I have a dreadful confession to make: I chose not to study at the University of Melbourne. Got the marks, went elsewhere. My family and teachers attributed this bizarre behaviour to the perversity of adolescence. It is true that I knew little about myself, and even less about the world, but I could see that I would not last a week at the University of Melbourne. One look at the place had put me right off. Coming from a provincial high school, you could feel it in the air – the automatic, often unconscious, snobbery of rich private schools. You can find them today weighing into current debates with their personal testimony, citing the private benefits that their University of Melbourne degree brought them, asserting that they could have paid a lot more for it than they did, attacking compulsory amenities fees in the same breath, and (noblesse oblige!) finding ingenious ways to create safely limited opportunities for the ‘genuinely disadvantaged’.