When I was a student, I arrived one day at the department of Middle Eastern studies at my redbrick university to be greeted by a note taped to the lecture-room door. “Gone to Yemen,” it read. “Back in a month.”
Our lecturer, a brilliant man, used to enjoy research trips to destinations ranging from Istanbul to Sanaa but somehow he always forgot to tell us about them beforehand. At the time, we gleefully headed for the pub. Today, 26 years on, when students are paying nearly £10,000 a year in fees on top of frequently amassing five-figure debts to subsidise their living costs, lecturers going Awol is rather less of a laughing matter.
