In Ireland we have two main images of College life in the USA, both doubtless equally inaccurate. Firstly there is the impression honed by exposure to movies along the lines of "Animal House"; in this vision US College life consists entirely of drunken fratboys reeling from "beer blast" to "kegger" to some other opportunity for beer enhanced mayhem, entirely unencumbered by any form of academic duty, and occasionally enlivened by the odd violent crime. For example "Scream 2" featured a group of students doing a "Film Studies" course which only seemed to involve one tutorial per week (if that), and was populated by film buffs of such discernment that it took them ages to realise that "The Godfather Part II" was an example of a sequel at least as good as its predecessor.
The other vision is of Harvard, Yale, and the rest of the "Ivy League", an elite world populated by geniuses, jocks and the fabulously wealthy, all with a rather Great Gatsby-ish conception of life. One phrase that recurs in both inspiring visions is "a big man on campus." In the first he's the biggest drunkard and practitioner of highly "amusing" practical jokes around. In the second he's called something along the lines of Washington M. Schuyler Jr., scion of the biggest banking family in Boston, hero of the backfield and loads of other American-College things I don't understand.
All of which is a highly roundabout way of getting round to discussing the trials and tribulations, sorrows and joys of being quite literally " a big man on campus." Large gentlemen have risen to positions of prominence in this University in recent years. In last years Student's Union Sabbatical Elections, in every case the taller candidate won (in US Presidential Elections, only twice has the shorter candidate defeated the taller.) Perhaps the expense and general bother of elections could be replaced by battery of physical tests for prospective candidates. In the Student Forum, Society life is increasingly dominated by men who have problems buying shoes, for example the L&H is led by the not exactly diminutive Barry M Ward and the greatest society of any kind anywhere in the known universe, the Philosophy Society, is led by none other than this correspondent, another who likes to shop at "High and Mighty" in Brown Thomas.
So what has been the experience of the larger gentleman in this college? Personally speaking, I feel that we can hardly class ourselves as some kind of persecuted minority group. However if I were a more litigious man I wager I could sue UCD for millions in the future for forcing me to sit at a cramp-inducing desk trying to write as fast as possible for hours at a time each summer. Once my lumbar vertebrae go I'll know who to blame. The exam desks are obviously designed for an optimum height of five foot six, which goes some way to explain the overall superior performance of women in exams.
Indeed, in a perfect world the desks and/or chairs in the library would be height adjustable. Of course by height adjustable I mean adjustable within a reasonably large range, unlike the swivel chair in the photo booth in USIT, which no matter how low you position it, still forces you to crouch in a rather ungainly fashion to get any of your face in the photo.
Most lecture theatres are reasonably comfortable, although my unorthodox posture and incessant changes to another yet more unorthodox posture mean that I require up to five times as much bench space as most people. Thus in cases of overcrowding le grand homme suffers, as for example when an entire year of medicine is packed into the pint-sized Anatomy Lecture Theatre in Earlsfort Terrace.
Another problem is the existence in the bar of a small, highly localised space-time continuum which late at night churns all conversation coming from a height of below about five foot ten into an indistinguishable aural mess. This is a common problem in social contexts where one finds oneself standing up, and must be related to the phenomenon whereby people make "eye-contact" with some part of your upper thorax.
But the big man's fate is not an entirely painful one. Of course there are the political advantages outlined above, also the fact that one's lofty position physically excludes one from some conversations means that people take one's silence to be a sign of a Good Listener and therefore Deep Thinker. This has been instrumental in allowing me to perpetuate the enormous con trick that I am some kind of intellectual, one which has deceived many (including the editors of this newspaper) while my true intellectual equal has always been that other great big man Homer Simpson, spiritual Auditor-for-Life of the Philosophy Society (no more plugs this year).
