The university has been split in two by a right-wing coup led by Economics and Law. With government blessing, they have expropriated all campus resources, from library books to the staff payroll. One side of the divided campus is economically relevant, officially approved and boring, the other useless, anarchic but fun. The two camps are separated by barbed wire. Students on our side sit on garbage-strewn floors with young, unpaid, punk lecturers, passionately talking literature and politics.
Assignments are communal, students mark their own work and write novels instead of theses.
Maoists prowl and scowl, dreaming of the glory days of May '68. I yearn for the social sanity of my youth. Massey 1984 New Zealand is a feistier place than the one I left in the mid-1960s. The Social Work Department is divided between neo-Marxists and the God Squad. Feminists debate the ethics of taking direct action against alleged rapists.