The News From The Dark Blues

Oxford charged headfirst into a row over the Vice Chancellor’s pay this week, with one bemused Trotskyite branding it “disgusting.”

Andy Hamilton, already notorious for his penchant of strutting dramatically around college quads in Matrix sunglasses, earns a whopping £180,000 more than the poor bastard who runs Cambridge, a miserable pauper by comparison.

What’s the difference? About £200k a year.

Lefties were outraged at the discovery and, much arm-waving and crying all night ensued at the hotbed of liberal values that is Wadham College.  Meanwhile, everyone else marvelled at the striking similarities between the Oxford and Cambridge VCs, which triggered an impromptu debate outside the Oxford Union about whether all universities are in fact run by a mutant race of bald, dome-headed middle-aged aliens.

Meanwhile the formidable Department of Psychiatry has discovered the sound of babies crying makes adults better at playing Whack-A-Mole. More depressing than the fact the study actually took place was students’ reaction to the dreadful shambles, with one poor girl at Teddy Hall claiming she was “enriched” by the experience and several others hammering on the department’s door to get their hands on the journal it was published in.

Elsewhere, history students were paralyzed with fear when they logged onto Wikipedia bleary-eyed earlier this week to discover what one finalist called a “black void staring into his soul.” The University’s counselling helpline phones were off the hook all day, and one poor unfortunate was even spotted hovering over the side of Magdalen bridge, raving and screaming about the Holy Roman Empire and how if the bloody interwebz fascists didn’t give it back he was going to jump. Or so I’ve heard from a reliable source.

On a more optimistic note St John’s have finally decided that it would be a good idea to pay their scouts (bedders) enough money to buy food and pay the rent – though don’t tell the good news to any of the college’s cigar-chomping Thatcherites or you’ll never get out alive – and speaking of Thatcher, the University is divided once again over whether to name a faculty building over her. I won’t explain any further than that because what I said about her in our paper almost got me demoted.

In other news, the antiquated practise of de-bagging enjoyed a brief but amusing Renaissance at Hugh Grant-favourite The Kings Arms, though whether the prominent phone hacking “victim” had anything to do with it remains to be confirmed.

And on that note: peace out, chaps.