Having recognised the futility of awarding people degrees for studying other people’s languages, the absurdity of giving someone a degree for studying their own language is impossible to deny. As English students would say with their penchant for using other people’s words to repeat other people’s thoughts (in most subjects, it is called plagiarism), it follows like “an overwhelming question”.
You cannot award degrees for reading novels, any more than you can for walking barefoot on beaches, having drunken sex with strangers or all the other things people look forward to doing on their holidays when the pressures of real work temporarily abate. Now of course English students will point out that the degree is English Language and Literature (“It’s really two degrees you know”).
If English students did no more than read and repeat what others had written, they would be a mild but bearable irritant. Unfortunately, there is something about the degree itself, or those attracted to study it, which leads them to believe that they are destined to create great literature, as well as to study it. They believe Oxford is a creative food chain, and that just as they have enriched their lives by reading the works of others, so their fellow students can enrich their infinitely poorer lives by suffering their own execrable efforts at poetry, or (if fate is being particularly unkind), their “first” novel. Who has not endured the utter agony of sitting through some adolescent sonnet, wondering what on earth can be said at the end which isn’t too rude but will firmly close off the prospect of any more readings from their Moleskine exercise book of horrors.
An observer sitting in the lecture hall might notice something rather odd – uncanny, one might say – all the English students look the same. There are broad types of course: our female English students comprising of the long-haired, Keatsian Romantics or alternatively the post-modernist “fuck the canon” look with the piercings and doc-martins to prove it. The male English students are even easier to predict: I’m looking at you slightly-stubbly specs-man, with the ankle boots and leather satchel.
As with all the degrees considered for exclusion, there are entries on the credit side of the ledger as well as debits. No other subject can have contributed so much high quality hair to the Oxford scene. Certainly no other set of students can have committed so much love and care to their own hair. The sight of English finalists walking to Schools shaking their locks in a light breeze is one of nature’s great events, the image of lions in the Serengeti coming irresistibly to mind.
And they would have greeted the original title for these articles – “Six Degrees for Separation” – with a smug nod of recognition rather than the look of blank incomprehension it actually received. But these are mere makeweights in the overall balance. If it makes it any easier, they can be given the satisfaction of choosing their own epitaph from whatever they happen to be studying, but the knell of parting day has tolled for English nonetheless.
