By: Vasavi
I found this book completely by accident, spotting it sitting innocuously on the shelves in the Passfield common room. I’m quickly captivated by the premise: it’s the stories of 14 former LSE students who lived in Passfield during the late 1970s – a period of transformation for the university.
The nature of university is such that it is perpetually in flux: students come, create friendships and experiences, then students go. This book is a lovely way to draw parallels – there is a vague familiarity that seeps through the pages referencing the same places I visit, the same antics of students, the same topics of study.
In many ways, it is not just a story of these individuals but also the wider institutional and cultural changes that began to emerge during the 1970s. Many of the writers lament to varying degrees the changes that have occurred in the university education system over time that transformed it into a market-oriented industry. Teaching seemed less rigid and more explicitly political back then – I certainly wouldn’t describe LSE and its students as ‘radical and unruly’.
Writing from memory makes for an occasionally frustrating read, not quite as detailed as you want it to be. You are left wondering about the gaps between each moment they touch on. The range of authors provides both an interesting and again, fragmented read. Some of the writers give long personal contexts of how LSE slots into their family and their community histories; others give more pragmatic accounts of the courses they took and the bureaucratic day-to-day. You find yourself reading the same stories through different eyes, experiencing the same places you know, creating a sense of semi-familiarity. Some are better at bringing back the student experience, others write with more explicit influence of hindsight. Yet, what unites them is the profound sense of gratitude at the pivotal role played by LSE in their lives.
It’s a nice way to contextualise yourself and understand what LSE could mean in the future. So much the LSE experience is forward-looking – focussed on one’s career, one’s next application, one’s next essay. There’s often a desire to skip to the end, to glide over the uncertainty and claim the shining future/stellar career promised for you. As a first-year student, I have no idea what LSE will mean to me in the future, how it will shape my life. Spending time looking back, turns out to be a pretty grounding and emotional experience.
It ends on a sombre collection of memories of Mark Lycett, another member of the friendship group, bringing sharply into focus the realities of death that so rarely permeate one’s busy university years. So the experience of reading it is a moving one – although never excessively nostalgic – that forces you to contextualise LSE in one’s individual and broader history.
This book is truly wonderful, not for its exciting stories (they aren’t always) or its insights on social mobility in the 1970s. Rather, what they lack in precise detail they make up for in the contextualisation of the LSE experience in their lives.
