The Irish Examiner View: Solving the tensions between town and gown in Cork

University College Cork UCC Quad

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought to the surface and into the headlines underlying behavioural problems and social tensions that have been simmering for many years, one of them being adversarial clashes of interests that set city residents against the universities they host. One of the earliest town v. gown clashes was seen in Oxford, England, in 1209, when fights between townspeople and professors led to scholars fleeing to a more congenial location, which they found further east in Cambridge.