Alumni of a certain age hark back 20 years to the last instance when St Stephen’s College experienced scandal. In a midnight prank that went monstrously public, a few “gentlemen” in “residence” broke into the “ladies common room”, coloured the walls with sexist graffiti, broke open a few lockers and left some garments hanging outside as their calling cards. In the following days that shook “College”, the absolutely dreaded happened: the media feasted on the story, the LCR breach made it to page one for a week, and charges of male chauvinism in India’s premier college led to the banning of its student community’s favourite indulgence, practical jokes and dark humour. Kooler Talk a student publication driven by pun and innuendo and Practical Joke Week were outlawed.

As the college on Delhi’s Ridge closed in on itself, Emergency-like restrictions on big gatherings and outsiders were imposed. Stephanians found themselves amongst only their own, and huddled into whispered discourses on the value of “chick-charts” in College’s traditions and this late stirring of feminism on the campus. Suddenly in that short spell of surreal isolation a sense of bliss was tangible.

For a college that prides itself on giving to India so many men and women in high public office, St Stephen’s has always been edgy in dealing with the world outside. Its folklore, its monikers, its mythology, its attitudes, all accentuate a sense of difference. To refer to the “Mess” as dining room, the “Residence” as hostel or its “Cafe” as canteen would be to invite withering scorn. Freshers are fattened on apocryphal stories of intruders being identified by designer clothes and gold necklaces. Arguments rage at the commencement of each academic year on whether Stephen’s should join up with the Delhi University Students’ Union and how other colleges gang up in cheering the non-Stephanian in sport ties. The point: to be a Stephanian, one must first appear to be one, dressed down and nose-in-the-air aloof.

At its best, this difference makes for a unique engagement. As a former student, Gopal Gandhi, wrote recently: ‘‘If St Stephen’s meant something special to me, it was this, that it enabled and encouraged you to think for yourself, speak for yourself, and do both mindful of the other person being rather more important in the scheme of things than yourself. Not least because ‘others’ were more numerous than ‘your’ kind. But let not the others’ strength — numerical or otherwise — overawe you into silence or petrification.’’

Steeled into separateness, Stephanians then set forth to be of assistance. The college sets great store by social service. And having personally disengaged from electoral politics, students issue invitations to public persons to come and speak to them as marks of honour. The Stephanian’s place in the scheme of things is drilled through authorised historiography. Upon admission even as a Stephanian acquires an obsession with GREs and IAS, a race begins to memorise milestones from College’s glory days — that attack by a Stephanian on Viceroy Hardinge in 1913 that fetched a death sentence, C.F. Andrews’ role in fetching Gandhiji back from South Africa, those Stephanians who enlisted in Naxalism’s earliest days, Zia-ul-Haq’s devotion to old Sukhia at the Dhaba, College’s relocation up the architectural chain — from a small heritage structure near Kinari Bazaar to the vicinity of St James’ Church to Walter George’s stone and brick spread on the Ridge.

This lingering on the successes of its alumni gives Stephen’s an extremely exaggerated confidence in its eminence. But it is this very sense of uniqueness that serves as a prism to project its periodic crises as urgent and far-reaching debates in higher education — from the limits to quotas in minority institutions, to women’s right to access all the programmes in co-ed colleges, to — now — accountability in admissions procedures and secular and theological domains in education.

Alas, this common cause only brings back the point: the situation without is not that different from that within.