"The cocktail of undiluted testosterone mixed with too much alcohol and sudden liberation from school discipline has long been a fraught one" ... St John's College. Photo: Supplied
IN THE wake of the disgrace of St John's College in recent days and months, it is not surprising horror stories have emerged from all parts and times past, about the wretched excess that can be a part of college life: the ribald rituals, the sexist attitudes, the sense that on a bad day hordes of Hooray Henrys and Henriettas can run amok. As one of the Fellows of the Senate of Sydney University, I not only applaud moves to curb these excesses in the modern era, but am a part of the process.
But are such rituals and excesses the substance of college life? That was not remotely my experience, and I don't believe it is the experience of most who go to such colleges.
As one who lived at Wesley College for three glorious years from 1980, and who has been closely associated with it since, I am strongly of the view that most colleges are fantastic places to be, and provide more than their fair share of the backbone of the university. Other students come and go, but the college students are of the university and - living together on campus cheek by jowl by towel for nine months of the year - they not only form extraordinarily tight and enduring bonds with one another, but also with the university itself.
Was there the odd ritual while I was there? Of course. And some of them involved heavy drinking. An obligatory dunking in the Turtle Pond in your first weeks in college comes to mind, something I helped do with others when I was no longer a "fresher". (That is, until we got to fresher Dolph Lundgren in 1981 - now the Hollywood action star - who refused to be so dunked. Just that once, we decided to let him off.) There was also "Fresher walkabout" where, in the company of another fresher you were dropped somewhere well out of Sydney with no money and no food and told to get home.
More pleasantly, in the first weeks, all the fresher men were taken out on a collective "date," with the older female students, while the fresher women were similarly taken out by the older men.
It was all part of the college students getting to know each another, and becoming whole as a group. Similarly, in the Wallabies there had been rituals of welcome, whereby a system of mock "fines" was imposed on those whose behaviour did not fit in with the ethos of the collective. For those not a part of it, some of these rituals can sound like what they are - childish nonsense - but they nevertheless serve the purpose of getting new arrivals integrated into "the tribe".
In my college experience, no such rituals involved heavy sexism as - I kid you not - for the last 40 years Wesley has been noted as a place where strong women abound and we Wesley blokes weren't allowed to be too sexist.
Not surprisingly, the worst of the excesses over the years have come from the all-male colleges, as the cocktail of undiluted testosterone mixed with too much alcohol and sudden liberation from school discipline has long been a fraught one.
These places are not mere dormitories as is the case on many American campuses, but wonderfully independent institutions with long histories and great traditions that have produced wonderful citizens who have made great contributions.
They have the capacity to change their own cultures, as we have seen with St Andrew's, particularly, and are now seeing with St John's. They will go on. And prosper. Independently.
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