When a fruity-looking old don from a pay-as-you-go Mickey Mouse university like Buckingham writes a slobbering piece in the Times Educational Supplement about how “there will be a girl in class who flashes her admiration ... enjoy her! She’s a perk”, one is always, inevitably, going to feel the impulse to vomit.

I certainly felt it when I saw those pictures of Terence Kealey, Buckingham’s Vice-Chancellor, with his great big Professor Branestawm head, the standard-issue hair tufts above the ears, the unruly eyebrows, and read about how “she will flaunt you her curves, which you should admire, daily, to spice up your sex life, nightly, with the wife”.

I was sick mostly at the thought of the old goat storing up images of his students in the old fantasy bank (schoolboys have a more satisfying, internally rhymed name for it).

But I was also revolted by this academic’s misuse of a straightforward transitive verb. She may well “flaunt her curves”. She may well “flaunt them at you”, which puts “you” in the dative (in Latin, tibi) and the curves safely in the accusative, where they should be. For the object of the sentence, the noun in the accusative, must be that which is flaunted. “Flaunt you her curves” is a solecism. A meaningless word pile. The old ram was clearly so excited with thoughts of his students’ hidden bits that he lost all control of his grammar.

And that is what makes him unfit for purpose. Leer, by all means. But leer with grammatical precison.

Prof Branestawm goes on to compare the look-but-don’t-touch role of the lecturer to a punter in Stringfellow’s, and I have to say, as a modern man, that upsets me. I don’t like to hear women spoken of like that. I am a feminist. I absolutely believe in women’s rights to equality in law, society and the workplace, that they should have their own running races and everything. All that. So I was sitting there, huffing and puffing, when, suddenly, I thought: “Hang on, let’s be honest about this, how different is he from me?”

In my last year at university, and for several years afterwards, I toyed with the idea of a career in academia. I got the grades, I was offered the funding, I rather enjoyed the library grind of it. But journalism distracted and only later, as the excitement of the daily newsroom slog began to pale, did I begin to think again of doing the D Phil and going back to teach.

And then I realised that my newfound academic zeal had nothing to do with tiring of journalism, and nothing to do with intellectual curiosity. I just wanted to sleep with the girls. That was it. That was the only reason. Plump young ladies sitting there in the tutorial, all wet-eyed and tight-skirted, bulging and blooming.

Staring at you. Hungry for information. Hungry for anything you have to offer.

And the reason the urge was so potent was because I would be making up for lost time. In three years at Oxford I had sex with only five girls. Three years holed up in the middle of nowhere with 6,000 perfectly presentable (if occasionally somewhat overserious) young women, and I managed to get it on with only five of them. It’s pathetic. The greatest waste of time of my life. To this day, hardly an hour goes by when I do not get up from my desk, pace my study, and then fall to my knees, weeping, and cry aloud: “Five, goddamit! Only five! What was I thinking of?”

What I was thinking of, of course, was getting a stonking degree. And I did. And that is because I was not screwing my socks off, and so had time to read and write and think. And so they asked me to come back and teach. And I thought about it very seriously. I thought about it, on and off, for the next ten years, even as journalism started to go reasonably well for me. And it was a long time before I realised that I was considering a “return to academia” (as failed men of letters always rather heroically call it — as if, like Han Solo in the Millennium Falcon, it is never too late to come swooping back into the picture and save the day) purely so I could have sex with my students.

I solved the problem in a different way, in the end, by looking up all the girls I had fancied at university and sleeping with them now, ten years later, ticking them off retrospectively (I guess we were ticking each other off) and then sort of mentally plugging them back into my past and — pace Stalin — rewriting my teenage sexual history.

I may have slept with only five girls at university. But I have probably slept with 12 or 15 girls who were at university with me. It’s a nice grammatical distinction. And one that I am very well qualified to make, having, as I said, had plenty of time to work extremely hard at my English degree, what with all the shagging I wasn’t doing.

And I’d guess it was the same for Dr Kealey. He’ll have got where he is by first getting a great degree because he was too thin and spotty to get laid very much. And now he sits there in lectures, sick with 50 years of unrequited lust, wishing he could turn back the clock, screw the girls and to hell with the lifetime of pedagogy.

And I dare say it’s the same for all academics. For they are all — every last one of them — people who got first-class degrees because they didn’t have very much sex. And they are all very angry about it. And they become tutors and lecturers so they can go back and make up for it.

It is this fascinating paradox on which the whole structure of world tertiary education rests.

And if I suggested above that I have in some way got all this out of my system, I lied. In the past few years I have found myself invited to universities more and more, to speak at the Oxford Union, to guest-edit a student magazine, to address the Cambridge University Food Society, whatever. I have accepted these invitations only very occasionally and, now that I am finally engaged to be married, I don’t accept them at all. Because on every single occasion, I think without fail, I have copped off with the first student I met.

Sex is what universities are for. For geeks to lose their virginity and studs to get their numbers up, for gays to come out or go back in, for public schoolboys to have their eyes opened by a big-arsed lass from the Valleys and council-estate girls to grab a bit of posh, for old to do it with young, poet with critic, student with teacher, counsellor with counselled, patient with doctor, friend with friend, drunk, stoned, high as a kite or stone-cold sober, and there is no point pretending otherwise.

To Dr Kealey, I say: put up or shut up. For heaven’s sake, find a girl you like, give her one from me, and then go back to your books, your lecturing, and, if she’ll have you, your wife.

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