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| The painful truth about a fair crack of the whip The painful truth about a fair crack of the whip | |
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| If I were going to sue my university for something I didn’t get while I was there, I don’t think I’d pick “a first in history”. That’s not what frustrated me or felt unfair. Which is where I differ from 38-year-old Oxford graduate Faiz Siddiqui. When he bitterly reflected on the ways his student days had been a letdown, it was the 2:1 that rankled. | If I were going to sue my university for something I didn’t get while I was there, I don’t think I’d pick “a first in history”. That’s not what frustrated me or felt unfair. Which is where I differ from 38-year-old Oxford graduate Faiz Siddiqui. When he bitterly reflected on the ways his student days had been a letdown, it was the 2:1 that rankled. |
| Like Siddiqui, I didn’t get a first. Unlike him, I didn’t get a 2:1 either. But, looking back, academic success really wasn’t what I was desperate for. Perhaps I didn’t want it enough. Though it really, really felt like I did. As I remember, I wanted it urgently all the time. Which is one of the reasons I didn’t get a first. | Like Siddiqui, I didn’t get a first. Unlike him, I didn’t get a 2:1 either. But, looking back, academic success really wasn’t what I was desperate for. Perhaps I didn’t want it enough. Though it really, really felt like I did. As I remember, I wanted it urgently all the time. Which is one of the reasons I didn’t get a first. |
| Fairness is like a new God. We invoke His name all the time. Yet, deep down, few of us believe He really exists | Fairness is like a new God. We invoke His name all the time. Yet, deep down, few of us believe He really exists |
| I was not a romantic success story at that age – that’s what I’m alluding to. And, frankly, I blame my education. I managed to arrive at university with the impression that betraying the mildest implication of sexual or romantic interest was like a mini-rape. Desire was something that should not merely be tastefully expressed within the bounds of politeness and respect, but completely concealed. I was perfectly content with this rule because letting someone know you fancy them is potentially extremely embarrassing, so the notion that it was also unutterably rude suited me quite well. In the short term. Which was actually much less than a term. | I was not a romantic success story at that age – that’s what I’m alluding to. And, frankly, I blame my education. I managed to arrive at university with the impression that betraying the mildest implication of sexual or romantic interest was like a mini-rape. Desire was something that should not merely be tastefully expressed within the bounds of politeness and respect, but completely concealed. I was perfectly content with this rule because letting someone know you fancy them is potentially extremely embarrassing, so the notion that it was also unutterably rude suited me quite well. In the short term. Which was actually much less than a term. |
| My seduction strategy was to seem cold and aloof and wait for the object of my desire to seduce me. It’s a technique that can work – if you’re, for example, a very beautiful woman. Unfortunately, that’s one of the many things I am not. When you’re landed with my gender and level of attractiveness, the aloofness reads as terror, which makes a mockery of all the effort it takes to feign the aloofness to conceal the terror. | My seduction strategy was to seem cold and aloof and wait for the object of my desire to seduce me. It’s a technique that can work – if you’re, for example, a very beautiful woman. Unfortunately, that’s one of the many things I am not. When you’re landed with my gender and level of attractiveness, the aloofness reads as terror, which makes a mockery of all the effort it takes to feign the aloofness to conceal the terror. |
| But it wasn’t a paucity of academic opportunities that made me feel life was unfair. In fact I was overwhelmed by the abundance of academic opportunities. To paraphrase Douglas Adams: I love academic opportunities – I love the squelching noise they make as they get squandered. | But it wasn’t a paucity of academic opportunities that made me feel life was unfair. In fact I was overwhelmed by the abundance of academic opportunities. To paraphrase Douglas Adams: I love academic opportunities – I love the squelching noise they make as they get squandered. |
| Faiz Siddiqui takes a different view. He reckons his university’s teaching was “appallingly bad” and “boring” and that this stopped him getting a first and so “denied him the chance of becoming a high-flying commercial barrister”. He trained as a solicitor instead and is now suing his alma mater for £1m in lost earnings he says he’s incurred as a result of this academic underachievement. It clearly hit him hard – he suffers from depression and insomnia and, the court was told, has a “fundamental inability to hold down any professional day job for any significant length of time”. I hope, for his sake, he’s not too directly involved in conducting his own case. | Faiz Siddiqui takes a different view. He reckons his university’s teaching was “appallingly bad” and “boring” and that this stopped him getting a first and so “denied him the chance of becoming a high-flying commercial barrister”. He trained as a solicitor instead and is now suing his alma mater for £1m in lost earnings he says he’s incurred as a result of this academic underachievement. It clearly hit him hard – he suffers from depression and insomnia and, the court was told, has a “fundamental inability to hold down any professional day job for any significant length of time”. I hope, for his sake, he’s not too directly involved in conducting his own case. |
| Siddiqui is a fairly feeble sympathy-magnet – not even strong enough to wipe a sympathy-VHS. Then again, he doesn’t want our sympathy, he just wants £1m of an educational charity’s money. But he obviously sincerely believes that his experience at Oxford was unfair. When he did the Indian imperial history course, he says, half the teaching staff was on sabbatical and so everything was rushed and overstretched. That’s what stopped him getting a top degree, which stopped him getting the career he wanted. | Siddiqui is a fairly feeble sympathy-magnet – not even strong enough to wipe a sympathy-VHS. Then again, he doesn’t want our sympathy, he just wants £1m of an educational charity’s money. But he obviously sincerely believes that his experience at Oxford was unfair. When he did the Indian imperial history course, he says, half the teaching staff was on sabbatical and so everything was rushed and overstretched. That’s what stopped him getting a top degree, which stopped him getting the career he wanted. |
| He’s clinging to that episode of bad luck, of unfairness, as the point where it all started to go wrong. Through sleepless nights, and jobless days, he’s speculated on what might have been if that course had gone differently, if his tutor hadn’t been so busy, if he’d got the job he wanted, the career he deserved. He’s filled a cave in his mind with the riches that would have been his if only everything had been fair. | He’s clinging to that episode of bad luck, of unfairness, as the point where it all started to go wrong. Through sleepless nights, and jobless days, he’s speculated on what might have been if that course had gone differently, if his tutor hadn’t been so busy, if he’d got the job he wanted, the career he deserved. He’s filled a cave in his mind with the riches that would have been his if only everything had been fair. |
| Fairness is like a new God. We invoke His name all the time. Politicians of every stamp publicly dedicate themselves to His service: “We need a fair society for hardworking families”; “Britain must get a fair deal from the EU”. All violence, hatred and misery is explained as being caused by His absence. Fairness is what everyone says they want, the governing principle we can all agree on. Yet, deep down, very few of us believe that He really exists. | Fairness is like a new God. We invoke His name all the time. Politicians of every stamp publicly dedicate themselves to His service: “We need a fair society for hardworking families”; “Britain must get a fair deal from the EU”. All violence, hatred and misery is explained as being caused by His absence. Fairness is what everyone says they want, the governing principle we can all agree on. Yet, deep down, very few of us believe that He really exists. |
| Life feels unfair so much of the time, and in ways that politics can seldom solve. There are the huge unfairnesses of people who are killed or injured in war zones, who are starving, who watch loved ones die of disease or penury. For those people, life justifiably feels unfair. But it also feels unfair for the millionaire businessman who gets caught in the rain and drops his papers in a puddle; for the successful and professionally fulfilled musician who steps in a dog shit and a bit gets smeared on the hem of his trousers; for the loving newlyweds whose Wi-Fi crashes halfway through watching a film on Netflix. | Life feels unfair so much of the time, and in ways that politics can seldom solve. There are the huge unfairnesses of people who are killed or injured in war zones, who are starving, who watch loved ones die of disease or penury. For those people, life justifiably feels unfair. But it also feels unfair for the millionaire businessman who gets caught in the rain and drops his papers in a puddle; for the successful and professionally fulfilled musician who steps in a dog shit and a bit gets smeared on the hem of his trousers; for the loving newlyweds whose Wi-Fi crashes halfway through watching a film on Netflix. |
| Evolution has not taught us to count our blessings. We’re hyper-conscious of things that are going wrong for us, which may have gone right for other people, and haunted by the threat of annoying, unlucky or tragic events that haven’t happened yet but might. Meanwhile aspects of our lives that are currently good or calm, and previous disasters that have passed and we’ve recovered from, don’t get factored in to the same extent. It makes sense: such good fortune is banked, you’ve got to focus on what’s coming up. I’m sure it’s an attitude that’s given humans the edge in everything from mammoth hunting to mergers and acquisitions, but it accentuates the negative and makes everything feel unjust. It means the grass is always greener on the other side. It also means no one person’s estimation of what’s fair is accurate. | Evolution has not taught us to count our blessings. We’re hyper-conscious of things that are going wrong for us, which may have gone right for other people, and haunted by the threat of annoying, unlucky or tragic events that haven’t happened yet but might. Meanwhile aspects of our lives that are currently good or calm, and previous disasters that have passed and we’ve recovered from, don’t get factored in to the same extent. It makes sense: such good fortune is banked, you’ve got to focus on what’s coming up. I’m sure it’s an attitude that’s given humans the edge in everything from mammoth hunting to mergers and acquisitions, but it accentuates the negative and makes everything feel unjust. It means the grass is always greener on the other side. It also means no one person’s estimation of what’s fair is accurate. |
| Fairness is the unattainable median. At a deep superstitious level, we all believe in an unequal distribution of luck. Things are either unfairly against us or unfairly in our favour – and most people’s secret, unworthy aim is to either join or remain in the latter group. | Fairness is the unattainable median. At a deep superstitious level, we all believe in an unequal distribution of luck. Things are either unfairly against us or unfairly in our favour – and most people’s secret, unworthy aim is to either join or remain in the latter group. |
| A sad fact of human nature is that, when things feel fair, they’re often not. When giving out the best parts in sketches to the ensemble cast of a stage revue, Robert Webb once said that you can tell when it’s fair because then everyone will feel hard done by. But if anyone thinks they’ve been given a fair amount to perform, it invariably means they’ve got too much. So bias feels like equity, privilege like justice. Meanwhile, in utopia, everyone feels equally dissatisfied. | A sad fact of human nature is that, when things feel fair, they’re often not. When giving out the best parts in sketches to the ensemble cast of a stage revue, Robert Webb once said that you can tell when it’s fair because then everyone will feel hard done by. But if anyone thinks they’ve been given a fair amount to perform, it invariably means they’ve got too much. So bias feels like equity, privilege like justice. Meanwhile, in utopia, everyone feels equally dissatisfied. |