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Showing posts with the label Richmond upon-Thames College

Richmond-upon-Thames College: the student factory

Richmond upon-Thames College main entrance From a distance, Richmond upon-Thames College looks and occasionally smells, like a bread factory. It is a machine for learning in. Our students leave baked, not half baked. Watch us on a fire drill. There's the staff and then there are 6,500 students, including part-timers. Take this example; we have seven different restaurants on campus, including Merits Training Restaurant, run by the catering students, the Appletree Cafe , run by our students with special needs, and there's our staff restaurant. Crowded into colleges like these there are still some of the idealists and disaffected casualties of the Thatcher years. They take cover between the time-servers and jobsworths like marijuana plants growing under tobacco leaves. Perhaps colleges like ours shelter a people's intelligentsia in waiting. If Jerusalem ever did come, these irritatingly self- deprecatory colleagues of mine might be among the leaders of a cultural renais