King's College: Unorganised Order

So I've gone to King's College for a few weeks now and started to settle into my routine. However, I'm finding this routine needlessly complicated and confusing. Most of us have heard of "organised chaos" which involves a framework that leads to mayhem, but is meant to function that way, like a busy restaurant. Well the British university system is just the opposite of that: the unorganised system that produces a sense of order which I simply call "unorganised order."
 
Let's start with King's College as a location: it isn't one. Rather the campus consists of buildings few and far between one another. Some buildings are south of the Thames, some are on the Strand. My student accommodation puts me twenty minutes from my nearest class (And people at AU complain of the walk from Leonard Hall to Kreeger). And public transport takes just as long, so people should only use it if they are lazy or the heavens have opened up for the next twenty minutes. As for the buildings themselves well... King's Building has twelve other buildings attached to it and navigating between buildings makes the old McKinley building at American University seems as straightforward as a prison cell block. I guess that’s what happens when a university that educated less than 3,000 students a year adds 30,000 more over 25 years (and that is why the U.K. government had to raise the cap on tuition fees to £9,000 or $14,500).
 
Then we come to the classes themselves. Some classes do have a degree of structure like assigned readings, essays, and short answers. But those are the exceptions that prove the rule. In three of my four modules I have been presented with a list of books to read. One of these lists is twenty pages long and on day one my professor said we would be mad to try and read all of them. The thing is, I have no idea which ones to read and have no means of getting 95 per cent of these books. Maybe people can find some in the library (which is somewhere else in London), but again, that's the exception that proves the rule.
 
So how does this system keep order? Simple: have a strict policy about how to pass a module. In my case as a study abroad student, that involves handing in essays before their deadlines. If I’m late by 10^-9999999999 of a second I get a zero. For regular students the same applies, but the essays normally aren't graded. They need to be done so the students can sit the final exam which will be graded.
 
It's incentives like these that keep order in an otherwise unorganised world. This might prove the closest thing that we get to anarchism: no order, but very serious consequences for those who don't step up. So in this regard, I think I prefer the US academic system.

Sorry, but I'm not Apologizing for the Empire

Ian McKellen once said in an interview that whereas Australian's ask tourists if they are enjoying themselves, he says sorry to tourists about everything when they come to England. The moment I heard this I realized I do say sorry for quite a lot as do many of the people here. In fact, I was walking through the National Gallery (The British one, not the Smithsonian one) and I stepped on part of a woman's foot. The woman immediately apologized and elected to move a few inches so I could better see the picture. Whenever people bump into me, I often apologize as well (I think, you might want to challenge my humility on that one). So the question really is: Why?

Frankly, we do have a lot to apologize for: The food, the weather, drunken British tourists, the public transport, football hooligans, the supposedly fire proof doors that require twice as much force to open, etc. This habit of apologizing may just be due to manners being beaten into us as children. However, I have a sneaky suspicion that it may just be guilt over ruling a quarter of the world. Following the Second World War Mr. Hitler made empires highly unfashionable what with his Third Reich and mass murder. Over the next twenty years the British and other European nations got rid of their imperial belongings willingly or otherwise. And then following independence a lot of nations collapsed or failed to grow. And since blaming native rulers for their country’s woes has proven very politically incorrect, the blame falls on former masters. So really the British have developed this habit because they feel they mismanaged the world and are the root cause of most of the world’s woes today. And this explains why apologizing for America is very politically incorrect in the US, they haven't controlled other countries quite like us Europeans.

Whilst I appreciate the culture of apologizing for things that aren't their fault: I take beef with people who apologize for the British Empire. Sure there were terrible things done in the British Colonies (Hitler didn't invent concentration camps, just the gas chambers) there were plenty of good things the empire did such as enforcing the abolition of slavery and ending cannibalism in New Zealand (So “Lord of the Rings" could be filmed there). Plus, much worse empires have existed (cough, Belgium, cough) and some weren't even European (cough, Mayans, cough).

Discussing this issue in detail is too much for one blog, so I leave you with this fact: I will not apologize for the British Empire, but I will apologize for not apologizing.