Tramp awarded university degree after kipping in library
- Newsbiscuit Editorial Team
- 18 minutes ago
- 1 min read
Brian, 53 (but looks 70) has become the first homeless person to be awarded a degree by the University of Padgate after spending five years sleeping in the Social Sciences section.
‘We checked the regs’, a spokesperson told us ‘and Brian’s time in the library could be APEL’d, which took care of year one’. APEL – or Accreditation of Prior Experience and Learning – is university-speak for cheating. It’s like Dark Matter but for qualifications.
‘He had to write assignments for years two and three but they weren’t bad. Okay, his academic writing could be better and he sometimes uses BBC Bitesize as a reference – but that’s true of most of our students’.
Brian’s dissertation – Girls Today: Highly Disappointing – was framed as a ‘lived experience narrative’ using swear words and graffiti in place of conventional sentence structure. It has been placed in the Restricted Reading section of the library.
Brian has had his critics at the university – mostly the security staff, really. Also his habit of constructing ‘book caves’ continues to irritate the librarians as it might set a bad example for the other sociology graduates sleeping rough there. Many students consider him an ‘inspiration’, given that he experienced despair, homelessness and poverty before attending university - whereas for them those are all in the future.