The students we deserve?

It was only a matter of time before a student ended up in court in connection with over-zealous celebrations and last week the sad fact came to pass. It is for a court to establish the circumstances, but what cannot be contested is that a University dean ended up with serious injuries.

This action can only be unreservedly condemned. More so when it takes place within the grounds of an institution that is all about teaching people not so much a specific subject, but to use their faculty of reason. This means advancing argument through the use of words, not fists. Euphoria or drunkenness is no excuse.

No one would begrudge a student commemorating a happy moment like graduation. They are more than entitled to celebrate such a momentous event in their lives. However, it is the mode of celebration being chosen by students that should be questioned. Not just by the man in the street, but by the students themselves.

Renting a private space and doing whatever they please there would be a very understandable way of giving vent to their sense of achievement. That is the kind of thing a number of students would do abroad.

But marching around the University precincts as well as Valletta chanting, blowing whistles, sounding foghorns and generally irritating anyone they happen to come into contact with is behaviour one would more readily associate with a Third Form school-outing-gone-wrong than students from the highest seat of learning.

It is not just a complete departure from the rational and reason, but it is worryingly immature and as well as being a rather pathetic reflection on a University that deserves better.

There are, no doubt, several reasons why students behave in this manner. Perhaps the most compelling is that they have never fully appreciated what going to university should be about.

While it is good to excel in a chosen subject, university should be an experience that is much deeper than that: learning how to interact with others, getting involved in new things, and using it as the link between the mollycoddled school atmosphere and the harsh working world are equally, if not more, important.

It has to be said that students in Malta are at a disadvantage; which is that the geographical proportions of the island do not allow them to branch out by themselves and take the well-trodden road abroad to independence. In fact, most continue to live at home where all their domestic needs are catered for.

To boot they are provided with money by the state. It is not just their course fees that are covered by public funds, a concept abroad which has long been under revision; but they are even given spending money, a concept that elsewhere has long been abandoned.

This is not just making it too convenient for them, but it is also unsustainable in the economic times we are living. Our myopic, vote-catching political parties are unwilling to acknowledge this.

But there is more. Even students’ concept of the graduation process itself seems to be flawed. Rather than seeing it, like their compatriots abroad do, as the moment when they flee the university nest, they use the occasion – through totally superfluous speeches by students on the big day – to attack what they see as the shortcomings of the institution.

If they had any difficulties, the time to tackle them was during their time there, not while they are marching out. Graduation is about saying ‘thank you’, ‘goodbye’ and ultimately growing up. Preferably without displaying any of the pains that should have been left behind during adolescence.