It is not a nice thing that happened to the Dean of the Science on Friday, obviously, and I have no doubt that the Court will take the appropriate view of it, as well as assessing the evidence in all its aspects, including the allegation made that a student was thumped as well.

This said, could we please have less pompousness from the worthy academics about the graduation celebrations that are going on? I quote from the Times, itself quoting Dr Montebello, the President of UMASA, the lecturers' trade union. He said action had to be taken before someone was killed. Lecturers were fearing students and locking themselves up in their offices.

"Action had to be taken before someone was killed" for Heaven's sake.

You see, graduands are going around taking pot-shots with their AK47s, trying to pick off any lecturer they spot who was foolhardy enough not to barricade himself in his office. And then we have marauding bands of students, equipped with lynching ropes, hollering "I spy a lecturer" and charging off after him, to string him up from the Library honeycomb.

The thing is, with this sort of portentous pronouncement, the academics, who distinguished themselves by their abject silence when their boss took us back to the mid-60's with his clampdown on heinous pornography, are making themselves look terribly foolish. It's bad enough that virtually every address made by a graduand at the ceremonies is pointing the finger at absentee lecturers and at the boring and unexciting content spouted out by rote by the ones who bother to turn up, we now have the academics as a body giving the impression that they'd rather that the University was left free of pesky students.

Lighten up, guys, you too were students once, though perhaps not of the more exuberant variety. If you were, I'd probably know some of you: the injured Dean, for instance, is of my vintage, but I've no recollection of him.

Perhaps he used to take refuge in the library in those days.