My advice to literary hopefuls at university

Here's a tricky one. The literature editor of that great Cambridge magazine Varsity has been in touch. He is asking writers who were students at Cambridge to contribute a short piece recollecting their time at the university and "how it contributed to their later literary career". The aim of the article would be "to show that 'Cambridge' can still be a source of inspiration rather than just a set of body texts and dead authors". Revealing a firmer grip of financial reality than of the dreary, spelling side of literature, he concludes that the piece would "necessarily be unrenumerated".

In spite of the unrenumeration, I shall of course reply. Cambridge, or perhaps that should be "Cambridge", has been rather on my mind since I read an interview with Matthew Parris, who must have been at Clare College at about the same time as I was attending Trinity. I am aware that he was not particularly attracted to women, but Parris claimed to have had a difficult time in his social life, forever being forced to turn down the advances of eager female undergraduates. One was so keen on him that he was obliged to escape from her across the rooftops of Clare.

Now this is all very bizarre and upsetting. Shamefully, any true account for Varsity of my three years at Cambridge would recall one simple, miserable fact, above all: it was a time of sexual famine. The male-to-female ration among undergraduates was four to one, and the few women who were available were monopolised by those swaggering, God-like, confident men who somehow managed to talk and touch and laugh with women, almost as if they were just other human beings.

For the rest of us, virginity hung in the air like a grey, persistent fog. Although it was the late sixties and the great atmosphere of liberation was celebrated in Varsity – "SO GROOVY IT'S POOVY, SO CURVY IT'S PERVY" as one headline had it – the action was always elsewhere.

It was said at the time that the unusually high incidence of suicide among male students was caused, above all, by sheer sexual frustration, a fact that offered a sort of grim comfort for all the other virgins – at least there were one or two other people who were in an even worse state of frustration than we were.

And yet there was Parris, down the road at Clare, fighting them off, shinning up drainpipes and skipping over walls to escape a keening horde of randy women. Even now, it seems terribly unfair.

Is this insight worth sharing with today's readers of Varsity? Probably not. If those ravenous years contributed to my later literary career, as they probably did, it would be in a murky, subliminal way that I would prefer not to explore. Besides, modern students hardly seem to be in need of advice in that area – most of them appear to be at it like monkeys, lucky devils.

On the other hand, it might be sensible to point up another lesson that I learnt from my university career. Almost as retarded educationally as I was socially, I arrived at university from a woeful boarding school with a dutiful, unimaginative, exam-based attitude towards work. It took me two years to realise that reading texts for English, attending supervisions and lectures and writing essays were not simply the dull duties of university life, but that I could actually enjoy them.

To suggest that one of the most important aspects of those three or four years is the freedom they offer to explore, to have fun culturally and intellectually, may seem obvious, but here at least we seem not to have moved on. To judge from what secondary school teachers are saying about the national curriculum, about the obsession with grading, with league tables and exam results, this may well mean that many of those starting their university careers this month will be as brainwashed in their attitude to study as I once was.

The new, modular structure of the A-level system favours a detailed, fact-based approach to small and particular areas of learning, and it makes wider exploration and connections impossible. This week the historian Simon Schama has claimed that students reach university "historically illiterate", thanks to the obsession with assessment and exams. "The modules only teach pupils Hitler and Henrys with nothing inbetween... Children often want to follow up a history programme they have seen on television, but the curriculum won't allow it."

Back at Cambridge University, the head of the history faculty has confirmed that new students arrive with a detailed knowledge of certain periods and themes, but unfortunately they "know little of the sweep of history".

It would be sad if, like a few of the less worldly students of 25 years ago, today's undergraduates are educated to associate study with fact and detail, with the gaining of grades. Somehow I would like to squeeze that idea into my account of the inspiration of "Cambridge" for the readers of Varsity. Don't be oppressed by exams, I want to tell them, or by the need to get the right qualification. Over the next three or four years, fun, adventure and experimentation are too important to be kept to your private life – they can part of your studies, too.

terblacker@aol.com