The news Otago University has been inexplicably relegated 22 places to 155 in the World's Top 500 Universities list was released on the same day I attended my first university lecture since 1969.
Can these two items possibly be related?
Well of course they can; even a zoo monkey stupefied by tourist finger food could see this.
The tertiary education world is rollicking in a sea of confusion and change, and my trotting down there has clearly been decreed from behind vice-chancellorian doors.
The aim surely is to right Otago's global position, to hopefully lift them above the wretched Auckland University, itself dropping, but still in the top 100.
I probably haven't been on the Auckland University campus since 1969, either.
I doubt if it is any different, an insipid rubble of bad buildings with the feel of a pile of odd shoes.
And the feel of a campus is sacrosanct.
Otago University in 1969 was quite simply the most thrilling place I had ever been.
Were there rankings back then, surely Otago would have been above even the much vaunted MIT, which once again this year turned up at No1, despite I and T standing for Institute and Technology, which makes it nothing more than a glorified polytech.
It is ironic I went down there for a lecture last week, given that I hardly attended a single lecture in my three years there in the 1960s
The gap year did not exist then, sadly; I was the perfect unformed/uninformed student, ready only for drinking and writing for Critic, not academia.
I still have my result card for philosophy 1, which read Did Not Attend Final Examination, amusing wordplay in view of the nihilists who were bespattered through that class wearing T-shirts that proclaimed Suicide Is The Ultimate Bravery.
Last week's lecture was much milder stuff, early New Zealand popular music.
Friend Chris Bourke, he of the wonderful book Blue Smoke, had been brought down from Wellington for three lectures, and he invited me along.
I remembered how much I loathed adult students in 1969, their incessant questions, their bad clothes, their high essay marks, and I resolved to slip quietly into the lecture early and just sit at the back filing my nails with an emery board.
Incidentally, full disclosure, I called emery boards elephant boards until I was well into my 30s.
I may have gone to university but I never said I was bright.
I arrived late after weak human GPS, and I had to bob and weave through laptopped and scribbling 18-year-olds, sorry, excuse me, sorry, excuse me, to find a vacant seat, an entry no student could miss. Adult students never change.
Chris gave a nice informative talk, though his wrestling with PowerPoint reminded me why I could never be a university lecturer.
PowerPoint should have been drowned at birth.
But I now know why country music enjoyed a belittling lower-decile following when I was young - their records were sold one shilling cheaper.
Incredible.
Imagine pricing music by its alleged artistic merit now! I would love that job.
I wandered around afterwards.
They have a food court now.
I bought a mountain-sized Mexican falafel fajita for under $10, a long cry from the swill I bought in this very same area 44 years before.
How could Otago rank at only 155 with food like this?
The campus was dangerous in 1969, traffic-riddled Castle St hurtling through its middle.
It was like Bangkok.
Now they have a proper huge sprawling campus.
The old university is still gorgeous, precisely what a Top Ten university should look like.
I have seen some of the Top Ten; Otago is better. The Staff Club remains old and wise, though the food is buffet.
Maybe that's where the 155 comes from. Staff Club used to be three-hour lunches, roast potatoes, wisdom, and women smoking pipes.
I am intrigued as to how Otago can get back up the ladder. I may be asked to complete my degree next year and table recommendations.
I certainly do like Mexican food.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
