Kudos to the Cambridge University housekeepers – messy students should be named and shamed

There’s a group of workers in Cambridge who are now heroes to me. The housekeepers of Fitzwilliam College, a newish college of Cambridge University founded in 1869, and which, according to its website, “is a modern, welcoming community committed to developing the talents of all its 750 undergraduate and postgraduate students”.

Well, some of those brainboxes – and they are, after all, students – are, it seems, a scruffy bunch. So scruffy that the housekeepers, with impeccable timing, have a habit of charging into rooms at 7am and, reported the university’s student newspaper, Varsity, “screaming at us to put plates away”.

Picture the poor, tousle-haired, gender-non-specific, youth able to fathom general relativity but not how to pick their pants up off the floor or stack plates in a dishwasher.

And this doesn’t go down too well with the housekeeping team, one of whom sent an email to the entire college community with attached photographs and a message that read: “an illustration of what housekeeping DO NOT want to see on their weekly visits.”

The photographs showed bedrooms and kitchens in a shocking state and there was also talk of one room being infested with slugs, which is a new one on me. Fleas, cockroaches, bed bugs, spiders and mice, yes, but I don’t quite know how you nurture slugs unless you’ve got some indoor vegetable-growing experiment going on.

Reacting to the email, Aaron Lardi, the co-president of Fitzwilliam College’s Junior Combination Room (its undergraduate student union), told Varsity that it was “unacceptable”.

Except they were talking about the email, not the mess. The outrage was about a breach of privacy not a lapse in civilised standards.

The housekeepers were reprimanded. “Steps have been taken with immediate effect to ensure that this does not happen again,” said a lily-livered college spokesman.

So presumably the rooms stay rank and the poor housekeepers must don PPE equipment and fight their way in there, doubtless at some point in the afternoon when the poor lambs have dragged themselves from their beds and are sipping alcohol-free drinks in the library café.

But these housekeepers are right and are doing the nation a favour by naming and shaming these filthy miscreants.

It’s all very well having a brilliant mind, but cleanliness, what with it being next to godliness, might help to ensure that the next generation of architects, aerothermal engineers, chemists, computer scientists, archaeologists and professors of Norse use their skills to make a better world. To keep yourself and your house clean is a moral duty and if you can display good morals in your study, if you can find a way to put your dirty pants in a laundry basket, then we might see the foundations of a better future.

Student life isn’t easy of course and I reckon it’s not quite as much fun as it used to be; clouded with the prospect of future debt and a lack of jobs. So if you can’t just get drunk all day and you have to keep your room tidy then, well just imagine the damage to one’s mental health.

Except, antagonised, listless students like nothing better than claiming their rights have been abused and using the pages of their university paper to mount protests against the college authorities.

While they can’t have the fun of poll-tax riots that were in the offing when I was a student, they can join regular marches for Palestine and there’s always the prospect of a good old-fashioned sit-in. You just sit down, in the way of something, a cleaner perhaps, and play that 1989 song by James often used for sit-in protests, Sit Down.

“Those who feel the breath of sadness/Sit down next to me/Those who find they’re touched by madness/Sit down next to me/Those who find themselves ridiculous/Sit down next to me.”

Which is a prospect to cheer the soul of any angsty student. Or a dirty protest, protesting that you can’t be dirty.

I look forward to hearing that song play when the housekeeping heroes of Cambridge collect their gongs at this year’s Pride of Britain Awards.