A Don’s Life

The bride's second disappointment

I am afraid that I must eat my words over geographical competence. I am writing this blog in Buffalo, New York State, where I am at a conference on “Genealogies of the Humanities” at the university there. No – I wasn’t entirely sure either quite what the title meant, but as it turned out my paper on how the definition of “the humanities” changed in nineteenth-century England seemed to fit the bill well enough. And there have been some great contributions on a range of topics from the role of animals in the humanities to how “Oriental Studies” became an independent subject in nineteenth-century Germany.

The truth is before I left I hadn’t completely checked out where Buffalo was. I knew that it was in the West of New York State, but I hadn’t exactly grasped that it was on the Great Lakes, just 20 minutes from Canada and right next to Niagara Falls. In fact, when I arrived at the airport and found the signs saying “Buffalo-Niagara” I had a slight panic that I was at the wrong place. A bit like being at Bristol Parkway when you want to be at Bristol Temple Meads, but less easily rectifiable.

I’m always a bit of a sucker for natural wonders (unlike painting and buildings, you don’t actually need to KNOW anything to enjoy them). So once I had realised that I really was in the right place, I decided that I would visit the Falls before I came home – even if it meant missing a little bit of the conference. It was gob-smacking.

What did the Romans wear under their togas?

If you teach at Oxford or Cambridge, you get used to the regular bursts of outrage about “the Oxbridge interview”. I posted a few months back about the myth that we are all a load of upper-class twits who use the interview to pick students just like ourselves. Wrong on both counts.

Just recently a different variant was doing the rounds: the one about all those weird, donnish and – this is the subtext – UNFAIR questions we ask at the interviews. Just to make sure the poor squirming candidate never feels at ease. A whole list of them were reeled off in the press and even on the Today programme. “What percentage of the world’s water is contained in a cow?” (Veterinary Medicine, Cambridge)  “Are you cool? (Philosophy, Politics and Economics, Oxford). “Why can’t you light a candle in a spaceship? (Physics, Oxford). The Evening Standard even dredged up some celebs to have a go at answering them – not very well.

What did not get headlined was the fact that the survey that had brought all these questions to light had been commissioned, and then hyped, by a company which specialises in helping potential students prepare for their Oxbridge interview – for a fee. There’s nothing like a bit of media panic to send frightened kids (and their over-anxious parents) rushing off with their cheque books to get some “specialist” advice.

My thoughts on this will, I hope,  be reassuring. More than that, they are free.

A captive audience

Classics offers more interesting speaking opportunities than you might imagine. In addition to the talks at school, colleges, breakfast clubs, museums and the like, I occasionally get a more surprising gig. Some recent favourites have been pre-performance talks at the Coliseum (engaging the audience with the myth of, say, Semele, before they see what Handel did with it) and a guest appearance at the wonderful “Treasury Women’s Group” (though that was more in the guise of female academic than strictly classicist).

But most memorable of all have been the couple of occasions I have gone to lecture to the in-mates at a high-security prison. It’s an extraordinarily electric kind of teaching.
Partly because it’s one of the few (relatively) free opportunities that they have for face to face interchange with the outside world, they give it far more attention than your average audience -- half of whom are worrying if they’ll make the bus/have time to get to the supermarket/meet their girlfriend when you’ve finished speaking. No chance of that for these guys.

A captive audience, as colleagues couldn’t resist – a bit predictably – joking.

A glimpse of the Sevso Treasure

On Tuesday I had what may well be a once in a life-time experience. I went to see probably the most exquisite of all surviving collections of Roman silver, the so-called “Sevso Treasure”. It had been brought out of hiding in its vault for a brief appearance on show in the galleries at Bonham’s Auction House in London. It wasn’t exactly a public viewing, but invitations had at least been issued to academics as well as the rich art crowd. The scruffy dons mixed with the elegant city-types and assorted toffs with the kind of friendliness that usually accompanies free-flowing champagne.

Stunning as it is, the Sevso Treaure is a very sad case. It’s the archaeological equivalent of a rejected asylum seeker, or (in the eyes of some) an illegal immigrant. It’s an antiquity with no passport.

What's a Faith School like?

The government now imagines that Faith Schools might take 25% of “non-faith” children. Estelle Morris sensibly wondered on the Today programme yesterday whether they would turn out prove an attractive option to such children and their parents.

I had wondered exactly that over the weekend and had looked around to see what an Islamic Faith School might offer to the average punter (I don’t yet know if Sikh, Jewish, Catholic and other Faith Schools would present the same problems, but I’ll keep you posted.)

One of the best known of these is Feversham College in Bradford, a “Voluntary Aided” secondary school “for Muslim girls” in Bradford. Currently it will admit up to 10% of non-Muslims if there are places available (and won’t be affected by any government 25% ruling, which would only apply to new schools). What would one of these 10% find?

Where is your spleen?

This week I started my lectures on Ancient History to first year students. Following a tradition invented by one of my colleagues 20 years ago, I kicked off the very first lecture by handing round a skeletal map of the Mediterranean – and asked them to mark several key places (including Athens, Sparta, Troy, Crete, Rome and Pompeii). The results are collected in for scrutiny, but entirely anonymously. No names are required,.

The idea is to demonstrate to the freshers that they really do need to get an atlas out before they start sounding off about the Peloponnesian War, or whatever. The accuracy this year was no better or worse than usual. Most of the my 100 or so clever first years could place Rome and Pompeii, but Sparta wandered dangerously (from time to time popping up in modern Turkey) while Alexandria was a mystery to many, and one at least appeared not to know that Crete was an island. Are they pulling my leg I wondered….?

Over the decades this little exercise has given the new students a wonderful feeling of shared ignorance. The dons on the other hand have enjoyed shaking their heads at the very idea that a student with straight (classical) As at A level still doesn’t know where Sparta is.

Veils, turbans and "rivers of blood"

Controversy about the how other cultures and religions dress is centuries old – stretching at least as far back as ancient Roman anxieties about the flamboyantly coloured costume of the eastern priests of the goddess Cybele (also known as  “the Great Mother”). It’s odd that most of those who have recently huffed and puffed on either side of the Jack Straw “veil debate” seem to have forgotten the almost equally fierce arguments in the 1960s about a quite different article of religious clothing: Sikh turbans.

When I was a child, growing up in the West Midlands, one of the big issues of multiculturalism (though we didn’t yet call it that) was whether local Sikh bus drivers and conductors should be allowed to work with long beards and their traditional headdress. It provoked national debate and banner headlines no less doom-laden than what we have seen and heard over the last week. Panic intensified after one Wolverhampton Sikh threatened to burn himself to death unless the prohibition was relaxed. There were rumoured to be many  more prepared  to follow his suicidal example.

Opinions were, of course, divided. Many Sikhs felt that their religion was being insulted by a prohibition on turbans. Others were uneasy about the hardline stance, worrying about the “worsening of community harmony” that it might cause. But the problem was resolved when in 1969 the Wolverhampton Transport Authority gave in to the pressure. I cannot now remember what had caused their opposition in the first place.But, apart from the old-fashioned assumption that men on the buses would not be the same without peaked caps, I imagine it came down to some version of  (in Straw’s words) ‘separation’ and ‘difference’.

Me and my satnav

I did actually finish writing the book  and sent it off (well, I pushed the e-mail button – “sending off”  a manuscript isn’t what it used to be) at 11.55 a.m. last Wednesday.  It was supposed to be with the American press on Tuesday, but then I had the time difference in my favour.

To celebrate (or to brighten up that post-partal low) I decided to invest in a satellite navigation system for the car. The main reason for this was to compensate for my appalling sense of direction. This is the only intellectual skill that I am prepared to admit shows a marked difference between the sexes. I know men who can even tell what direction a tube train is going. I can’t even get from Cambridge to central London without a navigator, or alternatively ending up hopelessly lost in Walthamstow. Most of my female friends are no better.

The other reason was more of a private fantasy. I chose the top of the range model which you can use in Europe and North America too. I couldn’t resist the idea that the very same gadget that would guide me to Islington, would also get me from Santa Monica to Las Vegas.

Freshers week

Tuesday is the beginning of the Cambridge academic year – and thousands of new students have turned up. Going through the elaborate welcoming routine, I find it impossible not to remember what it felt like more than 30 years ago when  I was in their place.

For a start it was much less elaborate. Nowadays the kids go through almost a solid week of induction, so intensive that I can’t imagine much of it goes in. There are briefings on Health and Safety, tours of the various libraries, computer training sessions, meetings with student reps of the Faculty, JCR tea parties and “bops”, plagiarism avoidance classes (well almost) . . .  and that is before they have been to meet any of their teachers and lecturers.

I remember it all being much more down to earth. A big college “feast” with a pep talk from the Principal, a brief meeting with our Tutor and Director of Studies – and off we went, in at the deep end (and amazingly we did soon manage to fathom how the University Library worked).

Apart from the predictable anxieties and indiscretions of the first few days (which I do not intend to share!), I now remember only two things of those first encounters with the College Fellows.