At a university reunion recently, my friends and I cornered the dean in charge of pastoral care and tried to make him tell us how much cooler we had been than students these days. We had heard they had no sex, did no drugs, never went out, spent all day in the library and all night applying for internships with accountancy firms. We must have been so difficult to control, we said, in a smug, self-satisfied way. Life must be easier for him now.
“Actually, you were all quite sweet,” he said crushingly. It was the new crop of first years that were the real challenge. In fact, they were tougher to manage than any group he had come across before; it started with horrendous bullying and got worse from there. The trouble was, he said, they were immature: he was having to treat them more like 16-year-olds than the 18- and 19-year-olds they were.
