Polar Undergraduate
The fact has now become indisputable that in an autonomous University College, it is misleading to talk of undergraduates in a collective sense, as one might talk of sheep or cattle.
Undergraduates differ very widely one from another, and this difference is most pronounced in the varying lengths of their day. Geographers tell us that the day varies in length from one latitude to another.
This variation, in my opinion, is also the soundest basis for a classification of undergraduates. This leads me to an important digression. The duty of a University, we are told, is to train students to fit themselves into society. But our University is doing much more than that. It is training students to fit them into the different geographical latitudes of the earth. Within the walls of the College (or rather within its barbed-wire fences), one may find a student whose day is only twelve hours, next door to another who has twenty-four.
It appears to me that Ibadan is destined to play a very important part in furthering world education and culture. A friend of mine, who enjoys a twenty-two-hour day, told me recently that after graduation he would take up an appointment in the North Pole. Unfortunately, he has just been informed that in the North Pole, there are six months of darkness during which the people and their governments go to sleep, or something very like it.
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Now, this constitutes a really serious problem because the very word ‘sleep’, be it tropical or polar, is repugnant to my friend. He hopes to overcome this difficulty by flying to the South Pole on the 22 September every year and returning six months later.
He will thus be oscillating north and south, in sympathy with the seasons. My friend belongs to a group of undergraduates that rejoices under the name of ‘Polar Type’. It is a very interesting group, and so, we shall describe a day in the life of one of them.
By their very nature, they are entitled to priority of treatment in an article like this. To begin with, their potential field of service to humanity is more extensive than that of any other group. It embraces, as we have seen, the two extremities of the earth.
Apart from this, they are the boldest group of undergraduates in the College. This is hardly surprising, seeing that people who fly in the face of nature, ignoring sleep which is her way of crying ‘halt!’, must possess more than their due of moral courage. It is significant that more than one member of this group featured prominently in the historic attempt to mob a President of the Students’ Union while on duty.
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A mere coincidence, perhaps. The criterion for membership of this group has been summarized mathematically as 20<p<24, where p is the number of ‘sleepless’ hours.
Now, these sleepless hours may be broken up and diversified by an interspersion, here and there, of small bits of sleep, s. In the latter instance, these small bits, when integrated, must not exceed four hours, i.e., the integral of delta s between limits minus infinity and nought is less than or equal to 4.
My friend wakes up at 6.30 a.m. and attends his first lecture at 7.00 a.m. He has a seat at the back of the room, where his chair and the wall combine to protect him from the onslaughts of gravity. Somehow, the notes taken by him at this period have a way of becoming unreadable afterwards.
It is a pity that we have no department of Egyptology in the College; I strongly feel that something in the nature of ‘Special Relationship’ must exist between these notes and the hieroglyphics. After all, they have both originated in Africa. We must, however, cut a long story short—my friend sleeps during lectures. Incidentally, most polar undergraduates exceed their maximum of four hours in this way. But the apparent inconsistency is quite easily explained. We must recognize the difference between official and unofficial sleeping.
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The Polar League is only concerned with official sleeping, and members are free to arrange their own nodding periods—either during lectures or on their way to the dining hall. It has been noticed that our polar friends become active after breakfast.
Personally, I think that hot tea has something to do with it. They are, all of them, good tea-drinkers, and we hope that when they grow older, they will be able to break the record set by a certain compatriot, who was alleged to have taken thirty-seven cups in the Government House! This is really untrue, because it is now definitely established that he took only thirty-five.
We must also remember, in fairness to him, that he apologized to the stewards for the extra inconvenience. He added, at the same time, that they would have saved themselves a lot of time and worry if they had served his tea in a bucket. But to come back to our friends of the League. They are dull but aggressive and have a strong bias for ‘amala’ and thermos flasks.
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Their only distinguishing feature during the day is their inactivity which diminishes as darkness sets in. It has not been possible, with our limited experimental facilities, to investigate thoroughly their behaviour after midnight.
A student has recently reported that in the small hours of a certain day, his neighbour fell off his chair, breaking his arm and his fountain-pen in the process. But an isolated and single observation has no statistical significance.
There is, however, a theory that has just been propounded, and which may throw light on polar undergraduates. It states that what matters in a University is not how many hours (p) we are awake, but the product of this quantity and our degree of alertness (d). This product (dp) is fairly constant for all students, and (p) can only be increased at the expense of (d). This is the Law of Conservation of Hours.
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