Nasty taste

Sideswipe no 93, is from Frederik Pohl's Drunkard's Walk (1960), sent in by Robert Dingwall, of Nottingham, set in a sci-fi university. "One needed a change of scene from the Halls of Academe every once in a while.

Otherwise one tended to become stuffy and provincial, to lose contact with the mass of humanity outside the University walls. For that reason Carl had made it a practice, through the 30-odd years since he began to teach, at least once in every year to accept or invent some task that would bring him in contact with the non-academic world . . . They had all been quite as distasteful as this one, but since Master Carl had never realized this before it hadn't mattered."