Joe Miles Week 6: Why does no one here give a shit about their degree?

First, I would like to offer my apologies for my complete and utter failure to submit anything simultaneously rage-inducing and woefully inaccurate last week. I’d say that I was being talent scouted by The Daily Mail, but in reality I was just being lazy. This is normally only a problem which concerns my degree.

Hands on heart, who here has never had a week, term, or even an entire academic career at Oxford where they frankly stopped giving a shit? Let’s face it, the only reason that you’d ever be reading The Tab right now is because Philosophy and Theology, or Ancient Minoan, or Blindfolded Upholstery is somehow even more boring than some irrelevant wank about who managed to turn up to Bridge or Wahoo that week dressed like an normal human being.

Very few people I know in any way give the impression that studying here- a privilege for which they will pay double the median annual salary of this country to enjoy- is something that they take remotely seriously. Whereas at my old school I would have looked upon such behaviour with disdain, now I am more than happy to boast of such behaviour myself.

What on earth leads to this? Why, when you gather the brightest minds in the country in a single institution, do those bright minds decide that anything, from writing pretentious articles on training llamas to appreciate Noh plays on your gap yah in Isis, to trying to stick two fingers up to the NUS, is preferable to the very subject that got them there in the first place?

I mean, I spent over 400 quid on a keytar. That’s more than I’ve spent on any textbooks here in my life. Admittedly that’s because the only thing I touch on my reading list are 20 page PDFs, but still.

Money well spent

I think it’s because Oxford, for a lot of people, is a chance for oddballs to actually have a social life. At your old school, if you wanted to write some pretentious bollocks in whatever passed for your magazines that only five people would read then you would presumably get a good ribbing in between having your head flushed down the toilets. However, here we have a society that allows you to run around on a broomstick pretending to be a wizard. We’ve taken all the weirdoes that Britain has to offer, given them easy access to alcohols and fellow weirdoes, and yelled “Supermarket sweep!”.

If you’ve spent the last near two decades of your life reading the same damn thing over and over again, then once you have the chance to meet other human beings who are willing to love and accept you for how gloriously, uniquely strange you are, the last thing on your mind will be acquiring any more information on the bowel habits of the House of Plantagenet.

We should be pleased that nobody takes their degree seriously here. After all,  it’s a sign that people who have often not quite fitted in have found somewhere where they can be who they actually are, without fear of repercussion. Oxford doesn’t just provide an education. It provides a vital social service.