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Explaining why she thought Cambridge had become a more intelligent university since she and I were there in the 1970s, the celebrity classicist Dame Mary Beard came out with a remark that irritated me acutely.
Our alma mater had been 'transformed for the better', she told the Cheltenham Literature Festival, because 'there aren't any of those thick white rugger buggers' any more.
'When you say, "Why are there so few third-class degrees at Cambridge?," she went on, 'I can tell you it's because those thickos have been removed.'
I should say at once that I carry no special torch for rugger buggers – defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as men who play rugby 'especially one who behaves in a loud and unpleasant way'.
It's only fair to point out, however, that by no means all rugby blues were loud-mouthed thickos. On the contrary, official figures show that, on average, students who play sports consistently earn higher exam grades than non-participants.
It is also true that one of the strengths of our ancient universities was that they welcomed undergraduates with all sorts of aptitudes beyond the merely academic – including those who excelled in sports.
Indeed, over the years, Oxford and Cambridge have produced far more than their fair share or rugby internationals, not to mention Test cricketers and Olympic rowers.
But I know exactly the type Dame Mary had in mind – boorish, braying hearties who took a perverse pride in reading few books and went around sneering at swots, vandalising college rooms ('Don't worry, Daddy will pay for the damage') and hurling bread rolls at each other during black-tie dinners.
To give you a flavour of such people, I recall overhearing one of them booming at a friend: 'I say, I've just seen Patrick Hodge laughing at a history book in the Seeley Library – and it didn't even have any pictures in it!'
The ridiculed bookworm in question, by the way, went on to become the great Lord Hodge, Deputy President of the Supreme Court.
I'm certainly not one to throw stones from my glass house, since my own degree was a miserable 2:2. But Dame Mary is surely right to suggest that the sort of men she describes tended to underperform academically.
That said, they made up only a tiny proportion of the student population at Cambridge, far too small to have any significant impact on the academic performance of the university as a whole.
But it wasn't her attack on thicko rugger buggers that irritated me. No, it was her gratuitous reference to the colour of their skin. Imagine for one moment the unthinkable: that instead of attacking white people, she had rejoiced over the removal of 'thicko black rugger buggers'.
She would surely have been cancelled like a shot. In all likelihood, she would never again have been offered work filming documentaries about the ancient world, while the BBC would no doubt have wiped all her past series from iPlayer.
At the same time, every publisher in the land would have turned its back on her by now, she would have been summarily sacked as a trustee of the British Museum and our old university would have disowned her, as would every other woke institution in the land.
But apparently it was just fine for her to lay into thicko rugger buggers whose skin colour happened to be white.
For unless I've missed something, nobody at all has demanded her head on a platter.
If I were Dame Mary's defence counsel, I would now argue that what she probably intended to say, in an uncharacteristically clumsy way, was that Cambridge had been much enriched lately by its massive injection of ethnic-minority students – and particularly those from overseas.
What is certainly true is that, in our day, the great majority of dons and undergraduates at Cambridge were white. But then this was true of the population of Britain as a whole, before Tony Blair threw open our borders to all-comers and his successors of every party failed to close them.
It is also a fact that universities nowadays depend far more than in the past on overseas students, who can be charged much higher fees than those born in Britain. But it's surely debatable whether these foreigners have improved standards.
My own guess, for what it's worth, is that they've probably lowered them. In these straitened times, after all, their money probably speaks more loudly to admissions tutors than home-grown academic potential. On the other hand, the end of restrictions on women has undoubtedly deepened the pool of talent from which colleges can draw. As Dame Mary points out, in the 1970s only 10 per cent of students at Cambridge were female (worse luck for us blokes!).
But there my defence of her must end.
What really gets my goat is the way she went on airily to dismiss the cancel culture in our universities as wildly exaggerated by the wicked media and nothing much to worry about.
'I've spent a lifetime on campuses,' she said, 'and I haven't lived in fear that I was going to be cancelled.'
Well, of course not, Dame Mary. As one of the country's high priestesses of woke, who has signed up to just about every tenet of the groupthink rife in today's academic world, you are armour-plated against cancellation.
Not so the likes of J.K. Rowling and others who have dared to challenge the woke orthodoxy that now prevails throughout our institutions.
Indeed, I find the Left's constant attacks on free speech downright frightening. That's not to mention how damaging they are to a young generation who are brainwashed by hearing only one approved side of every argument.
Yet in an interview elsewhere, Dame Mary has preposterously suggested that cancel culture may exist more on the Right than the Left.
I don't know about you but, in today's world, I struggle to think of a single Left-wing broadcaster or academic who has ever been vilified by colleagues or thrown out of work for being too much in favour of mass immigration, abortion or transgender rights, or too much against the British empire, Nigel Farage or the state of Israel.
But try insisting that only men have penises, questioning the scale of the threat posed by climate change or singing the praises of Brexit or the late Charlie Kirk, and see how far that gets you when you are applying for work in academia, the BBC or almost any quango in the land.
As for Dame Mary, though I often wish she would stop sharing her irritating groupthink about the modern age, I would never dream of cancelling her.
For one thing, we should all be free to say what we want, no matter how silly, if we stop short of inciting violence. For another, I would miss her fascinating insights into the ancient world, the subject she knows best.
Just one modest plea: call me a male chauvinist pig, by all means, but is it really too much to ask that she should get a decent haircut and better clothes – and stop appearing on our TVs looking like a bag lady?
It quite puts me off my supper.