A Don's Life by Mary Beard - Times Online - WBLG

The perils of league tables

Cambridge summer rituals don’t end with the exams, or even with the fancy dress of degree day. The final pantomime is the college league tables. The version that gets most publicity is the “Tompkins Table”, which is basically a first-past-the-post style of ranking. It gives 5 points for a first, 3 points for a 2.1 and so on. Then it produces a score for each college by reckoning their actual points total against what they would have got if every student had been awarded a first. A bit of “weighting” goes into the process, to cancel out the undue influence of subjects which score a lot of firsts. Otherwise any college could “win” by packing the place with (male) mathematicians.

This isn’t an official university ranking (we do have our own internal version, the “Baxter Tables” driven by every imaginable statistical correctness – but they are not made public till September). Peter Tompkins is a Cambridge Maths graduate (what else?) who compiles this table for fun.

Our public line is that is not something that much bothers us. Winning colleges may blazon their success on their website (but even some of those affect a more lofty disdain, and boast only in private). Winners and losers alike join together in patiently explaining that this is all very misleading, that it gives an inappropriate weighting to firsts (when for most of the students it’s a 2.1 that counts), and that anyway very little separates the top from the middle (if not the bottom).

But underneath we’re all a little bit more anxious.

Treasure trove

If you are anywhere near South Italy in what is left of the summer, then don’t miss a stunning exhibition of Roman silverware at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, which has just been extended to 2 October (and, after that, will move to Turin until February).

The National Museum is both infuriating and exhilarating. It is an absolute disgrace that they have not had their great collection of paintings from Pompeii and Herculaneum on display for some five years now. (Visitors are palmed off with a confusing and badly labelled show of just what came from the Pompeian temple of Isis – plus a few images that qualify for the erotic collection of the “Secret Cabinet”.)

But, as if to make up for this, they have been hosting a series of stupendous temporary exhibitions. “Argenti a Pompei” (“Silver at Pompeii”) is the best yet.

How to open locked doors at Pompeii

Given the circumstances, the mobile phone crowing every 30 minutes or so, and heat approaching 40 degrees, we got a lot of work done at Pompeii over the last few days. Arrangements on this site change almost every time you visit it – largely because the Italian archaeological service are always looking for new ways to cope with visitors figures that are now not far off 3 million a year.

The House of the Vettii, which used to be everyone’s favourite (great wall paintings throughout and a memorable picture in the entrance hall of a man weighing his huge phallus against a large bag of money) is now closed to the public – awaiting restoration sometime over the next few years. In fact the whole ancient town can give the impression of being closed or “in restauro”.

Gone are the days when you wandered round and a guard would open up anything that was shut. But there is a – very little publicized – secret for seeing some of the highlights.

In the news in Pompeii

I am still reeling from the reaction to my “Keeping Sex out of Scholarship” blog. More than a year ago, I reviewed a book in the TLS (a “Dictionary of British Classicists”), in which I pointed out how the reliable stories of what is euphemistically known as the “wandering hand”  of Eduard Fraenkel, a professor Latin at Oxford had been ignored. I wrote that I had an ambivalent reaction to what Fraenkel was supposed  to have done: on the one hand sisterly outrage at the abuse of male power; on the other, a wistful nostalgia (shared, I can assure you, by many of my age) for an earlier era of pedagogy, an age perhaps of greater innocence. What was the reaction?  I received just a handful of letters from outraged pupils of Fraenkel, denouncing me for sullying the memory of their teacher.
A couple of weeks ago, I return to the issue briefly in a blog. This gets suddenly picked up by the media, from the Mail to the BBC. This time I am denounced for exactly the opposite crime. Now I am supposed to be the out of touch Cambridge don who “hankers after” an age when professor slept with students. Not what I said, and not true.

Who wrote "I Claudius"?

The thirty-year anniversary repeat of the classic “I Claudius” series continues until Thursday on BBC 4. In fact, evening television has been something of a Togafest for the last ten days. A re-run of “Up Pompeii” at 8.30, followed by murder in the imperial palace under the watchful eye of Uncle Claudius at 9.00.

“Up Pompeii” has not worn too well, unless you like Frankie Howerd playing Frankie Howerd. But “I Claudius” is still gripping. Part of the reason is that it was made on an extremely low budget, before the tricks of new technology had been invented. So no expensive location shots (which never look quite right anyway); and no computer assisted crowds or armies. These were gob-smacking the first time we saw them (the Colosseum apparently packed with spectators in “Gladiator” made a tremendous impact on me at least). But now that we know it’s all done by  “techies” on a computer, it just seems a bit of a cheat.

Instead “I Claudius” relied on some nicely mocked up rooms in the imperial palace (the Circus Maximus was recreated with just “noises off”), on lingering close-ups on the actors’ faces – and on plenty of sex.

In the harem

When I confessed in my last post that I had never been to the Istanbul Archaeological Museum, the full truth was that I had never before been to Istanbul. So after some serious work on the antiquities, I made straight for the Topkapi Palace – HQ of the Ottoman rulers and the tourist high-spot of the city.

It was a nicely multi-cultural kind of tourism. Grubby backpackers in shorts rubbed shoulders with parties of head-scarved (and gratifyingly badly-behaved) Moslem school girls. Elderly guide book-readers shared benches with elderly Moslem pilgrims – there to see the numerous relics of Mohammed himself that the Sultans had acquired.

I left the relics till last. And once I’d paid the money and passed the security check (liquids, thank heavens, were still allowed), I made straight for the harem.

Looting ancient and modern

Last weekend I visited the Istanbul Archaeological Museum for the first time. In my trade that is a rather shaming confession – as if a middle-aged professor of English Literature were to admit to only having just finished Middlemarch. Like most long-deferred pleasures, it had its unexpected sides.

One of the most curious highlights was a small fragment of a purple marble foot. You would hardly give it second look, except for the history that was explained on its label. For this was the toe of one figure in that famous statue group of Roman emperors (the Tetrarchs) which now stands against the wall of San Marco in Venice, one of the highlights of that Square.

The Venetians took it in the thirteenth century, when they controlled Constantinople, as the city was then called after its founder the Roman emperor Constantine (that was when they looted the “Horses of San Marco” too). But they broke off this piece of a foot in the process and left it behind. It was found centuries later in the rubbish heap of an archaeological excavation in the city. Even the archaeologists nearly missed it.

But this is not the only tiny fragment of a famous monument now elsewhere.

Plagiarism

The crime that is buzzing in Cambridge right now is plagiarism. In fact, we are more immune to this disease than most universities, as so much of our assessment is done by old-fashioned 3-hour exam. This used to make us look like dinosaurs. Now it means that we are at the cutting edge of authenticity testing. You can’t  plagiarise in a 3-hour exam, you can only (try to) cheat.

All the same there is a flurry of excitement about one particular company that offers model essays (at 2.2,  2.1 or 1st standard), custom-built to the question of your choice. According to the local paper, this company claims to attract most hits to its website (which is, of course, different from most paid up clients) from Cambridge.

Frankly I don’t believe that many of our students actually sign up (or they are stupider than I take them to be); nor do I imagine that anyone with any financial acumen whatsoever would slave away producing the model answers that they are flogging.

Keeping sex out of scholarship

Sometimes I feel that people read what I write in a surprisingly perverse way. To put that more kindly, there is an odd mismatch in journalism (even the most cerebral literary kind of journalism) between the attention given to the writing and the attention given to the reading. I slave for hours trying to capture exactly the right nuance – then someone takes the TLS on the train or to the loo, gives it five minutes and goes away with a very odd impression of what I was trying to say.

Not that I blame the reader. After all, I  probably give much the same 5-minute treatment to what other people write. And you might argue that it is the writer’s job to make their point clear to all-comers.  All the same, when someone completely misrepresents you, it is peculiarly irritating.

Last week (24 July), the Independent newspaper published a “question and answer” article with the excellent Mary Warnock. One question was:

“Professor Mary Beard has suggested that Eduard Fraenkel’s status as a classical scholar is diminished by his inappropriate conduct towards women in his Oxford classes . . . As a former student of Fraenkel’s do you agree?”

Warnock’s reply: “I think, alas, Professor Beard is talking nonsense.”