But I look back with great merriment on those days, and recall them with my sense of humour fully engaged. Every student who chooses to should have the chance to participate in subsidised campus activities, be they sport, politics, debating, competitive chess, or the peculiar combination of writing and politically correct navel-gazing that we undertook in the poor dear Media Collective, which was actually just a refuge for insecure post-adolescents desperately trying to construct an identity. Such things form part of a rounded education and teach one to think for oneself. But Education Minister Christopher Pyne doesn't think so. This week, in a turn-around which seemed to contradict Prime Minister Tony Abbott's commitment to ''candid'' and ''consultative'' government, Pyne raised and promptly dropped the idea of abolishing the government's student services and amenities fee, as well as fore-shadowing the idea of re-introducing caps on university places. The $273 annual student services fee was reintroduced by the Gillard government in 2011, after the Howard government abolished compulsory student fees in 2005. In an interview with Fairfax Media which was splashed on the Herald's front page on Wednesday, Pyne said the fee was ''compulsory student unionism by the back door'' and that the Coalition would abolish it. In another interview with The Australian Financial Review, he was asked when the fee might be abolished and he said: ''It might be in the budget, but that's not until May.'' But Pyne either went too far, or said too much.

This was not part of the script - Abbott had previously promised the university sector a period of stability after the budget cuts the Gillard government made in the May budget. In a pre-election press release Pyne himself promised the Coalition had ''no plans'' to reintroduce caps to university places and that "reports that this is being considered are wrong''. On Wednesday morning, after the Herald's splash, Pyne's reversal was swift. That morning, though he was scheduled to appear on ABC Radio's flagship AM program, the ''Mouth from the South'' went missing. He resurfaced on local radio - on ABC Adelaide, where he backtracked, saying the abolition of the student service fee was not a priority. That same day a leaked email from the Prime Minister's media adviser informed ministerial staff that all requests for media interviews, right down to local ABC outlets, were to be vetted through the Prime Minister's office first (Abbott may have promised ''grown-up government'' but ministers will apparently need permission from the headmaster's office before they speak). On Thursday the Prime Minister emerged from several days' silence to give a press conference in which he used identical language to slap down the idea. The student fees abolition was ''not a priority'', he said. There were ''no plans for change in this area at this time''. Messages were mixed, at the very least. Was Pyne freelancing or was he speaking confident in the knowledge that his views on student unionism align with his leader's, only to have the leader rein him in?

Abbott and Pyne are personally close and Pyne is at the ''heart of the Coalition's senior leadership group'', to quote the leader. Despite Abbott's embrace of student politics when he attended Sydney University in the 1970s, he was always firmly against compulsory student unionism, although it should be noted he and Pyne both attended university when it was free - in the window between Gough Whitlam abolishing fees in 1974 and Bob Hawke's introduction of the Higher Education Contribution Scheme in 1989. Abbott's time in student politics is well documented. It was a period during which the rank stupidity of the left was matched only by the blunt aggression of the right. He was at Sydney University not long after the upheaval of the Whitlam years and the Vietnam protests, during which conscripts took refuge on campus and federal police were set upon by student mobs. Things have moved on since then. They have even moved on from the earnest political correctness of my own university career. I was discussing Baudrillard with the Media Collective cats before Howard abolished compulsory student unionism, when there were fewer constraints on what student fees could be spent on. When the fees were reintroduced by the Gillard government in 2011, they were regulated, with money directed towards counselling, study support, childcare, sport and student representative councils (which, as democratic institutions, will sadly always involve some politics).

Universities must now be transparent about what they do with the money raised, and to take the example of Sydney University (which discloses on its website exactly where the fees go), it is allocated by the uni in consultation with democratically elected student representatives. There is something unseemly about politicians who have formed their own views in the crucible of ratbag student politics seeking to deny future generations the same anarchic privilege. The abolition of student fees is a purely ideological policy which would not save the government a single cent. It would cruel university services and has already aggravated the Nationals, who strongly support service fees because they help regional students. The floating of the idea by Pyne looks an awful like a government that had no clear higher education policy before the election is simply falling back on the higher education culture wars of the Howard era, even though the rest of the world has moved past them. And those culture wars were so tedious. More tedious than an entire semester's-worth of post-structuralism reading.