Catherine Czerkawska
Advice beyond price

The other day, I was travelling by train when I met my son's old advisor of studies. Not only did he remember me from graduation day, and my son from his various meetings with him, but he also remembered several other students who – over many years – had gone to the same university from our small village, remembered not just their names but what they had moved on to do, in great detail.
     'I'm not surprised,' said our son, later on the phone. 'He can remember everything.'
     I found myself wondering, as I watched him leave the train, if there would be room for him in a future system where almost all academic advice and information will probably be given impersonally, online. And what about the pastoral side of this when the thinking seems to be that if students have personal problems, they should make an appointment to see a professional counsellor? Like most bogus 'improvements' of this sort, it seems to me that the main aim of the change is to save money, while persuading the 'customers', i.e. students and their parents, who all too often have to foot the bills, that the new system is better than the old.
     I remember when my son – having, so to speak, changed horses in mid stream, from one subject to another – was first allocated to this brilliant, but humane and caring man. After his first meeting, he came away full of enthusiasm, feeling that he had a friend on the staff, somebody wiser but involved. So it proved.
     This was an academic advisor in the old style and they are, I fear, rarer than hen's teeth these days. His communications with his students were always businesslike, but also reassuringly individual. He took time to chat, he took the trouble to find out about them. He was never a 'soft touch' but he was there, and helpful. At some point during their final year, he took them out in small groups, for dinner. He even sent them detailed instructions about graduation day.
     After the ceremony, we found all of his advisees looking for him. They had promised to meet him, so that he could have pictures taken with them. There he was, a diminutive man, with a towering intellect, surrounded by these tall young men and women who clearly thought the world of him. It was a bit like coming face to face with the real Mr Chips. Since then, he has kept in touch with them, in a low key way, sending copies of graduation photos, and always ready and willing to give academic references. The fact that, some 18 months later, he recognised and remembered me, was typical of the man.
     Meeting him again leads me to reflect that the imposition of a rigid distinction between academic and other kinds of counselling, within a university setting, the assumption that academic advice can all be computerised, is symptomatic of some unwelcome change that has taken place within the academic world. Why have our universities allowed this to happen? If there is no place in this impersonal new culture for a wise, elder academic to nurture, advise, teach and assist his or her students in the way that this man has helped them and has been loved for it, then something precious, something that should lie at the very heart of the university ethos – the passing on, not just of knowledge, but of wisdom and experience too – is under threat.
     The sad thing is that the 'high heidyins' don't seem able to appreciate exactly what they are losing, nor will they until it has gone for good. And, of course, it will be the students who will suffer most of all.

Catherine Czerkawska is a playwright, novelist and poet