A life in the day of a don

This week I am off to Brussels to be a Euro-academic – for the final selection round of some big Euro-research-grants. I’m on the awarding panel, not one of those seeking the research money. But no plutocrat me. As it’s the end of the month, I’m off on the Eurostar equipped with a range of plastic, none of which will be able to extract any cash from any hole-in-the-wall – which adds a sense of boy-scoutish adventure to the voyage. (It’ll have to be reef knots and a compass, rather than a taxi from the station!)

Part of the reason for this particular cash crisis is that the European Commission still hasn’t  managed to pay me the expenses from my last trip to Brussels in June. This circumstance alone is enough to make me very suspicious of the whole new-Europe project. If they can’t get me my expenses within 4 months, then what hope is there for financial management on a bigger scale? (The husband points out that he is largely in favour of the treaty etc and is, in fact, subsidizing my trip, so it kind of cancels out.)

Anyway, I’ll be reporting back on this expedition soon. Meanwhile, to a question that several emails have raised. What on earth do you dons do? I had a moan a few weeks back about the general idea that our long vacation is in fact an extended holiday. But what is it we do during term-time?

When I tell people that my main formal obligation is that I am asked to give 40 lectures a year, it usually produces some such reply as “surely you meant week?”…and then howls of disbelief when I say “no, year”.

Actually, 40 lectures per year or not, term-time amounts to a more than 12 hour day, 7 days a week.

The best I can do is give you an hour by hour account of one typical day last week. This is not in the spirit of complaint – because actually I love the job. But there are a few misapprehensions about our leisurely life that need to be put right.

OK, so lets take last Wednesday.

Work started at 7.00 a.m, with three long student essays to read and comment on. True, on another day, I might have marked them the evening before. But I had spent most of Tuesday evening giving a practice job interview to a young colleague, and when I got home I read one of my graduate students’ work – and that took till 1.00 in the morning or so and I just couldn’t manage the essays.

I biked off to my Faculty at 9.00. The journey takes 20 minutes, as I’m a bit more sedate than some, but I managed to think about my up-coming lecture on the way. I ought to have done a bit more thinking when I arrived, but instead I had a meeting with one of my college colleagues about plans for student teaching – and I just about had time to photocopy an extra sheet for the handout, before the lecture at 10.00.

So at 10.00 I was talking to 120 first years about the Persian Wars and Orientalism. How many had read any Edward Said? None (but this was the group who had done much better on the map test than the previous year, so I half forgave them).

At 11.00, I had an hour with the PhD student whose work I’d read the evening before. Then at 12.00 one of my MPhil students came to talk about the seminar on Roman freedmen he is due to give in a couple of weeks time.

So I ended up being late for the weekly meeting of our nineteenth-century history project (12.30 – 2.00), partly because I went via the Buttery to get a sandwich to eat on the hoof. We were discussing two pre-Darwinian texts on female beauty --fascinating stuff, but I had to slip out before the finish in order to get back to college at 2.00 for a two hour supervision on Roman religion with a group of three second year undergraduates, whose essays I’d read first thing in the morning.

At 4.00 there was just time to look at the mail and some of the 50 or so emails that had come in since I last switched on, before I had to bike off to the station to get the 5.15 train to a College alumnae event in London. On the way, and on the way back, I got through one article submitted to a journal that I help edit and I read the papers for some job interviews and a Faculty Teaching Committee meeting that were both happening the following day.

Home on the 9.52 and getting back just before 11.30, I dealt with the backlog of emails and started to read the big chunk of work sent by another PhD student, but by 1.00 in the morning I was fading fast and went to bed – intending to be at work again by 7.00. (I nearly made it but not quite.)

And yes, I had -- I confess – by then consumed rather more than the 1 unit of alcohol now recommended for us middle-class, professional women.

Comments

[Mary]

Thanks for that James Meredith Day...but I fear I must demur on the 'vacations' are holidays and the breezy shortness of our 8 weeks terms. OK, undergraduate lectures only take place in 8 week bursts...but this doesnt make the vac a vacation in the normal sense of the word.Leave aside our own research, the last week of the summer vac is taken up by 'preterminal' courses for first years; the first week of the Christmas vacation is consumed by the whole admissions process; the graduate students are there and needing teaching the whole year round...before you get to the admin which doesnt stop at the end of "term"..etc etc...(I could go on!)
So I'm not sure the contrast is quite as JMD has it.

[James Meredith Day]

Kudos for a fine depiction of a day in the life of a Cambridge don. As a Cambridge graduate, and occasional lecturer there, I found the portayal of tasks, and time spent on them, thoroughly convincing.
That said, the Cambridge terms are short, indeed, and vacations so long, that compared to what many of us know on the Continent (I'm a professor at Louvain), loads are relatively much lighter, and vacations veritable holidays, at Cambridge.
Perhaps Ms. Beard could, on one of her jaunts to Brussels, persuade those eager to establish universal standards and codes, that Cambridge should be the standard, not only in academic and scientific accomplishment, but calendar-setting, too, for the whole of Europe. I would enthusiastically endorse such a proposal, as, no doubt, many of my Belgian, and other Continental, colleagues, would.

[Mary]

Alan...that's a blog in itself, and I am minded to oblige this weeked, m

[Alan]

Dear Professor Beard,

This is not a comment but rather a question:

What ancient works would you most wish to be found if they could be found at the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum?

I'm just guessing that your heart and mind were set racing by news that the search for the "lost library" has resumed!

[Mary]

I must confess that I cribbed it from the Sunday Times column... I've always thought it a rather clever inversion!
So UK readers probably just thought... she's cribbed it

[Xjy]

Hm, I just noticed the inversion in your title, Mary... Not a day in the life, but a LIFE in the DAY. And no one's picked up on it.
So we live while counting the coffee-spoons, and ticking off the meetings and bus-rides.
How much of an existential kick did you intend to give us with this title??

[abc]

And I suspect that the mentor who made those choices probably loved her mentee and her mentee's life and ability very much x

[abc]

Another point on live-in studies:- 2 opportunities - one offer of a weekly boarding place at a full-time boarding school and parental involvement in the early stages of school development with some of the excursions. In the case of any type of activity involving equal opportunity and disability, you can transfer this position on to the Cambridge system. My greatest greatest greatest mentor ever predicted my A'level results (aged 8, as well as the timing of her own death, she said (!)), picked my best friend (with dyslexia) and spoke to my mom all at once! Sorely missed. Truly brilliant ability.

[abc]

I guess an answer is :- the university has its own internal systems of mentoring and connections to local hospitals which provide the necessary support. However, what if the university and the university staff do not know the full extent of the depression/disability and experience is better placed elsewhere? Why should a student like that lose out on an opportunity to maximise their intellect just because there isn't the balance of study and home? I would fly to study in Hong Kong and back home again if I could and the opportunities for me/ the provision was better. It's funny how prejudice gets in the way of that ultimate balance. There are many brilliant people who just cannot travel, you know. It's called "This is why I read a book".

[abc]

And I guess the key point is "How does Cambridge deal with persons with depression, to reduce risk?". A brilliant chair once told me the highest percentile firsts came out of Addenbrookes. It was actually a pleasure being exposed to a person with such a lateral mind.

[abc]

My best mentor was actually a teacher at Cambridge who told me to go home during term, that it didn't matter. I had just had a nervous breakdown and she believed that I had the intelligence to get a Cambridge degree. Cambridge can make this kind of call when it wants to and I think it would be terrible if Cambridge qua institution proved itself to be a liability for persons with a susceptibility to depression. I guess, as with everything, performance depends on the vision of the ultimate tutor or the administrating don.

[abc]

Live-in studies don't work if it cuts out potential for those who are extraordinarily bright but need support to maximise their intellect. Live-in studies then doesn't become the best, if one is considering equal opportunity.

[Xjy]

When I was in Brussels a couple of weeks ago it struck me as a cross between the House of Lords and the Mad Hatter's tea-party. Unelected initiators of legislation in the Commission, unelected deciders of legislation (ie not elected for that job at all) in the Council, and "elected" interpreter fodder in the Parliament.

The backbone of it all seems to be the bureaucracy - a smug freemasonry of interchangeable meritocratic flunkies who think the whole thing is great, who don't have to care about democratic responsibility or the whole picture.

And the happiest "actors" we met were the lobbyists, cos they actually knew what they were there for and got paid to openly press for it (as opposed to the politicians trying to push through the old rejected constitution by sleight of hand and rephrasing).

No-no questions in discussion were things like moving the capital of the EU to Prague, having Russian as an official language, and how central the meritocracy and its own interests are to the project.

Anyway, compared to this lunacy your packed day is full of meaning and purpose. Education and cultural transmission are still being well served (not well enough, but what the hell) by live-in studies seven days a week during unbelievably intense and concentrated terms full of interaction between experienced knowledgeable and articulate (yeah, all things considered etc) teachers and interested and enthusiastic learners. Enough people see each other and listen to each other and read stuff to keep things moving. On a more or less conscious level! (I've had great interaction and teaching-learning dialectics happening with teenagers in disadvantaged suburbs, but it's mainly subconscious and visceral, and against the grain of society, which blunts and ruins the tools.)

Until we change our society into a cooperative and cheerful place for everybody we'll have to survive as best we can, and it'll just get harder for most people. So in the mean time let's get the most out of the few and limited examples of good human-human and human-nature interaction we can find, and try and make them into centres of rebellion. Metastases of health and vigour in a cancerous body politic.

Your day (and term) isn't just an academic question - academics don't deserve the time of day from most people, and are incapable of looking after their deepest intellectual interests anyway. It's a matter for the whole of society. If real learning is isolated in ivory towers and insulated in padded cells, and thought is intrussed in straitjackets, we're all fucked.

In a word, keep the oasis green and keep the dates coming!

[The Worst of Perth]

The only cuts I can see that you could make in that schedule is the drinking time. Everything else is core business.

[abc]

On plutocracy: how much money can it cost to cure a woman of breast cancer? Sorry the statement reminded me of a conversation last night with a dear friend who has just married into the french aristocracy and just told me she has in actual fact completed her PhD. The breast cancer risk didn't register? I wonder, in an unfair world, how much money would finding a cure take?

[Richard]

I'm sure JS is right that Oxbridge academics are especially busy, having college tutorials as well as lecturing (on the other hand, terms are shorter). And certainly academics are badly paid (me included). But it's misleading to say that "Frankly, in Cambridge all of my junior colleagues and I typically only manage to support ourselves by virtue of having a better-paid partner." Plenty of people (incl. in the expensive South East) earn less than academics, and still manage to survive... And other employers (including other universities!) don't sweeten the pill of bad pay for new employees with so much subsidised accommodation, food and drink, etc. as is provided by (many) Oxbridge colleges.
My girlfriend is a Cambridge academic. Is she going to have to leave me for a city millionaire?!

[Candadai Tirumalai]

Here are two glimpses into a past era. The very productive Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy was convinced that four hours of creative work a day was his limit. It is not that he was idle the rest of the time but he must not have not have included his other academic activities (refereeing papers for instance) under that rubric.
The novelist Kingsley Amis, who did not finish his B. Litt. thesis at Oxford, has recounted that his supervisor was seldom available for consultatation later in the day and he therefore turned up at the College early one morning, only to be told by the porter that he would have to come earlier still, for the don, known for his convivial ways, was awake then.

[abc]

And women? When did they lose their graces and walk out with top hats to the stock exchange like men...

[abc]

Professionalism is a good way of avoiding workplace accidents. In many ways professionalism and humane treatment are two sides of the same coin. The person who believes strongly in being professional will inevitably think hard about the sensible decision to take. Professionalism has never however been another brand name for general callousness of character. The doctor who has a bleeding member of his staff would be completely failing his team if he did not bandage that person up properly.

On the drink front, too many can stop one from doing one’s job well the next day. There are many young alcoholics in the professions now. You can almost forward project it as a future problem in some young people. Altogether unwise.

[JS]

Isn't it interesting how Oxbridge academics are never asked about any working time rules, or work out our actual hourly rate of pay?

At present I am seriously considering dissuading people from an academic career: the hours are long; recognition abysmal; pay poor (our students earn more a year or so after graduation); apparently pension contributions may be increased leading to a real-terms pay cut; administrative duties over-whelm and the one reason we choose the career, research, is always pushed onto the back burner. Frankly, in Cambridge all of my junior colleagues and I typically only manage to support ourselves by virtue of having a better-paid partner.

This sounds unfair and I love the research and the teaching (barring the exceptionally illiterate undergrads with whom one is occasionally confronted), but how the University plans to recruit and keep the best staff at present is beyond me. We seem to be relying on reputation (and the cachet that brings to academics) alone.

[anthony alcock]

Have you ever compared your day with the day of the average European academic ?