Matt Hayles is a pretty cool guy. He's not the British alternative- music Matt Hayles who goes by the stage name Aqualung, but, still… The Matt Hayles in this column is a 21-year-old student at the University of British Columbia, where he's studying Japanese history.

He's also the elections outreach officer for UBC's student union, which is known as the Alma Mater Society.

Hayles reckons that something weird is happening in campus life these days, and he doesn't like it at all. "There's a whole fragmentation of politics going on," Hayles told me the other day. "People are living in their own little student bubbles."

There are now more than 300 clubs at UBC. It's a rise of 50 percent over the past decade or so.

There's the Moustache Club, the Coin and Stamp Collectors, and the Hip-Hop Club. There's the Cannabis Club, the Croquet Society, and the Ambassadors for Jesus. There is the Israel Advocacy Committee, and the Marxist-Leninist Study Group, and there are Walking Robots, Young Conservatives, Ismailis, and Italians. There are several clubs for dancers, and there are clubs for chess players, science-fiction fans, and Gilbert and Sullivan enthusiasts. Some clubs are brand-new this year. Others, like the Chinese Varsity Club, go back to the 1930s.

There is absolutely no harm in clubs, Hayles is quick to say. Clubs are great. Hayles proudly declared himself a member of the Asian Studies Club, as well as the only club on campus with its own armourer (the Fencing Club). The trouble, though, is that the political life of the student community is being segregated into its own special hive. It is as though the Alma Mater Society is becoming a little club of its own, Hayles said: "It's becoming its own little student bubble."

The AMS is supposed to be about all the students at UBC. It's supposed to be the collective voice of students as individuals. Instead, it's becoming what Hayles described as a club of distinct subgroups, marked by their preoccupation with an ironic "revolutionary" pose.

"The people who are involved in politics are completely into a counterculture way of thinking," Hayles said. "There's kind of a political class of people that gets involved in the AMS. It's like there's this idea that 'You are your social group,' and the AMS has become like a specialized subgroup of campus life. They don't really interact with anyone but themselves."

The just-concluded AMS elections attracted a healthy number of candidates: 20 students ran for five senate seats, 11 students ran for two board-of-governor posts, and 14 students ran for five executive positions. But only about 12 percent of UBC's 43,000 students bothered to vote.

"Student apathy" is hardly a new thing. During the past 20 years, the lowest turnout for AMS elections was in 1988, when only 4.8 percent of students voted. The highest turnout was 20.6 percent in 1996, a spike attributed to a popular referendum on child-care. Even in the alleged heyday of campus activism in the 1960s, it wasn't much better. One high-turnout poll, the 1968 UBC student vote on the Vietnam War, attracted a turnout of only about 25 percent. And only a bare majority voted in favour of a halt to the U.S. bombing of Vietnam and a ban on Canada selling armaments to the Americans. It was only "total support of present U.S. policy" that got a fairly unequivocal "no".

But what's happening now is the "complete fragmentation of politics", Hayles said, such that the people who work for the AMS, volunteer for the AMS, and run for AMS office are just another campus subculture, a "club"-with a $10.5-million budget.

It can get a bit sordid, besides. Last month, a new student newspaper with a distinct protest-culture feel to it (the inaugural editorial was headlined "The Knoll Is an Uprising") appeared on campus. Sparky and well-written, the Knoll arrived just in time to endorse a slate of candidates for the January AMS elections. It quickly turned out that the so-called Semantics Media Collective behind the Knoll had obtained funding from the "student resource groups" that the AMS itself funds.

The Knoll-endorsed candidates ended up paying penalties that included $50 fines and cuts to election budgets. One candidate who had been directly involved in the Knoll was barred from campaigning for the final two days of the election.

In Hayles's concerns about the fragmentation of the student body, there is more than a faint echo of the case UBC English professor Graham Good presented in his controversial book Humanism Betrayed: Theory, Ideology and Culture in the Contemporary University (McGill-Queen's Press, 2001). Good argued that the academic life of the university-its freedom, its curiosity, and its love of learning-was being fatally corroded by group-identity politics, postmodern sectarianism, and a pseudoradicalism that gives rise to the "paradoxical phenomenon of the radical elite".

I caught up to Good the other day, and we talked about the phenomenon that troubles Hayles. Good said he'd been watching it happen for some time. Good is 62, and he came to UBC from Princeton in 1971. He said younger students, like Hayles, are starting to get a bit fed up with the way things have gone.

"I see signs of hope," Good said. "There is always rebellion against orthodoxy."

The Chronicles Web log can be found at transmontanus.blogspot.com/.