I read this story with a sickening feeling of guilt. I was boasting last week that I read English at Cambridge like Andy Burnham and Amy Hunt as if that made me something. Of course it does, it makes you white and privileged, even David Baddiel who read English at my college  after me was easy to assimilate into my story of myself – ooh let’s not forget the actresses and actors , all of whom were white and ever so nice. I’m not saying they were – but I’m sure it made me feel that I was the right sort of graduate. 45 years after “going up” I now have to confront this privilege I’ve felt all my adult life and ask what right I have to it.

This story of a young man who killed himself for the shame being poured on him was one that turned the guilt that I should have felt before and it turned it full on me.

Thanks to my friend Alan Chaplin who posted this article drawing it to my attention. I have put it on a free post from Stephen Bush. Here it is (as long as it lasts and you can email henry@agewage.com if it’s run out).

Maybe our prejudice has been diluted but I don’t think my generation will fully rid ourselves of the insidious superiority that Cambridge gave us. There were no professors, no lecturers and no students that I can remember as black and from reading Stephen Bush’s article I learn that

His [Jason Arday’s] story was never discussed without a miasma of race. His shortcomings were depicted not just as the usual failures of rigour in publishing or academia but as exceptional proof that ethnic diversity at Cambridge — where 0.4 per cent of academic staff are Black — has gone too far.

I will never know what it was to be black when I was a teenager in the late 1970s. Except for a rare adventure to the Notting Hill Carnival, I had no experience of black life. My only memory of black culture was entertaining Aswad in Eric Griffiths’ room at Trinity College. Black culture only made its way into my life through soul and reggae.

I suspect that I am like the friends I had at Cambridge . We all reckoned we understood what other people were like – but we didn’t have a clue , even when we “came down”.