This country is blessed, when you think about it.

In other member states, university students get all hot and bothered and lob gas cylinders off the roof at assorted members of the constabulary, when they are told that the fees they pay are going to have to go up.

Here, on the other hand, university students, who are paid to be university students, get all hot and bothered and lob virtual missives through Facebook when they are told by one of their profs that they should pay attention in class and stop using their laptops.

I teach a few hundred students every year and, from my part, I couldn't give a toss whether they pay attention, play with their laptops (or anything or anyone else, for that matter), have a snooze or even turn up at all. All I ask, demand, in fact, sometimes with menaces, is that they do whatever they want to do quietly and without disturbing the poor nerds who actually want to listen to what I have to say.

If they find my lectures boring, equally I don't give a toss. I'm not there to amuse a bunch of teenagers with the attention span of a mosquito: if they don't like it, they can go and complain to whoever it is one complains to about being bored. Back in my day, chunter, chunter, we didn't care about being bored and no-one in particular cared if we were bored: we just had to produce exam scripts at the end of the year that got us through to the next, which is par for the course.

But that doesn't mean that the prof concerned wasn't within his rights to demand that the people who turn up should pay attention: it's his class and he runs it, and there's an end to it. The spoilt brats who find his delivery boring or whatever needn't turn up and if that means they don't get their stipend, well, tough, guys, there's no such thing as a free lunch. I'm not even sure how this attendance lark works, are there actually Uni profs who sit there like primary school marms and read off names? Have they no self respect?

When you think about it, it seems that the academic body doesn't really believe in having a backbone. When the Magnificent Rector started that prosecution about the dirty words, the halls of academe did not light up with torches shone in defence of freedom of expression, artistic or otherwise, to say nothing about treating students as adults.

Of more recent vintage is the deafening silence that greeted the revelation of one of their colleagues' rather crude attitude towards women. It was reported that Prof. Pirotta, and not Joe of that clan, who had taught me English (for his sins), had surmised on Facebook that it was their hormones, to say nothing of the effects of their menstrual cycles, that inspired a number of female opinion writers (unsurprisingly those whose admiration for Joseph Muscat is limited in the extreme)

If it had been I who had put this thought into the public domain, the Renee Lavieras and Helena Dallis of this world would, quite rightly, have drawn themselves up into the full majesty of their feminism and pilloried me.

But because Godfrey Pirotta is a man of the Left, nary a peep was forthcoming.