A rather unnecessarily large number of people appear to have a problem with Corpus’ University Challenge winning captain Gail Trimble. But the prevailing opinion that she is rather ‘smug’ is not only a rather sad one to have, it’s just plain wrong.

You’d think that if anyone would find her to be so, it would be her teammates – but they are genuinely baffled by this response. One teammember, Lauren Schwartzman, sees in Trimble a strong and genuine leader, who encouraged the rest of the group and fostered a comfortable, successful atmosphere.
Yet still, most of us don’t know her personally, and the criticism remains bizarrely disproportionate. We must remember that UC is edited as much as any other programme, and that answering a question right is always going to raise a smile.
People watch University Challenge to see contestants answer questions and to try and have a go at them themselves. Criticism would be much better aimed at those which fail to get any right, who fail at succeeding in doing what the show is there for.

Trimble is good at answering questions. Bloody good. Yet her levels of success are hardly those that appear to have gone to her head. For all the articles written about her as far and wide as the national press, there isn’t an arrogant word of hers present in any of them. And she turned down Nuts.
Quite frankly if I was as good at something as Gail Trimble is at quizzes, I’d feel entitled to be rather smug. So lets shift focus away from her apparent persona and celebrate her success instead.

Chris Patten’s argument for a sliding scale on tuition fees rather resembles the reasoning behind progressive taxation: the rich pay more to cover the poor, reducing inequalities in income and wealth and so on so forth. Sensible right?
Well, it would be if those that were coming to university were those with the money, but they’re not. A student entering university is usually at least 18, an adult, and supposedly embarking on a life of self sufficiency which should no longer require parental fiscal support.

Parents are at this point no longer required to fund their children, and some of course won’t. But the fact that some parents wouldn’t continue to support their children isn’t really the point, because by the time their child has progressed from child to adult they shouldn’t be encouraged to.

The tuition fees are taken on by the students themselves, paying them back according to their own futures, and rightly so. Encouraging the richer parents to pay more than others for university would be to reinforce the incorrect opinion that their success should continue to be funded by where they come from and not who they are.

University is one of society’s great levellers, because students are removed from their individual backgrounds and dropped into a place where their futures are decided upon their own decisions and abilities. Or to put it another way, their achievements are based upon merit, something Patten rightly thinks is rather important.Asking parents to fund the gap in a difference in tuition fees encourages division, apathy and an attitude which states that life will always be easy, because mummy and daddy can make it so.

Students graduating from university come out largely equally in debt, a debt which should be encouraged to be removed by themselves to support the notions that personal drive and hard work are the tools which will bring one’s one success, something that would benefit not just individuals, but the whole country.

Indeed what would stop the university admitting students on the basis of their parent’s wealth? If the financiers had a gap to fill and a way to do it, it would hardly be surprising to see them do it. Patten’s concept sounds great in principle, echoing a progressive ideal rightly enforced across society. But if a culture of meritocracy is most important, differences in tuition fees must be avoided.

Geraint Anderson, city analyst turned rogue, knows the high life. His recently published book, Cityboy: Beer And Loathing in the Square Mile, exposes the high-flying life of those working in the Square Mile, from £1,000 meals to insider trading—via drugs and a lot of drinks.

One of the few to break the City’s code of silence, Anderson maintains he ‘slipped through the net’ of the city by mistake. He was brought up left wing by his father, a Labour MP and peer, and a Christian by his missionary mother. While he insists he found his job and the general City culture ‘incredibly tedious and offensive,’ he certainly embraced the lifestyle for a number of years. He quit his job at Dresdner Kleinwort from a beach in Goa with a joint in one hand, pina colada in the other, hours after pocketing his largest bonus yet, a mere £500,000.

Anderson was at this point writing a notorious column for thelondonpaper: Cityboy, targeting the culture and excesses of the City. ‘[It was] confessional and an opportunity to vent my vitriol,’ he remarks. ‘If I hadn’t done it I’d probably have gone fucking mental.’ He didn’t know if he was about to be fired for  writing the column and continuing to work for the company, or awarded his annual bonus.

At a time when high-level bonuses have become infamous and symbolic of all that is wrong with the City, Anderson confirmed the notion that the bonus culture is the primary cause of the credit crunch.

‘The City and Wall Street became wild west casinos with everyone trying to make as much money as quickly as possible, thinking that the whole shebang, caboodle, whatever, was going to be falling down at any minute. The whole emphasis is to make money.’ Even since the publication of Liar’s Poker in the 1980’s, the original exposé of city life at Salomon Bros., Anderson thinks the city has developed a dangerous ‘get rich quick, anything goes’ attitude. He believes that the asymmetrical risk of the bonuses is to blame for much of the current economic situation—if you make money you keep some of it, if you lose it there’s little by way of a penalty. But the main problem is too short-term an outlook.

His answer to the bonus furore, now that he no longer benefits from it, is tighter regulation and longer-term incentives so that bankers don’t get rewarded for short-term gambles that may later backfire. ‘The whole system needs to change. Pressure can come from politicians and regulators, but ultimately its shareholders who need to say, “We want our long term interests looked after.”’
‘The electorate’ll go insane,’ he notes, ‘if there’s another credit crunch where it’s clear the bankers are to blame.’ The government has to change something, but there’s only so much they can do.

‘Whatever government, either Tory or Labour, is going to be unwilling to regulate too tightly, they’re going to be unwilling to change market forces too much because Thatcherism won many years ago. It’s a question of tweaking the system so you don’t just get idiots driving around in Porsches snorting  cocaine.’

There’s a limit to possible changes that can be made to bonuses and the surrounding culture though. ‘You don’t do the job for the love of the job,’ Anderson points out. ‘I don’t think you do the job because you think you’re doing the world some good; I don’t think you do it for the creative fulfilment; You do it for the money.’

His experience of the city, and he does charitably concede that there are some half-decent people working there to earn a good living, is that people assess their self worth on the size of their bonus. ‘Basically, it’s just “who’s got the biggest penis?” And its pathetic.’

He cites an apocryphal story that Goldman Sachs used to look for people who’d been bullied at school ‘because they’ve got the drive necessary to stay up ‘till all hours going through the minutia of various tedious deals so they can buy the yellow Ferrari Testarossa. It’s insecurity that’s the main driving force in the city.’He comments on the divide in the City culture: on the one hand life is racy, hedonistic and unruly; on the other, its becoming more professional probably due to the complexity of the products being sold.

‘One of the reasons I had to leave was my USP was to get clients drunk, take them out to clubs, parties, whatever, strip joints. You know.And there was a new breed of these tedious graduate trainees who had wanted to be hedge fund managers since they were about ninr years old—you know, wasted their lives trying to get there. And they’re really boring and really dull, and they’re professional and they knew about spreadsheets. They took the fun out of it, and so it became that my ability to charm clients was becoming less and less important.’

Reflecting on whether he’d recommend working in the City, I think there’s a part of him that still misses the excitement.  He likens working in the City to working as a bank robber. You’re constantly telling yourself ‘just one more job, just one more bonus.’ But he maintains that ‘suddenly you’re 50, an alcoholic, drug addict, weirdo, red-faced loser. And I didn’t want to become that.’

His broader point on the fruitlessness of the City was thought provoking. ‘The one good thing from the credit crunch is that the City won’t just suck up all the talent this country has to offer by offering vast rewards. Because that’s been tragic, and I’m sure society has suffered from the fact that people who should have been curing cancer or sorting out global warming instead have been pushing around bits of paper. Graduate trainees, or graduates from Oxford, might now be forced to do something more worthwhile with their lives.’

‘Recessions produce great music and they produce great art,’ he considers, on the other upsides to a recession. ‘People maybe start thinking a little less about the next pair of trainers they can buy or the best car they can buy. And might start thinking about things that are free, love or sex or things that are free that give you pleasure and give you fulfilment. And apart from that people’ll stop fucking talking about property prices at dinner parties.’

What is Unique about All Souls?

It is often said that All Souls is unique because it has no students. This is incorrect. One category of fellowship, the Prize Fellowship, is open to people who have recently completed an undergraduate degree or recently registered for a postgraduate course: six current Prize Fellows are graduate students. All Souls is, however, unique in that all members of the College are Fellows, and are therefore full voting members of the Governing Body. Unlike at most Colleges, several Fellows’ main work is outwith academia: current and recent Fellows include politicians, lawyers, novelists and an internet entrepreneur. The College believes that people working in such fields are enriched by contact with academia, and that academia is enriched by contact with them. The Prize Fellowship is a further distinctive feature of All Souls. The Fellowship lasts for seven years and Prize Fellows can choose whether to do academic work or to pursue another career. The flexibility and duration of the Prize Fellowship makes it an unparalleled opportunity for people early in their careers.

How do you become a Fellow of All Souls?

There are several categories of Fellowship. The selection procedure for each category of Fellowship is different, but all appointments are made on merit and all Fellowships are open to both women and men. As at other colleges and universities, Senior Research Fellows and Post-Doctoral Research Fellows are chosen on the basis of their proposals for future research and their record of academic achievement.

Some University Professorships and Lectureships are associated with All Souls. Prize Fellows are selected after a written examination, which is held at the end of the summer vacation. Candidates write essays in response to questions on their area of academic work. There is also a general component to the examination, and one paper involves writing an essay in response to a single word (e.g. bias, water, harmony). Copies of past papers are available on the College website. The written examination is used to draw up a shortlist of candidates for interview.

Many people think that you need to receive some kind of invitation to sit the Prize Fellowship examination – this is not true. Anyone who meets the eligibility criteria set out on the College website can apply. The College is concerned that relatively few women choose to sit the Prize Fellowship examination. To encourage potential female candidates to inform themselves about the College and the Fellowship, an open evening for women will be held on Friday 13 March (eighth week) from 5pm to 7pm in the Old Library.

What do Fellow of All Souls do?

Most Fellows spend the majority of their time doing academic research. All Souls has particular strengths in History and Law, but there are Fellows working in a broad range of fields in both sciences and humanities. Many Fellows also teach or supervise students from other colleges and give a variety of lectures and seminars for the University as a whole. Fellows who work outwith academia play an important role in the governance of the College and participate from time to time in academic activities (e.g. conferences) that relate to their area of employment. Fellows who are not engaged on academic work receive minimal payment from the College.

Are there any strange traditions at All Souls?

Most, if not all, colleges have their own peculiar traditions, and All Souls is no exception. Legend has it that, when the College’s foundations were being dug, an enormous mallard flew out of a drain where it had been trapped for many years. The mallard became a College symbol and the ‘Mallard Song’ is sung by Fellows on a few College occasions. In 1801, there was a procession to mark the new century. This involved Fellows marching around the College with blazing torches and singing the Mallard Song; a mallard was carried on a pole. The event was repeated in 1901 and 2001, but fortunately no animal is now involved!