Thank you for the comment. Interesting. However, University of Sussex is an entirely different body not connected with University of Brighton.

“Visiting Sussex University in the late ’90s is not unlike watching a rerun of 2001: A Space Odyssey: you see, from a later vantage point, the gap between the hope it embodied and the reality in which it now exists.

The university, like the film, was a product of the ’60s, and there is, now, something both retro and enviable about its vanguardism, its pink brick and concrete arches, its eschewal of straitjacketed curricula, its spirited jab to the guts of Oxbridge, its sheer newness.

“There is no God,” declared the iconoclastic philosopher Patrick Corbett to his first-year students in the compulsory “Language and Values” course, demanding that they reassess their belief systems.

There may not have been a God at Sussex, but there were the Beatles and the blues, the Mersey Poets, Becket and Sartre, anti-nuclear marches and the anti-apartheid movement, campaigns against racist landladies and Outspan-peddling grocers, co-ed student digs. “Deliberate sociological experiments are being performed on other people’s children!” screamed the Sunday Telegraph.

At Thabo Mbeki’s BA graduation in 1965, the actor Albert Finney and the sculptor Henry Moore were awarded honorary doctorates. Sussex graduates, said another honouree, Professor David Reisman, “have something at once Elizabethan and international about them, stylish and ‘with it’, here and now, but also . . . less snobbish and less inhibited, and more truly introspective and more rightly troubled than earlier generations of undergraduates”.

A classmate of Mbeki’s, the journalist Lesley Garner, wrote after attending her class’s 30th reunion that “we were the epitome of everything the ’60s stood for: youth, glamour, right-on political correctness, educational experiment. We inhabited our brave new world by the sea wearing the first miniskirts and microscopic dresses bought from our very own branch of Biba up by the station.” Mark Gevisser, Sunday Times, 30th May 1999