Why Are We Here?

Professor Chris Morash Columnist

So; here’s the thing… A question has been bothering me. Why are we here?

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I don’t mean that in any big, existential, ontological sense, (as in why is there something and not nothing, or what is my ultimate purpose for the years I’ve been allotted). I will be addressing full answers to those questions in my column for the next issue of this year’s University Times. No, I’m asking the question today in a much more practical sort of way: why are we here on campus?

After all, we’re already at a point in the academic year when we can imagine those shimmering days of summer when the campus seems to get along fairly well without most of us, when the main occupants are Italian tourists, the College Fox, a few stray seagulls and a resident Provost. So, we know that the campus doesn’t really need us. The seagulls and the fox know that there are worms and mice aplenty for food. Indeed, according to the maintenance staff in my building this morning, there were rumours of a rat who had taken up residence in my building over Reading Week.

“Didja see the rat?”

“Er… no…”

“Big as a cat it was.”

“Are we talking a full-size cat, or more a sort of kitten…?”

“Huge it was. Feckin’ huge. But, sure, I wouldn’t worry about it. The students will scare it away.”

I digress. The campus has its own secret life, a life that ticks along quite well without us. So, if the campus doesn’t need us, do we need the campus?

There was a point earlier in the year when this seemed like more than a hypothetical question once again, amidst doomsday scenarios about power blackouts and deep-frozen public buildings (a doomsday which, like previous endings of the world, seems to have passed us by).

Still, it did make me wonder. Do we really need to be here, other than for incidental things like the odd lecture or tutorial?

I decided to do some research. The past is not always a great guide to the future, but it can be entertaining. Besides, I like the Library, so I plunged into some of its darker recesses to find a few novels by the most famous Trinity author of the nineteenth century,

Charles Lever.

Charles Who? Well you may ask, and not with shame. Today his literary star may have waned to the point of invisibility, but in his time lots of people thought was as good a novelist as Dickens. More importantly, he could boast of something that poor old Dickens could never manage: he could say that he had been a Trinity undergrad. You can’t say that of Dickens. Or of Proust, for that matter.

Here, I thought, is a font of that special wisdom which literature distils like a fine single malt. From whose pen, other than Lever’s, would I find a novel like his Charles O’Malley (1841), that has a chapter entitled “The Vice-Provost”, (“without the walls of the college, for above forty years, he had not ventured half as many times”). There is another entitled “Trinity College – Lectures”. Again, you won’t find that in Proust.

“Trinity College – Lectures” was particularly enlightening, because it had absolutely nothing to do with lectures. Here we are introduced to the Trinity student character based on Lever, Charles O’Malley: “Except read, there was nothing he did not do.”

Ah, I thought, here’s where we get the real value of being on campus. This is going to be an edifying account of the real value of a university education, one that lies not in the formal curriculum – what is taught in lectures, labs and tutorials – but in the vibrant energy of student life, the learning that takes place in the students’ union, in clubs and societies and, on playing fields and in intense conversations late at night in college rooms.

I read on. Lever’s hero, Charles O’Malley, and his college friend, Francis Webber, form their own college society, called “The Board of Works”, “whose object was principally devoted to the embellishment of the University, in which, to do them justice, their labours were unceasing, and what with the assistance of some black paint, a ladder, and a few pounds of gunpowder, they certainly contrived to effect many changes.”

Wait a minute. “Black paint?” “A ladder?”

“Gunpowder???”

I read on. “We were acknowledged the most riotous, ill-conducted, disorderly men on the books of the University. Were the lamps of the squares extinguished, and the college left in total darkness, we were summoned before the Dean; was the Vice-Provost serenaded with a chorus of trombones and French horns, to our taste in music was the attention ascribed; did a sudden alarm of fire disturb the congregation at morning chapel, Messrs. Webber and O’Malley were brought before the Board. Reading men avoided the building where we resided as they would have done the plague.”

Now, just to be clear: I’m not advocating a return to the Rare Aul Times here. Extracurricular activities that involve any combination of ladders, black paint, and gunpowder really ought to be avoided, where at all possible. And I’m reasonably sure that Vice-Provosts nowadays venture outside the college walls more than once every two years. But, details aside, as another academic term winds down, after reading Lever I was reminded of why universities are more than just delivery vessels for functional learning, and why a living campus is more than simply a handy form of pest-control.

All the same, I think I’ll stick with Sally Rooney or Louise Nealon for my novels of Trinity campus life.

Professor Chris Morash is Trinity’s Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing and a former Vice-Provost. He returns this year to continue writing his column, known as “Thingmote”, following a very successful run last year. The thingmote was a mound of earth which served as a meeting space in Medieval Dublin. It was located just outside where Front Gate is now.