A Don’s Life

The New Acropolis Museum is good . . .

. . . from the inside at least. I’m not so sure about the outside.

I’ve been in Athens for a few days and the main purpose was to see round the New Acropolis Museum, nearly finished and with a few sculptures already installed. My expectations were a bit muted, and I’d read rather too much about the whole thing being a mausoleum for the missing Elgin Marbles.

Actually it was, in all sorts of ways, a very nice surprise. The top floor where the Parthenon Marbles are to be displayed worked especially well –  looking directly at the temple on the Acropolis itself and, as the jargon goes, having “a conversation” with it (though one of my Greek friends did mutter darkly about it being a rather one-sided conversation).

It’s a great view and the frieze comes over very powerfully,  being on show at roughly the same height as the sections in the British Museum – but arranged as it was on the original building, not ‘inside out’ as in the Duveen Gallery.

They’re still trying to work out how best to display the metopes, and at what height.

A portrait of Boris Anrep

If you have ever looked at your feet as you walk into the National Gallery in London by the old main entrance, you will have spotted an extraordinary series of mosaics --  on the landing when you get up the first flight of stairs. They feature, among other luminaries of the early twentieth century, Virginia Woolf as Clio the Muse of History (below), Greta Garbo as Melpomene the Muse of Tragedy, plus a range of contemporary vignettes of British life, from football to Christmas pudding or dinosaur gazing.

They are by the Russian, sub-Bloomsbury, mosaicist Boris (von) Anrep, who designed them between the late 1920s and early 50s. I’ve always been rather keen on Anrep – largely because of his smart reworking of classical themes. In fact I had once planned to write about him, and had even got in touch with those around who still remembered him (he died in 1969), but other things got in the way.

There is actually quite a lot of Anrep work to see. He also produced mosaics for Westminster Cathedral,  for the Tate and Sandhurst, and he did a number of private Bloomsbury commissions. His was, needless to say, a colourful life beyond the tesserae, including a memorable feud with Roger Fry – who eventually went off with  Anrep’s second wife, Helen.

Anyway, interest was rewarded at the Willingham auctions last Saturday, when the husband (for I confess it was he) spotted in the catalogue and then on the wall, a good oil portrait of Anrep – done, to judge by his age, in the 1920s or possibly 30s, and signed by “L Inglesis”. Estimate £30-50.

We wanted it.

What do you do about plagiarism

The radio psychiatrist Raj Persaud admitted “inadvertent plagiarism” of colleagues’ books and articles and last week was suspended for three months by the General Medical Council for the offence.

Allegations of fictional plagiarism – whether it’s Ian McEwan or Dan Brown (fictional enough, after all) – are often the stuff of news stories. In fact, one of the commonest ways to attack the commercially successful has always been to claim that the big name author has nicked his plot from some neglected and impoverished scribbler. The originality of Mrs McCain's cookie recipes has obviously been causing some trouble too.

It is less often that academic plagiarism makes much of an impact outside the academy. Allusive allegations remain buried in prefaces and are the stuff of late night conversations at conference bars. It tends to be a no win game on both sides: the supposed culprit looks cheap and dishonest, the complainant tends to look petulant and armed with an axe to grind. Mud sticks everywhere.

It hasn’t often happened to me. But when, years ago, I saw a report of a lecture given in the USA, using material that I was pretty sure derived directly from work I had done and talked about in a lecture of my own, but not yet published – the feeling was rather like having your handbag gone through by an opportunistic thief. The temptation to pursue it was enormous.  By and large though, in most cases, it is probably best to shrug shoulders and forget about it. (It’s rather like a bad and unfair review – however much you want to write and object, the wise course is put up and shut up.)

Students though don’t have that privilege. The more they are examined on course works and dissertations, the more plagiarism (and its dastardly variant ‘self-plagiarism’) replaces simple cheating as the crime they most fear being accused of. Some I know are dogged by terror of the “inadvertent plagiarism” that Persaud owned up to.

I have no idea what Persaud thought he was doing. But the truth is that most student cases of traditional plagiarism (I mean good old-fashioned copying, rather than buying essays off the internet) are usually inadvertent – and glaringly obvious.

Bad arguments about academic standards

Geoffrey Alderman (ex-University of London, now University of Buckingham) has been sounding off about academic standards. The argument is that university authorities are so anxious about their place in the league tables that they pressurize powerless lecturers to pass students who should rightly fail, to condone cheating and to lower standards across the board – all in the interests of getting more firsts and 2.1s, and so proving the success of students and staff alike.

In other words what once a 2.1 is now a first, what was a 2.2 is now a 2.1 and so on down.

Perhaps Alderman sees different sides and different areas of higher education from those that I know. But – while I share his gloom about some aspects of the league table and “outcome” culture, which is no better in the university sector than in the health service or primary schools -- overall his rant looks like a pretty feeble, knee-jerk analysis to me.

Over the last thirty years, Cambridge exam results have changed in something like the way Alderman claims. That is to say that the third class degree has virtually disappeared (except in cases of personal tragedy), and the 2.2 is now looked upon by many students as a terrible disappointment. That is despite the fact that large numbers of the middle-aged great and the good achieved no better.

But this change is much more a reflection of changing student culture and aspirations than of any collusion on our part to ‘mark up’. Fifty years ago in Cambridge there really were a still significant minority among the students, who were here for the sport and the parties, or occasionally for more honourable forms of self-improvement (art, acting, music) not wholly compatible with success in the Tripos. Many of these were happy enough with a lousy degree, if that was the price you had to pay for the other forms of experience. For better or worse (and mostly – but not entirely -- for better), that kind of student hardly exists any longer. Our students are determined to do well and so they do. Add to this the fact that (for better or worse again) we are much more careful to make it clear exactly what we expect of them – and it’s hardly a surprise that the third class has become a thing of the past. We’d be doing something frightfully wrong if it hadn’t.

If anything, Alderman’s got it the wrong way round. Our problem is that we don’t give high enough marks, not that we mark too generously.

Who is my MEP?

There is something fascinating about watching the reaction of the powers-that-be as they adjust to the Irish “no-to the-Lisbon-treaty” vote. The very same leaders who have only recently been sounding off about the importance of Zimbabwe and Kenya abiding by the democratic vote of their people, now seem to be threatening a course in political re-education for the stupid Irish who have gone and voted the wrong way.

Democracy it seems is a jolly good thing, except when it votes for something or someone you don’t like. To be sure a whole ocean of violence, intimidation and corruption separates our eurocrats from Mr Mugabe. But they do both seem to share an “I know better than the electorate” philosophy.

Even the Liberal Democrats have lost their grip on this one, and keep muttering about having a referendum on whether we should be in or out of Europe. It is totally obvious that we should stay in and that the real question is a much more difficult one: namely, what kind of Europe, with want kind of democratic structures, do we want to invent for ourselves (and what kind do we have a hope of gaining consensus for).

The way Europe is going certainly doesn’t look very attractive. I’m not referring to the populist tub-thumping about MEPs’  expenses. They may, or may not, be on a fantastic gravy train. I really don’t know. But being regularly on the receiving end of accusations about the six month ‘holidays’ enjoyed by University teachers, I tend to be sympathetic to others similarly traduced for their ‘easy life’.

My problem is who these MEPs are. I cant remember when the last MEP elections were. And so far as I can recall I have heard nothing from my elected Euro-representatives for years and years.

I wonder how many British readers of this post could name their MEP.

Cambridge mug-shots -- and Roman terrorism

There’s a new exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, celebrating the faces of the university. It’s a kind of prequel to the big 800th anniversary of the university next year, of which we will all hear quite enough I due course. This is where it’s good to take the woman’s part and take a gracious but relatively distant interest in the first 740 years.

Anyway the new show –“On the Shoulders of Giants” -- is a series of pictures of university people by the excellent photographer Howard Guest: porters, professors, librarians, bedders, boatmen, and students of every style (Amnesty stalwarts to dining-club toffs).

It was an eye-opener for me , partly because it gave me a peek into the offices of those whose work-place I rarely see. One of the most fascinating mornings I ever spent in Cambridge more than ten years ago was ‘shadowing’ a college colleague who works on Huntingdon’s disease using quite a lot of (very well-cared for) mice. But I don’t often get to see into a lab.

So it came as something of a surprise to see the scientists pictured staring down microscopes like we did at school. Is that the stage outfit? Or do they still actually use these things?

Meanwhile, the good news was that there were loads of books on display too…edging the computers into second place.

But what would an outsider have made of us?

Who turned the Reith Lectures into "Any Answers"?

In Paris I decided to listen, on my lap-top, to the first of this year’s Reith Lectures: Jonathan Spence on Chinese Confucianism. I’ve obviously not been concentrating as much as I should on to these lectures for the last decade or so, because I was surprised to find that the ‘lecture’ itself amounted to a little less than 20 minutes. The rest of the 45 minute slot was 20 minutes of ‘question and answer’ with the studio audience and 5 minutes of polite fluff from Sue Lawley.

For bloggers outside the UK, let me explain that the Reith Lectures are supposed to be one of the jewels in the public broadcasting crown. They started off in 1948 in honour of the first Director General of the BBC – and in his style of broadcasting. The introduction to the first series of Reith lectures (given by Bertrand Russell) claimed that their aim was to be a ‘stimulus to thought and a contribution to knowledge’.

They continue to appoint excellent speakers: recently Marina Warner, Onora O’Neill, Wole Soyinka and this year Spence, who is a professor at Yale, on “Chinese Vistas”. The trouble is that, whereas Bertrand Russell had 54 minutes locked up in a studio to deliver 6 lectures on “Authority and the Individual”, Spence has 4 sessions of under 20 minutes, on location (first one in British Library, apparently because it owns the world’s first (Chinese) book), followed by a Q and A session.

What on earth is the point of  these “lectures lite”. The prospect of a 19 minute lecture on Confucianism is hardly like to attract more knife-carrying teenagers than a 40 minute version (“Come on, Wayne – let’s give them Reith lectures a try before we go out for some binge drinking and senseless violence.. it’s only 20 minutes….”). Meanwhile it leaves poor old Spence (who actually did a valiant job) struggling to tell his audience something about Confucianism and develop an interesting argument on it, in the flash of an eyelid.

Sometimes tough and interesting subjects need a bit of space to develop – as well as keep them really interesting. That’s where Russell scored, with wide ranging reflections on social groups, from insects through ancient Egypt and Sparta, to the present day. Likewise Nikolaus Pevsner whose Englishness of English Art started life as Reith Lectures. Besides, if millions can look for hours at the live web-cam in the Big Brother house, while the residents are asleep, might there not be a few hundred thousand who would listen to a good and lengthy lecture while doing the ironing?

But worse came when we had to listen to the question and answer session that followed the “lecture” – a kind of Any Answers merged with a celebrity Question Time.

Why ruins are disappointing

My next gig is in Paris – at a conference on Ruins.

As almost always, two days in Paris in early June seemed a very nice idea when I agreed to give a paper last year. Whether the 6.30 am Eurostar on Thursday seems quite such an attractive prospect now is another question.

It wasn’t just Paris in the spring that made me say yes to the invitation. I’ve been brewing up a somewhat deviant view on ruins (academically deviant, that is) for some time.

Which is to say, I want to think a bit harder about why most ruins are – lets face it – disappointing.

Go to jail, go directly to jail

New notices have recently appeared on the first class carriages of the Cambridge to London (First Capital Connect) train. These detail, in large font clarity, the penalties for being a “standard class” passenger and travelling in a first class carriage.

I am sure that these penalties are not new. What is new is the determination to enforce them. In the old days (by which I mean roughly a year ago), if you got on a very busy train and there were no seats, and probably nowhere even to stand, in “standard” you could decide to go and take one of the free seats in first. When the ticket inspector (now called “revenue protection officers”) came round, he or she either took your point and didn’t charge you anything. The worst that happened, in practice, was that they charged you the difference between what you had paid and the regular first class fare.

Fair enough.

What the new notices announce is, if you’re lucky, a mandatory penalty fare. If you are unlucky, then the maximum sentence is a criminal record and £1000 fine or three months in prison.

Prison for being a standard class person sitting in a first class train carriage?