This is a short (really!) account of why everyone in Corpus detests our Senior Tutor. For easier navigation you can click on any of the links below to jump to the relevant section, or click on the 'Back' buttons to return to the top.
Dr Kelly is a lecturer and Director of Studies in
Classics. He is Australian, although he was educated in Cambridge (Trinity
College, I think). Previous to becoming Director of Studies, he was Dean of
College, the man responsible for discipline. Here he built up a reputation for over-the-top
punishments dispensed seemingly at a whim, such as large fines for minor
offences, often given to students in severe financial
difficulty. He especially enjoyed exercising his authority to close the college
bar, the main social focus of college, for such reasons as 'the jukebox was too
loud' and 'one person got too drunk'. Yet the powers that he had as Dean of
College became dissatisfactory - he craved for more...
Until Christmas 1999, our Senior Tutor was Dr Paul Beattie. By no means adored, he was nonetheless respected by the students for at least seeming to care about us. Yet after only three years in office, Dr Beattie was maneuvered out of his job, 'choosing' to leave due to Corpus' dismal performance in the Baxter Tables - an unofficial yet immensely important league table of Cambridge colleges..
It is interesting to note, however, that while for the first two years of Beattie's reign Corpus lay at the bottom of the league table, in his third year we rose spectacularly, reaching 6th in the University. The league table is weighted to make finalists' results the most significant. So the only group of students over which Beattie had responsibility over for the whole of their degrees were the ones responsible for Corpus' amazing success. Yet he left because he was 'failing'.
Thus I suspect the real reason why Dr Beattie was asked to leave was because he failed not academically, but politically. He alienated himself from the rest of the Fellowship by taking his role as the undergraduates' representative and advocate to the Fellows too seriously. In fact, towards the end of his office he became useless as our representative, because any opinion of ours that he supported was rejected out of hand by the Fellows, without consideration.
So despite Kelly's fearsome reputation for irrationality,
Corpus students cautiously welcomed his promotion to Senior Tutor - he was very
clearly a highly accomplished politician, and so would never fall into the same
trap that Beattie had of alienating himself from the Fellows. In that respect, we were absolutely
right.
The most important issue in Cambridge this year was the Access Issue. Essentially, an influential group of University bigwigs published recommendations that rents should increase in Cambridge to match rents at other universities across the country. This report (the "Bursars' Report" - see here) was published in 1997, but was highlighted for the first time at the end of 1999 when King's College authorities attempted to whack up room rents by about 40% without any warning. This, understandably, pissed off a lot of people.
So the pissed off people went and had a look at this report (which was being blamed for the rent increases), and discovered that it was, frankly, complete rubbish. The list of things wrong with its conclusions is too long to mention here (try here), but the most important (politically), was the fact that they had completely disregarded the effects a big increase in living costs might have on access to Cambridge for applicants from poor backgrounds.
So this became the ideological basis for a huge
University-wide protest against rent increases, including rent strikes (i.e.
withholding rent payments from colleges) in many colleges.
From Corpus' point of view, students had a good deal. Student representatives had negotiated an agreement with the college several years ago, whereby rent increases would be phased in gradually over a long time, thus not significantly disadvantaging any one year group of students.
In the light of the University-wide uproar, however, the issue was re-examined and it was realised that the access people had a point. The Bursar's Report was complete bullshit, and although nobody presently in Corpus minded paying a little bit extra to be here, it seemed incredibly stupid to raise rents (and thus put off cool clever people from coming here simply for financial reasons) if there was no need.
So a large minority of Corpus students (yes, including me)
decided to join the argument, and pressed for more openness from the college
about how necessary these rent increases really were. Unsurprisingly, they
ignored us. So, at the beginning of Lent Term 2000, about a quarter of Corpus
students (yes, including me) went on rent strike.
The rent strike pissed the college off. Not for financial reasons, of course (Corpus is astonishingly rich, which raises the interesting question of why it needs to raise rents...) but because we got into the papers, and so were making Corpus look bad. Luckily for the Fellows, they had a new hero, Dr Chris Kelly, whose appointment at a time of student unrest gave him the perfect opportunity to prove how much better he was at handling us than Dr Beattie.
Even better, Kelly was now the arbiter between two apparently opposing factions - the students and Fellows. He thus had two options:
1) Fulfill his role as student advocate by mediating between the groups, conveying to the Fellows that in fact we were not protesting against them, but for a principle. Try and present our opinions to the Fellows in a manner that showed that the last thing we wanted was to upset them.
2) Sit in the middle playing both groups off each other, generating misinformation in order to make himself look good.
He picked option 2. That was bad.
The Access Issue was upsetting a lot Fellows, but we were in danger of starting to persuade some of them that we weren't just rebellious idiots, despite Kelly's best efforts. This was naturally unacceptable, so Kelly demonstrated his political genius by closing the college bar.
If there is one thing guaranteed to raise the red mist in a group of students, it is to close their bar. I suspect that that is a constant across all cultures - probably even species. Yet he did. Well he didn't close it entirely, just for half the week, and changing bar hours so that it was open in the mornings instead of the evenings. He decided to call the bar the 'Corpus Cafe', and banned alcohol from it for all but about half an hour a day. In a letter he said that his reasons were:
1) People were drinking too much
2) There was a 'bar culture' in Corpus (i.e. people spent a lot of time talking in the bar)
Aside from the fact that we are students, so destined to drink too much on occasion, it seems odd that one of his reasons for crippling bar opening times was that it was the social centre of the college. We are a small college with few communal spaces, and the bar is very much the kernel of social life in college.
So was Kelly just being immensely insensitive, or was this
a tactic to piss off as many students as possible? If it was the latter, then it
worked spectacularly well. Overnight Kelly became reviled in college, and Corpus
students became the laughing stock of the University for not having a bar. Most
tellingly, the sheer volume of vitriol and hatred directed at Kelly completely
overwhelmed some people's attempts to show the Fellows that we are in fact
(usually) pretty reasonable. All of a sudden the Fellows had clear evidence that
we were as irrational as Kelly was portraying us to be.
In the midst of all this, of course, the Access Issue still remained. In the context of the Bar Hours uproar it seemed insignificant, despite being actually much more important. Kelly had to resolve the Access Issue before people came to their senses, and he knew that disbanding the rent strike would make him look even better to the Fellows.
So after several weeks of frustrating negotiations (in the context of threats to throw out all those involved in the strike), he offered the strikers a deal. An end to the rent strike in exchange for the creation of a new committee, including student representatives, to look into the effects of rent increases on access to Corpus. Given that rent strikes in other colleges were starting to fail horribly and that Kelly made it clear that this was the best that he was willing to offer, the strikers capitulated.
We have yet to hear anything about this new Access
Committee.
Having dismissed the Access Issue, and as the complaints
about bar hours started to die away (well we do actually work, you know), reduced bar hours became politically
useless to Kelly. Thus when we returned for May term (the exam term), we
discovered that bar hours had been mysteriously reinstated. What happened to too
much drinking? And the 'bar culture'?
Having suffered the farce that was Kelly's response to the Access Issue, we came into May term 2000 with a new JCR Committee knowing full well that Kelly would do something else to piss us off.
The issue turned out to be Kelly's pet project - an Academic Room Ballot. Until Kelly, rooms were allocated according to a ballot of randomly selected names, with the order of the second year ballot reversed for the third (final) year. Although this sounds odd, it is widely accepted to be fair and is totally unbiased. On top of that, room allocation was run by the JCR Committee (the Student Union), not the college.
Kelly decided that was eminently too fair to be allowed to continue to exist. So he proposed an academic room ballot, whereby those with the best results get first choice of rooms. His reasoning (given in another letter) was that this would be an incentive to achieve better grades, which would thus send us spiraling further up the league tables to even greater glory.
There are a myriad of things wrong with the entire concept of an academic room ballot. Here are my favourites:
As I said, this is but a choice selection of dozens of equally good reasons, never mind the huge number of practical problems involved in the idea.
The outgoing JCR Committee (which I was on) put all of
these reasons to both Dr Kelly and the Fellows. Unsurprisingly, the Fellows
chose to ignore us (although again, in private many agreed), and gave Dr Kelly
carte blanche in creating a room ballot, despite having never discussed or even
considered the arguments for and against it.
Nevertheless, we were confident that any room ballot that Kelly could conceive would be so unworkable that it would collapse before it could be implemented. Sure enough, every member of college received a substantial paper at the beginning of the exam term outlining Kelly's proposal for a room ballot.
First he promised that the current second year's randomly-allocated room ballot would remain unaffected, because 'it would be unfair to those previously at the bottom of the room ballot' - an effective way of appeasing the most vocal year-group within the college.
Then he proposed system whereby every member of the first year would chose eight rooms that he/she liked. There would be a random ballot as before, except after exam results were published at the beginning of the summer, all those with Firsts (who wished to) would be moved to the top of this ballot. Subsequently Dr Kelly would assign rooms based on the eight selections he had received, as well as other information such as price limits, special requirements...etc.
The practical upshot of Dr Kelly's room ballot is that
nobody is certain about where they may be living next year (never mind how much
they will be paying or who they will be living near). The more sinister
implication is that for most of the first year, Dr Kelly himself will have
control over where exactly they live. So this is a scheme that places more power
in Dr Kelly's hands. Spot a pattern?
Naturally, the entire college was up in arms. There was a general feeling that this was one insult too many, and that things had to stop. The new JCR Committee valiantly presided over an unprecedented number of extremely heated Open Meetings of the entire college, with record turnouts. Proposals to ignore Kelly's ballot and run an independent one of our own were passed unanimously by a huge number of people.
Behind all this, however, was the nagging fear that Kelly would find a way to punish those who spoke out against him. This became more concrete when Kelly went back on his previous written promise and threatened to implement an academic room ballot on the second year. However, fear of Kelly's actions was especially strong in the first year, who had little idea of what to expect from Cambridge, yet were being asked to bear the brunt of the responsibility by rejecting Kelly's proposals. It thus transpired that there was a significant minority of the first year who were unwilling to stand up to Kelly, despite almost unanimous support from the other years within Corpus.
Thus when it came to the crunch, the first year crumbled,
and so many complied with Kelly's requirements that it became impossible for
even the most principled of the others to stand alone. Kelly won. Corpus has now
got an academic room ballot.
Exams and May Week came and went, the third year (sadly) just went, and as always, we all looked forward to meeting the new first year. But while we were away over the summer Kelly was hard at work thinking up new ways of being an asshole. One interesting side-effect of our prolonged absence was that we picked up a new set of allies - the college staff. In the absence of students to bully, Kelly felt forced to exercise his megalomaniacal tendencies on the administrative, domestic, maintenance and other college staff. By the end of the summer, absolutely nothing in college was allowed to happen without Kelly's direct permission.
This removed what little autonomy that college staff, notably the porters and
the Tutorial Assistant, Anne Phillips, (who previously practically ran the
Tutorial Office) had. In private, all the college staff have admitted personal
hatred of Kelly for his behaviour - for example, one porter wondered if Kelly
was cruising around the Black Sea on holiday on a ship or on his ego. These are
powerful people who know how the college works. Was Kelly wise to piss them off?
Kelly was active on issues affecting us over the summer too. He implemented his new academic room ballot based on first year results, and in general most people seem more willing to make the best of their situation rather than ciriticise his methods. Regardless, there is clear evidence that he has not followed the rules he set out - people who stated that they did not wish to move up the ballot got suspiciously big rooms, and all those with lower grades appear to have gotten poorer rooms. One student was denied accommodation in college altogether, and another has been given the smallest room in college despite getting a low 2:2.
Suspicious room allocation was not limited to the new second year, however. At least one of the new third year was repeatedly threatened with withdrawal of accommodation over the course of the summer, with absolutely no constructive help from the man who should be the most sympathetic. Room allocation for the new first year is somewhat suspicious, too - both Fresher classicists have extremely large rooms (Kelly is a classicist).
However, the exact problems with room allocation are difficult to assess -
much of this is just hearsay. Luckily, the JCR is currently writing a
paper tackling the issue much more thoroughly. Should be interesting reading.
Despite having successfully intimidated last year's first year into agreeing to the academic room ballot, Kelly knew that there are plenty of people in college willing to speak out against him. Thus one of his priorities in the new academic year was to reduce our influence on the new intake - the first year over whom he has total control, and the first year on whom he will be judged. Thus he did several things to encourage segregation between the first year and the rest of the college, most seriously abolishing the Aunts and Uncles scheme, and vetoing the Freshers' Guide, both of which are explained in more detailed below.
He also prevented us from coming up early. Usually the second and third year are allowed to return to college early in order to prevent total chaos on the day Freshers arrive, but more importantly so that we have enough time to prepare a proper Freshers' Week. This year, Kelly declared that nobody was allowed back at all before the Freshers. Even the JCR Committee was not allowed back until two days before the Freshers. Luckily, I managed to get back a whole month early due to the fact that I needed to start a research project, so I got to see all Kelly's antics first-hand. Shame.
Still, despite an extraordinary number of people heroically defying Kelly and
coming back to Cambridge by a variety of underhand methods, there was the predictable chaos on Freshers' Day. On top of that, despite all the JCR
Committee's efforts, there simply wasn't time to organise Freshers' Week to
satisfaction, and it was very much touch-and-go all week. Still, we had good fun
and things went well anyway, so it didn't quite turn out like Kelly planned...
Like most colleges and many Universities, until this summer Corpus had a very successful scheme by which every new Fresher was assigned a contact in the same subject who would write to them before term started, and help them subsequently through their time in college. Yet Kelly decided to prevent the Aunts and Uncles scheme from continuing this year - without consultation and without giving any justification. We only found out about this when we actively asked when we would hear who our new Nieces and Nephews would be. Actually, the JCR organises Uncles and Aunts, but it has to rely on the Tutorial Office for the list of new Freshers and their addresses, so unfortunatlely Kelly was in a position to abolish it.
However, in a new and promising development, Kelly was forced into retreat by
none other than the newly-appointed Master, Prof. Haroon Ahmed. Apparently, when
the Master eventually found out about Kelly abolishing the Aunts and Uncles
scheme (of which he wasn't informed of until the very end of the summer) he told
Kelly to 'be nicer to students'! Thus just a week before the Freshers arrived,
all the new second year got a desperate email appealing for help setting up a
'Welcoming Committee' to replace the Aunts and Uncles scheme. This hurried
replacement eventually consisted of just ten random second years for the entire
first year. Just as good
as before, then, obviously.
Every year the Corpus JCR produces a Freshers' Guide to be sent out (again, via the Tutorial Office) to new Freshers with advice on what to expect and what to bring. In 1998/9 Rachel and I wrote the Freshers' Guide, and this year Simon Crouch essentially took what we wrote and modified it. Despite the fact that the previous Senior Tutor had approved essentially the same document, and that our original guide has been up on the Corpus JCR website since then, Kelly vetoed the guide, criticising it on the basis that 'it isn't written in English' and 'it doesn't emphasise academic work enough'. He also said that it ought to be given to Freshers when they arrived, not before, showing that he had absolutely no idea what it was meant to be for in the first place. Idiot.
What's most grating (not that I took this personally, obviously) was that the Freshers' Guide has been up on the web for ages. While I was involved with the Corpus JCR website I received many emails from applicants praising the information we provided, and those who stayed behind over Christmas 1999 to look after interview candidates also told me that most cited the Corpus JCR website as a major reason for picking Corpus in the first place. Yet Kelly was totally unaware of the existence of this online guide, and thought that Simon had written the Guide from scratch. What an idiot.
Anyhow, fortunately, Kelly went on holiday at the beginning of September, and
so handed responsibility over censoring the Freshers' Guide to Dr Justin Meggit,
one of the Tutors. With a great deal of effort and clever persuasion, Simon
managed to get Dr Meggit to approve the same document that Kelly had vetoed, and
it got sent out. Thank God.
On returning to Corpus, we were unsurprised to discover that Kelly has yet again changed the bar hours. Now the bar is only open between 9 and 10:30 (a massive 90 minutes!) every day to sell alcohol. Not only does this make Corpus college bar the worst in Cambridge, it also makes it hugely uneconomical to run. Without alcohol sales, the bar (or 'cafe') runs at a huge loss to the college, which is allegedly trying to cut back on expenditure.
This raises the interesting question of why Kelly did this. There hasn't been any justification, and we can safely disregard his previously stated reasons (excessive drinking and a 'bar culture') because he had no problem reinstating normal bar hours last term. The college is obviously reluctant to lose money, so he must have a very strong reason to do this. The only rational explanation is the same as before - he wants to segregate us from the Freshers. The bar is the centre of Corpus, and by crippling it he is crippling social contact between years and between individuals.
The interesting thing is that there hasn't been the same uproar as there was
the first time he tried this. Much of the reason is apathy or pessimism, but I
suspect the main reason is that people are just getting used to Kelly. I thought
that most people over-reacted to initial restrictions in bar hours, resulting in
the loss of the Access Issue, but this total indifference is somehow more
worrying. Corpus is changing, and it's changing into a place where what Kelly
does is increasingly tolerated.
The fact of the matter is, we're only here for around three years, whereas Kelly will be around for a lot longer. Already, only my year fully remembers what Corpus was like before Kelly took over, and most students here have spent the majority of their time here living under Kelly. Corpus has changed, from a place with many flaws but with a uniquely strong group of people living, working and learning from each other, into a place where people are increasingly left alone, without support or reliable friends, in a highly pressured work environment.
Cambridge is difficult, and many people are miserable here because they don't feel they are being 'normal' students - just pack horses churning out essays or answers to questions. Corpus used to be a place where no-one felt that way, because we had a tiny but extremely supportive, integrated social structure that ensured that nobody was ever allowed to feel lonely or abandoned.
In Kelly's Corpus, things are different. By focusing entirely on academic
success, he has ruined not only what made Corpus unique, but what made it
successful. The new generation of Kelly's Corpuscles will be normal Cambridge
students - over-worked, highly-stressed, and essentially unhappy. And that's a
tragedy.