Perhaps I should declare an interest in this one. This story, from today’s Sheffield Star, features Barry, my parent’s neighbour in the house I grew up in. He’s a reasonable man. But the behaviour his video shows really is constant, and I just wonder if the attitude towards it is misled by the fact that it’s done by University students.
What’s happening is young people bringing chaos and in some cases fear to a residential area. The fact that they are students is neither here nor there. It is a problem to be managed, and increasingly so. It is serious too – my parents have had people coming into the garden, breaking up garden furniture and hitting each other with the pieces while they frantically called the police. The discarded takeaways attract rats and poison local dogs.
It’s great that more and more people are going to University. I went. It must have done me some good. It is without doubt a good thing. Only a small proportion cause this kind of distress, but a small proportion can be quite a large number. Like immigration, we want it and it brings countless long term benefits, but we have to be prepared for the numbers. It’s not unusual to have 30 000 students living in a few square miles. If that was younger kids on an estate they would all have ASBOs. My friend’s elderly parents are one of only three households left on a street otherwise occupied by hundreds of students. They have to put up with the noise, pools of vomit and mattresses left in the street between academic years.
But we seem to do something different with students – they’re a different category neither adult nor child. I lived for a while in Washington DC as a student and it was implicit in what we did and how we lived that we were more children than adults – we were too young to drink (this was in our third year), we shared rooms, the sexes weren’t allowed to mix between set hours, and the atmosphere was more like teenagers having a sleepover than anything else.
The last thing I want is for students to be ‘educated’ on that model, but by segmenting such a large group away from the rest of the world we seem to be encouraging a genuine social problem interfering with the lives of residents. When I was a student (in Leeds) the accommodation for students was largely separated off from the city, and had its own distinct shops, club nights and pubs. The main ‘political’ issue ‘tackled’ by the students was getting a plaque made banning Jack Straw from the Union building.
Sheffield is not like that. Yet. But any number of people needs managing, as does how they interact with the rest of the city. The small minority who make life a misery for residents can’t be allowed to cause a backlash against the considerable benefits they bring, nor can they be allowed to put people off studying for its own sake.
My question is how do we manage alcohol in this situation? The poll on ‘boozenight’ last night suggested people would largely support raising the minimum age for drinking to 21. Having been around people turning 21 in America I cannot quite imagine that that would help. But what should we do? There are deals in bars and shops clearly designed to attract students. If they explicitly targeted football fans or under age drinkers in the same way there would be an outcry.
Why should students be any different?
