TWENTY years ago, the nation was in mourning following the Hillsborough disaster.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, students protested about The Sun's appalling headline claiming to tell "The Truth" about some Liverpool fans who attended that fateful football match.

Students in the late 1980s, like our predecessors, didn't need much excuse to protest. So it was all out with placards to highlight the plight of families whose grief was compounded by lurid, unsubstantiated tabloid claims.

We regularly missed lectures to chant angrily against fascism, racism - anything with an `ism'. And we didn't bother apologising to academics for missing their lectures and tutorials.

Back then, tuition fees were paid by the local education authority as were maintenance costs, (unless your parents were well off) so we had time for marching. We also had money to while away the hours navel gazing while gulping strange-looking cider concoctions.

So the hairy Che Guevara T-shirt-wearer turned bespectacled, balding accountant will chortle at the thought of students at Manchester Metropolitan University getting in a lather about tardy tutors. Posters have appeared encouraging students to send a text if a rebel lecturer turns up more than 10 minutes late.

Students leave university with debts running into tens of thousands of pounds, so it's no surprise that they are more inclined to protest about lectures starting late or being cancelled than a spurious story in a red top. But it's not so funny for lecturers who face being hauled before the Dean to explain themselves.

The move, sanctioned by university bosses, was initiated by the students' union, whose president Nicola Lee sounds like she's had a charisma bypass, when she insists it's not disrespectful to plaster 'shop-a-lecturer'-style posters over campus because 'students must get what they're entitled to'. I wonder whether the tutor can 'shop-a-student' too - and whether the current crop of brilliant young minds always show up on time for lectures.

Manchester Met is following in the footsteps of the University of Manchester where law students attempted to storm the office of the prof they believed was responsible for cutting their lecture times.

Nowadays the student sees him/herself as a feisty customer rather than an idealistic rebel. Yet I hope undergraduates aren't utterly obsessed with getting their money's worth. In reality, the state still contributes towards the homegrown student's learning experience and it's the foreign students from outside the EU who have real cause to complain as they're the ones that are stung for the full cost of studying at our internationally renowned higher education institutions.

It would be sad if students didn't still protest about causes beyond campus, but the signs aren't good given my recent experience. At a beauty contest I attended (under duress) last week, a third year undergraduate at a reputable university informed the baying, mostly shaven-headed male audience, that her role model was not Marie Curie or Emmeline Pankhurst... but Katie Price. Her reasoning? The pneumatically-enhanced red top favourite formerly known as Jordan has made everyone pay to look at her body and hear her banal utterings... how inspiring.