Even of Keele

What were the politicians who pronounce on education like at university? Liberal Democrat Don Foster kicks off our series on the college lives of the main party spokespeople by recalling his 1960s student days for Simon Midgley.

There were no defining epiphanies in Don Foster's rite of passage through Keele University in the mid to late 1960s. The Liberal Democrat's education and employment spokesman, now 49, remembers many, mostly happy, moments but no blinding, revelatory turning points.

Dancing with Princess Margaret at a university ball, a Francoise Hardy LP being played at full volume late one night, early morning fry ups at the Keele motorway service station - fragmented memories that together form a patchwork quilt-like tapestry of his formative student days.

Curiously perhaps, the radicalism and spoiled self-indulgence of the late 1960s seem to have touched him not at all. His four undergraduate years - 1965-69 - came at a time when student protest was reaching new heights, the Vietnam war dominated the headlines and flower power was all the rage.

And yet, while he led a very active student life, he stood aside from student protests. He was a student politician but he was not party political - he campaigned for change but was content to work within the established structure of university and student committees.

He never took drugs at university and has no memory of any other students at Keele doing so either. He wore conventional clothes - jeans and a denim shirt, never sunbathed nude on campus or occupied the registry. Mr Foster was, he says now, fairly hostile to some of the more extreme forms of student protest. "I was a bit of a party pooper against some of the more extreme forms of silliness for the sake of silliness."

He won a fiercely fought election to become chairman of the students union entertainments committee. He organised student balls, ran discos and planned charity events. He booked the pop groups of the day - The Seekers, The Piccadilly Line, The Foundations and The Flower Pot Men. He also sold rag magazines, delivered meals on wheels, played rugby occasionally for the university third 15 and was a co-founder of the university rowing club.

They were busy times during which he was content to channel his energy and managerial and entrepreneurial talents into fairly conventional but altruistic activities raising money for good causes and organising events on other people's behalf.

"I got a bit of a reputation for making things happen,'' he says. "I just got pleasure out of making balls happen efficiently. I don't see myself as a hugely well organised person but I suppose I do like to get things right."

The son of a policeman, Mr Foster was the first generation of his family to go to university. One of the most vivid memories of his youth is of the day he passed his 11 plus. "Those who had passed jumped up and down with glee in the playground while those who had failed were as miserable as sin and you felt that this big division had taken place. Not a pleasant experience."

After seven years boarding at Lancaster Royal Grammar School, he passed A levels in physics (A), mathematics (B) and further mathematics (D). Unable to aspire to Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh or Durham, he looked at a number of universities including Leeds and East Anglia.

In the end he chose Keele, then a relatively new university with a pioneering and unusual curriculum offering a foundation year in a wide range of subjects followed by a joint honours degree and the chance to acquire a teaching certificate at the same time.

Although he registered to study physics and mathematics, he eventually swapped to physics and psychology after growing bored with mathematics. He also studied Russian as a subsidiary subject but was frustrated by his inability to get to grips with the Russian alphabet.

Mr Foster remembers working hard for his finals. "I was never a particularly able student," he says. "My 2i was achieved on the basis of slog and hard work rather than great intellectual prowess."

In his final year he married a fellow student, Victoria, and they moved into a small rented house in a hamlet four or five miles away from the campus. He remembers a very strict regime revising for finals which revolved around taking breaks listening to the Archers and Mrs Dale's Diary.

Although he did relatively well academically he does not appear to regard his university studies as being especially formative intellectually. "University was much more formative about relationsips, about getting involved in a whole range of activities," he says.

"I made lots of mistakes. I learnt a great deal. I made a lot of very good and close friends. I did things and I felt I was achieving something. I did not know that I was a Liberal when I was at university. Looking back on it I was a Liberal, there's no doubt that the things I did and the values I held, involvement in lots of charity things, there was obviously somewhere in there a sort of concern for others."

While he can remember the odd essay - "Water: the Universal Resource" or the "Romans in Britain", working with early computers, doing some psychological research work with Harold Lomas which subsequently got published, reading The Brothers Karamazov, Germinal by Zola and the works of B F Skinner and other psychologists, he does not regard any one book as having a seminal influence on his life.

"My wife's sister visited my room on campus one day," he recalls "Looked at my bookshelves and said 'Ah I see you have lent all your books to the library'. In terms of benefiting from university from the academic point of view there's no doubt whatsoever that the incredibly cliched phrase is true - that were I to go back now I would get more out of it than I did when I was there.

"But on the other hand if I had not done it when I did it I would not have got to the position where I am now saying I would have got more out of it. So it's a bit chicken and egg. There are things I wish I had not done and things I wish I had done. But I did have a very full, very formative time when I was at university."

Next week David Blunkett recalls his revolutionary student colleagues at Sheffield in the 1960s.