Oxford has always offered sanctuary to the socially maladjusted and chronically ill-at-ease. At first glance, Emerald Fennell’s new film, Saltburn, might be an attempt to dramatise the resulting long-lived demographic tension of undergraduate life: the modus vivendi that must be established between those who effortlessly belong and those who find they can’t. Fennell is herself the Oxford-educated daughter of a multi-millionaire London jeweller, perhaps giving some indication of which side of the university’s social binary might have claimed her allegiance. Much like her first film, Promising Young Woman, Saltburn is propelled along by an enjoyable, rather unhinged, spirit of social paranoia. It is a film that is rather evidently entertained by itself and its own excesses. In fact, the film is so enjoyable that many of the curious errors and misconceptions that underscore its depiction of Oxford undergraduate life occur to one only as afterthoughts.

The film’s elevator-pitch is simple enough: the psychodrama of The Talented Mr Ripley imposed on the charmed setting of Brideshead Revisited. Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) is gormless and poor; Felix (Jacob Erlordi) is gorgeous and rich; both are first-years at Brasenose. After a few run-ins, Felix generously befriends Oliver, many rungs his social inferior, and invites him to spend the summer at Saltburn, his family’s country seat. Ripley-style, Oliver is revealed to be in the grip of an opaque desire at once to pursue, destroy, and in some sense become Felix, the object of his dark obsession.

He embeds himself in Felix’s life like a parasite, his fascination all the creepier for having a sexual dimension while lacking any straightforward sexual explanation. In one scene, having spied Felix masturbating in their shared bathroom through a crack in the door, Oliver waits for him to leave, then climbs into the tub and sucks the inseminated water out of the drain. But worse than this — much, much worse — is that Oliver is later discovered by Felix to have lied about his social background. He is not in fact working class, but a middle-class person engaging in “oppression cosplay”: a very Oxford touch. Fennell has correctly noticed that among today’s undergraduates, misleadingly playing down one’s privileged background might well be a more profitable form of social camouflage than playing it up.

That aside, the more one thinks about the fast-blossoming relationship between Oliver and Felix in the first act, the less sense it makes. Why exactly does Felix allow Oliver to penetrate his life to the degree that he does? Pity — the explanation the film seems to want the viewer to accept — is, as Oliver must know, not a very promising model for manipulation within the socially ruthless undergraduate circles in which Felix seamlessly moves. There are half-hearted attempts to suggest that the frisson of playing the role of saviour, or perhaps an acquired taste for the exoticism of poverty, might motivate Felix’s adoption of Oliver. (“I can see why Felix likes you,” his sister tells Oliver when meeting him — Yes? Please tell us! the viewer thinks — “you’re so… real”). But none of those interpretations of Felix’s motivations can be properly sustained for the reason that Felix, perhaps against the grain of our expectation, turns out to be consistently decent, sane and straightforward.

For similar reasons, it isn’t at all clear why Felix’s family seem so desperate for Oliver to stick around at Saltburn once he’s been invited up. Likely explanations as to why this berth might be made available to him — for instance, that Oliver is a sparkling conversationalist or accomplished social performer — are ruled-out by the film’s premise. Were he to have these qualities, Oliver wouldn’t have needed to trick Felix into friendship in the manner in which he turns out to have done. In general, the film suffers from a kind of uncertainty about how attractive a figure Oliver is supposed to be. He manipulates boldly but haphazardly, leaving the viewer wondering whether anyone capable of even occasionally pulling off the feats of seduction and role-playing he sometimes succeeds in would really be stuck in such a social rut to begin with.

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If the degree to which Oliver succeeds at Saltburn is under-explained, the degree to which he fails to at Oxford is more so. In his first few days as a fresher, Oliver is mocked by his tutor for having read all the books on his reading list, and at dinner is shown to be a solitary loner adrift in a sea of convivial, urbane and already intimately acquainted others. The message seems to be that he is an isolated loser. But as anyone who has been there will know, and anyone who hasn’t should be able to guess, there are in fact countless Oliver Quicks at Oxford. For the most part they are fully-integrated, albeit lame, members of the community. Oliver would fit right in!

A conscientious but neurotic loner, the prototypical Oliver is probably a PPE-ist (rather than an English student, as Fennell imagines). He types away loudly in lectures and pulls a reliable 9 to 5 at his favourite desk in the college library; he may have been liberated by student life to the degree of making some inadvisable fashion choices and has perhaps even got a daring earring, all the while holding his underwhelming personality fixed. He goes on a few forgettable nights-out a term, prizes the limited social recognition he receives on the basis of fulfilling some thankless administrative role like being JCR secretary, and spends most of his evenings cooking enormously elaborate meals with his boring girlfriend in the staircase kitchenette. I encountered Oliver dozens of times at Oxford.

Saltburn may of course not intend to draw any deeper moral about Oxford’s social scene. Few of the satiric touches in the film seem to be operating in the service of a wider background political theory. Of course, that aim — to make a film about social inequality at Oxford which is just fun — may strike some as subversive enough in its own right. All the same, any film that did aspire to be a credible satire of contemporary Oxford would have to reckon with the fact that Oliver is not now, nor likely ever was, the canonical villain of undergraduate life. At best, he is a hapless accomplice. The real baddies are a subtly different social type.

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Generations turn over quickly at Oxford, and the spirit of the age changes with them. It didn’t take me and my contemporaries long to notice that, in the latter half of the 2010s, we had contrived to come up at a time when a detectable atmosphere of lameness hung about the place. This was doubtless true of other universities too, though the combination of Oxford’s fragmented and parochial institutional structure, as well as the high concentration of intelligent weirdos, seemed to amplify its effects there. “Lameness” is admittedly a frustratingly non-specific label, but seems the right kind of impressionistic diagnosis to get some traction on the problem. It was after all often a little tricky to put one’s finger on what lay at the root of this lameness, though the dispositions and reactions associated with it were quite obviously expressions of the same underlying phenomenon.

It wasn’t, to be clear, just that there were a number of visible malcontents in the social mix — that, I had obviously been fully prepared for — but that, somehow, they seemed to be in charge, and moreover ruling by consent. Everyday college life was kept in check by their many wildly unpredictable and exquisitely-honed sensitivities; a casuistry of safetyism provided the method by which almost all communal decisions were taken. The mood was censorious, retributive, and moralistic. The de rigueur attitude was a kind of performative insecurity, though lapsing into this mode was often nothing more than an implicit double-bluff: a way of announcing one belonged by insisting that one didn’t.

An extraordinary coup had clearly taken place at some point, comparably diabolical to the one which Oliver pulls off. Many of those in power behaved with a kind of wounded officiousness that suggested they had been bullied too much at school, or perhaps not enough. Now, as if taking their cue from certain progressive political causes, they seemed to be attempting to “reclaim” their lameness as something to be celebrated, or at least uncompromisingly imposed on other people.

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Perhaps the most violent outlet for these strange urges was JCR politics, which some of its leading practitioners seemed to conceive of primarily as a mode of social revenge — using it to terrorise their fellow students and police their activities, though invariably under the guise of promoting kindness, the collective mental wellbeing, or some equally sinister objective. In the manner of modern day Lord Chamberlains they would turn up to the university theatres and hammer lists of trigger warnings to the doors; satirical college magazines were shut down; each term brought with it a cause of outrange more unimportant than the last. The rule seemed to be that no gripe could be too manifestly unserious to fail to count as a veto on any collective enterprise. It was often difficult to know how far to be amused and how far disturbed by the strange ascendant mood.

A shrewd choice to simply side-step these unwieldy contemporary developments may be why Saltburn is set in 2006: long enough ago that recent history’s political and technological trends hadn’t had a chance to warp the character of campus politics, though still recent enough to pass for the present in certain crucial respects. Still, the effect is to trap the film with a somewhat ersatz image of Oxford — the dreamy crane shots over the Rad Cam, the oddly managed homoeroticism, the remote aristocratic estates. The view from the dreaming spires manages to not quite bring into focus certain notable developments on the ground.

As a result, and whatever its other successes, Saltburn fails to skewer what is distinctively worth skewering in undergraduate life today. It’s a shame, as that would be well worth doing. Undergraduate life is funny, even though it takes itself seriously. Some properly trained derision would reveal its excess self-seriousness to be compensating for a gross lack of seriousness; its overweening moralism disguising an untoward parochialism; the pretence of imposter syndrome concealing the existence of the real imposters.

Then I got glandular fever when I was 14, and spent six weeks mostly in bed. I was blessed with the damascene insight that no one could make me go if I chose not to. And so, I stopped. I learned that there was a threshold of non-attendance at which an intervention would be staged, and showed up just enough to avoid that. Otherwise, I claimed to be generically “ill”. No one really believed this, but no one really seemed to mind.

I stayed at home, listening to morbid records, writing diaries and reading in the garden. I did adequately in my GCSEs, and barely adequately in my A-levels. This stung my pride, but didn’t seem to matter. Whatever I was supposed to be, it wasn’t going to happen here, in the countryside, where there was one bus to town every two hours. This was not my place, even though it was the only place I’d ever known. University was where the Sarah Project would truly begin.

And it did. I started an English degree, and it was immediately clear that no amount of going to school would have been better preparation than my years of skiving. Six contact hours a week and as many novels as I could consume in the meantime? I knew how to do this! When I discovered that I didn’t like my course (too much theory), I just worked harder and got better marks, so that by the end of my first year I could offer my clutch of firsts around to other universities that would never have looked twice at my A-level grades.

I ended up, not exactly coincidentally, transferring to the university that my boyfriend was attending. And then, two weeks into my second year, I found out I was pregnant. Two days after that, I realised I was going to have this baby. I didn’t experience this exactly as a choice, though I know it was one. I experienced it as knowledge. Whatever had made its home in my belly had made me a mother, and I would have to catch up with that.

Even as the person who made that decision, I find it hard to reconcile the ambition I had at 20 with the will to throw my lot in with maternity. All I can say is that I believed I was equal to anything then, and my life so far had shown that I could overcome whatever obstacles I put into my own way. The baby would go to nursery (I assumed there would be a nursery). I would go back to university (I assumed this would be possible). The Sarah Project would continue, with some light amendments.

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It’s difficult not to be conspicuous as a pregnant student. When I came back for my third year, I would introduce myself to classmates and find out they already knew me as “the pregnant one”. Well, they could hardly have missed me, with my huge belly and my dreary, hated uniform of Mothercare tunics. I understood that I wasn’t like most students, and I didn’t really mind.

For most people, university — or an arts degree at least — is the first time in their education that they realise what I realised laid out in my bed at 14, with a raging fever and a furious lymph system: no one else can force you to do this. You can choose not to. Outside my first Victorian tutorial, my peers joked about how they simply hadn’t had time to get through Middlemarch over the summer break. I had read it during breastfeeds, resting the massive paperback on the small body of my baby, trying to coax his appetite into sync with the chapter breaks.

I read the chapter where Dorothea Brooke visits her sister Celia, who has just become a mother. Dorothea watches Celia “watching the remarkable acts of the baby”, hardly knowing the person her sister has become. I felt like both sisters at once, besotted with my child and simultaneously astonished to observe my own besottedness. But I felt only annoyance for most of my classmates, who had nothing but time and no inclination. What had they come here for if they didn’t want to do the work?

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More disconcerting still was the realisation that I didn’t belong in the same world as my tutors either, even as I started to fit myself for lecturing as a profession. (I wanted to write but a baby seemed an insuperable barrier to getting into journalism and academia was right there, offering me funding.) The ones who were parents were, mostly, male. For female early-career academics, the trade-off seemed impossible.

If you could complete your doctorate in three years, you still had a race to convert insecure and underpaid jobs into a proper departmental role before your fertility began to fade. I felt, smugly, that I’d carved a private path through the system, then realised I had not. The most senior women tended to be childless. This is a bit less true now than it was in the early noughties, but it’s still the case that having a baby is about the worst thing you can do for your career as a woman in academia.

I had a sturdy faith in the myth of my own exceptionalism, but not sturdy enough to believe that I was so much better than every other woman with a university career. I survived through my BA and an MA, and a little way into a DPhil, for the same reason I failed to sink myself at school and college: because there was a system that believed I would eventually succeed. I did not just “get to university”: I was carried. Teachers guided me, despite my great reluctance, through the admissions system. My parents had hand-couriered my paperwork when I was in danger of missing deadlines. And I did not just “complete my degree”. I had support — most importantly, the backing of my boyfriend, my family and my boyfriend’s family; but also, a generously subsidised and excellent student union nursery on campus.

It mattered as well that my tutors did not want to see me fail, and when I finally fell out of university it was because my doctoral supervisor simply could not deal with me having another baby: he called me a child bride and stopped answering my emails. Still, in a way, that disinterest was a relief. Before then, I had had to learn that there is nothing quite as suspect as the person in authority who takes a special interest and then takes a bit too much.

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Part of the problem, nowadays, is that no one seems entirely sure what universities owe their students: complete protection from all distress, or benign neglect. Then universities minister Sam Gyimah argued that institutions should see themselves acting “in loco parentis”, with particular responsibility for the mental health of their students; but he also claimed that students were being coddled by a “culture of censorship”, suggesting that campuses were if anything too protective of their charges.

Those two apparently conflicting positions might be closer than it seems. Students are treated increasingly as consumers — they want and expect their university to look after them, and universities write policies on wellbeing and inclusion that suggest they can meet this demand. The necessary resources, however, rarely exist. A fully funded psych service is expensive. Trigger warnings and no-platforming come cheap. They may not be moral and they may not be effective, but they allow beleaguered lecturers to believe they’re discharging their duty of care, even if deferring to student demands ultimately only traps young people in permanent adolescence.

In the last few years, I’ve done some teaching at university, and the rawness of students — the childishness of them, in the safety-rails-on simulacrum of an adult life that university offers — can be painful to see. I’ve sometimes felt the same annoyance with my own classes that I did outside that Middlemarch seminar: why are you here, if you can’t manage your own life?

But the bargain of university has always included the promise that it will form you in the last stage of your growing-up: you become a part of it and emerge, finally, as a fully matriculated member of the bourgeoisie. It was never only about the education, and students will always be liable to do slightly dumb things. That might be trying to protect themselves from the literal violence of people with ideas, or it might be having a baby. The duty of a university is to see that neither of those decisions can keep someone from becoming the adult they could be.