe CDE off the map.
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One academic, celebrated throughout our galaxy (and parts of the universe) for his suave condemnation of the White Paper, was so incensed with our violation of ‘democratic debate’, that he actually MOVED his anti-Willetts talk from the space (that, in case you hadn’t been following, we’d taken from Willetts), because he couldn’t reconcile an ‘Occupied space’ with the idea of a ‘public space’. It was a quotation from this same Rebel Historian in a Guardian article a couple of weeks later that really got me maniacally obsessed with the idea of The Gown as complicit with The Suit. Speaking of last year’s anti-fees occupation of the Old Schools in Cambridge, The Guardian had quoted Rebel Historian mentioning some kind of feeling of security and protection that occupying students and activists had purportedly expressed regarding Rebel Historian’s academic gown. Despite the protestations of the Rebel Historian, apparently the students had wanted him to wear it because it made them feel ‘safe’. Or something like that.
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It is the politics of paternalism behind this idea that makes me feel the most unsafe and the most alienated. It makes me feel scolded and scoldable. It makes me fearful for the potential of continuing my studies unharassed by academic authorities. In the context of the University, the gown serves just the same purpose as the business suit in wider society. It isn’t kooky. It isn’t fun. It’s an embarrassing bastion of a night-patrolling proctorial system that used to lock women lacking a bonnet in a building called the ‘spinning house’ where they were ‘examined’ for evidence of prostitution. And I would like to say loudly and clearly: your title, the letters after your name, the ridiculous Dracula-cape you feel inclined to swoop around in – these things to not automatically make me answerable to you, inferior to you, admonishable or threatenable. And every time I look into the face of a cop, a security guard, a politician, or a banker, that will be my refrain.
Cambridge University has, overwhelmingly, taught me to be deferent. To be ‘awed’. To rein my questions and my comments in because of the ‘prestigious’ position of being in proximity to celebrated academics and thinkers. Cambridge University has taught me to be apologetic for my own curiosity! And to treat that curiosity as audacity! And I don’t want to wait around here for the moment to come that I’m endowed with the inalienable right to speak for myself because I get to walk on a particularly nice patch of grass or dress like a bat. I would like to see more humanity in this place. And by that I literally mean more humans. Humans that can relate to each other without words having to navigate and manoeuvre their way around uniforms and letters and publications. Careerism is not the same as ambition. It is far more vaulting, for a start. And far more hostile to women. It grows by what it feeds on: the consolidation of a prestige that favours a white, cis, male, monied demographic. Let’s defeat the White Paper and start by burning our gowns. Let’s defeat careerism by burning the White Paper.
*this is untrue