Dougald Hine

Dougald checking online content in the balcony of his “office”– the Royal Festival Hall in London

The first time I met him, there was no question that Dougald had presence. When he went on stage, he captured everyone’s attention on the first word. I mean it quite literally: The first word was “Wheeeeeeeen?” howled for long enough for everyone to take in every aspect of his impressive image: the long gothic coat, the leonine mane of hair, the high domed forehead, the fiery eyes.

When I interviewed him, he was short of sleep and his presence was somewhat subdued. But even on a low day, Dougald is a force to be reckoned with. When he is explaining something, he often breaks in the middle of a sentence to make a side remark that shows he’s fully aware of the complexities of the matter, and then gracefully returns to his main thread, retaining perfect grammatical coherence all along. At one point in the interview he complained about a Radio 3 project to identify emerging public intellectuals that excluded anybody who didn’t belong to a university, and he didn’t need to say that he sees himself as one of the intellectuals that is shaping the ideas of this age through his projects and Internet presence. For anyone that knows anything about him, it’s quite obvious that he is.

The reasons for his project start with his own experience at university. “I had a very confusing experience at university. I remember at various points in my teens well-meaning people saying: ‘Look, you’re bright. Keep your head down, work hard, get to Oxford and you’ll meet people like you.’ I got to Oxford, and I didn’t.” The main problem? “We were given tools for thinking by which we were able to deconstruct everything and anything. It was having your ability to create and sustain a world view destroyed without any support or guidance for the recreation of a new world view at the end of that process. It was as if, unwillingly, our tutors were hacking us to pieces and then throwing us as dog meat for the management consultancies that were coming along to hoover up my contemporaries. Institutions like Oxford at least retained some nostalgia for learning pursued for its own sake. But it had been a generation since anyone took this seriously at a policy level. Rather than the focus being on the intrinsic pleasure, joy, fascination and playfulness of learning, the university is a mechanism for getting the best job you can get, it’s a mechanism for the economy, the employers getting the best new employees they can get. And that was broken at every level. It wasn’t doing a good job for the employers or the graduates on fulfilling that desire. And it was also broken at the level that it communicated to you a very unhelpful set of messages as to what life was about: ‘Life is about getting the best job you can get. You can measure that by social status if you’re sophisticated, by money if you’re not. The centre of your life should be the thing you do as a job. There is such a thing as a career.’ On a superficial level, I came out with one of the top degrees in my year in my subject, but I came out damaged by the experience.”

The rest will be on the book. Be good to me and you may get one.

Thoughts

I have met many people who feel that they were damaged by university. The day I read the first line of Allen Gingsberg’s Howl, ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked’, I knew it’s as true or more today as it was then. Some of the brightest people I’ve met were also the greatest misfits, and I couldn’t help the creeping feeling that they fitted so badly because of, not in spite of, being so bright. My husband was one of them, but by the time I met him he was already falling into a downward spiral of alcohol and a very varied assortment of drugs from black, grey and white markets. He died of an overdose eight years afterwards, for his whole life the fractal peg that wouldn’t fit the square hole.

I have often wondered why it didn’t happen to me, why I never caught the existential angst so typical of Generation X. I had all the risk factors: intelligent, different, belonging nowhere in particular. But something made me immune to the disease, at least partially. I never had any of the worst symptoms: no utter lack of direction in my life, no cynicism as if I were breastfed on scorching corrosive acid, no deep desire to game the system as the only logical response to it.

The rest will be on the book. Be good to me and you may get one.