St Edmund Hall makes the news?

Damian Cugley’s Weblog

My former college, St Edmund Hall, has made the news: The Daily Telegraph published an article about the alcoholic bingeing of its students—or rather, an inaccurate report of an alcohol ban (as pointed out by Oxford Student). This was picked up by Today (and BBCi, which claims SEH has cloisters and a front gate resembling Queen’s?) and the Guardian:

Yesterday, St Edmund Hall, reputed to be the booziest of the Oxford colleges, lifted its ban on alcohol - a measure imposed after puke levels threatened to overwhelm the place in the manner of the sea after global warming. While registering the unseemliness of posh students pissing (literally) away their tuition fees, the tone of the media coverage was largely nostalgic. Here were students doing what they do best: getting wrecked and falling over, in the long and proud tradition of British undergraduate life. (Emma Brockes, in the Guardian Unlimited)

SEH is not unique in suffering from puking outbreaks and loutish behaviour by drunks. They just made the news because they belatedly tried to do something about it.

There is a somewhat desperate attempt to invoke nostalgia for Brideshead Revisited (it was even cited in the Torygraph headline), which must be a bit annoying for the growing minority of Oxford students who are not privately educated. Any connection between traditionally ‘hearty’ Teddy Hall and alcoholic binges is more likely to do with rowing and rugby than the sort of refined chap who has a teddy bear and valet.

The sordid truth is that students today (Oxford no exception) are doing what young Britons have been doing since forever, which is drinking as much booze as they can afford. Despite taxes, the real cost of drinking as a proportion of income has declined markedly over the years. As a result, instead of grimly nursing a single pint all evening, your average 18-year-old can afford to drink a crate or two of alcopops in a sitting. They can also afford to go out drinking several nights a week. It’s not as if eking out one’s grant to last the rest of term is a meaningful goal these days...

My suggestion for addressing the increasing problem of young men relieving themselves in the streets is a shaming campaign. Perhaps signs inside the exits to pubs and clubs saying ‘Mother says: Go before you Go, boys!’ and spot fines for public urination (you would need unusually bold police officers to enforce that one, however).

And those people who keep going on about how getting legless is an essential part of student life can be drafted on to clean-up duty.

10 March 2003