University V

Some reflections on life at University.  Some of the lecturers were frankly a waste of space, gentlemen who had graduated from technical colleges and should never have been allowed through the doors of the University.  They read from well thumbed and worn jotters, their lecturing notes from 20 years before.  When asked a serious question they floundered and exhibited their dearth of real knowledge of the subject, something this bunch of mature students picked up on straight away.  It became a game, baiting the poor sods with outfield esoteric questions on modern innovations in their field.
However, and this was the joy of university life, the really good ones stretched us until we twanged.  As soon as their lecture ended we bunched together and exchanged what notes we had made to insure that we had understood all the wisdom he had literally blasted at us during the lecture.  It was as clear as crystal during the class but unless we had our conference immediately afterwards a lot of it was lost.  One in particular, Professor who took us for Control Engineering, was what we had all invisaged as a true university professor.  What ever question we threw at him, he would explain it in a number of ways so that even the slowest in the class would understand.  Non of us ever dosed off in his class, a sort of zen like awareness was required in order to understand the gems he was imparting in every class.
In later years I attended Aberdeen University to take an MBA.  In general the lecturers were first class with the exception of our Accountancy lecturer.  Woeful.  I got quite ratty with him as I particularly wanted to understand this subject.  We had six accountants on the course and they all agreed he had not got a clue.  However, it all became clear in our second year.  We had a choice of elective subjects and I choose business ethics as one of my electives.  Who should walk in for the first morning lecture but our useless accountancy lecturer.  I walked out, him chasing after me.  The poor guy explained that he was a philosophy lecturer who had been roped in as Accountancy lecturer at the last minute when the actual accountancy lecturer resigned suddenly.  Returned to class and we found him a splendid lecturer in business ethics.  I complained to the University management about our treatment and I suspect as a result of this all the non accountants on the course scraped through the final accountancy examination!
Aberdeen, like most successful universities, takes large numbers of foreign students.  Some of these students, especially the chinese students in the 90's, had little or no english.  How they were supposed to complete the courses successfully was beyond me....but they did?  What has changed today, not a lot.