FIRST, an important statistic: Of all the chumps holding house parties where police intervened last weekend, only one in 10 involved students.
Alcohol and rationality are not best pals, and you can be stupid and selfish at absolutely any age. (Guilty as charged, but not in a Covid-related way.)
However, students have dominated the news cycles of late for all the obvious reasons.
First off, thousands of them fetched up at universities from every corner of the UK, some corners of which had a high rate of infection. Some of them were billeted in student accommodation which was designed for 12.
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In a normal world, quite a civilised way of letting young folks make new friends and have ready made company. Nothing of course is normal right now.
Freshers’ Week – a euphemism for social excesses with bits and bobs of useful info attached – was not so much a pale shadow of its usual self, but an interlude of which a closed religious order might have been proud.
Nevertheless, not getting to the pub one weekend, having to stay put for two weeks’ isolation, is not the worst ever thing in the world. Ask the folks with sad, lonely relations in care homes who’ve been waiting six months for a hug from a member of their family.
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I get that this is not the university experience that people signed up and paid for. And certainly online teaching is no substitute for face-to-face lectures cheek by jowl with your fellow learners.
The thing is, everyone is having to cope with all manner of substitutes for real life right now. It’s tough if you’re 17 and away from home for the first time, and it’s tough if you’re 27 and not allowed into your workplace. It’s not funny if you’re 37, 47, or 57 and find that your furlough period was merely a delayed redundancy.
So I’m not in the market for blaming the universities unduly – whilst hoping their motivation wasn’t just a financial one. Nor blaming students for wanting to do what everyone else did as teenagers. It’s just life under Covid. And nobody is getting a free pass.
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