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

Is Andrew Sachs a 'lovely old man'?

I have no idea. Though, he does seem to have come out of the Ross/Brand storm in a teacup rather well – pretty feisty, and hiding his more predictable and understandable  grudges with some dignity.

But I do know that when I’m 78 the last thing I will want is my 20 something grand-daughter (pictured), with Gothic tendencies and some kind of acquaintance with an over-paid radio star, telling the world that I am “a lovely old man (woman, in my case) who has never harmed anyone in his life”.

If you ask me, that kind of infantilisation of the elderly, as if they were all somehow nice, gentle and wouldn’t hurt a fly, is even worse than the silly, misplaced jokes of Messrs Ross and Brand. Lets hope that Sachs, like the rest of us, has had some opportunity to harm someone in his life and is well prepared to win against these boys – with a life-time’s experience of personal conflict.

But why on earth the fuss? And why did Team GB (I mean Gordon Brown’s advisers) think it was worth him taking time off the credit crunch to rap the BBC over the knuckles on this one. I guess, it’s a bit like Oxbridge bashing. They think it goes down well with the gallery.

US democracy in action -- or gone mad?

I don’t mean the presidential election, though I am still a bit uncertain about exactly  how democratic THAT is.

I am currently baffled by my first sight of what a November 4 ballot paper will look like for a voter in Berkeley. This runs to two densely printed sides of paper. There are the various presidential candidates, plus the candidates for the House of Representatives, the Senate and the local assemblies and councils – and for the local court, the mayor and the local school board.

It seems sensible I guess to do that on the same day.

The baffling bit is all the "propositions”, state-wide and local. So far as I can tell, so long as you can get enough signatories together, you can put any proposition to the electorate. Whether they are well drafted or a loose rag-bag of problems, they will all be binding if passed – though they can waste an enormous amount of court time, as problematic or incomprehensible clauses are subject to legal challenge.

Next week, in addition to voting for their various representatives, the good burghers of Berkeley will be asked to vote on 12 state propositions, and  7 local measures. As one of my students said, the full background documentation on these stretches to more pages than the local telephone directory.

A good old-fashioned 2.1 is better than a Higher Education Achievement Record

University examiners are an extremely conscientious crowd, and in my experience, degree marking is as fair as it could be, given human frailty (and far better that than a computer). All the same, I’ve often thought that we might be better off without the fixed degree class boundaries of first, 2.1 etc. As with all these linear classifications, it’s hard to feel entirely happy about lumping together the person who just missed a first with the one who just scraped a 2.1, and so on. So I’ve always had a certain sympathy with the idea of introducing a more nuanced record of a university degree.

Until I saw what was being piloted as the ‘Higher Education Achievement Record’ (Hear, for short -- of course), trumpeted in several papers this week (and deriving from last year’s Burgess report). It is apparently being test run in several UK universities right now.

Reading about it, I was sent rushing back into the arms of the old conventional nineteenth-century system  of ‘classes’, for all their faults. ‘Hear” has been developed by the kind of people who refer to what I call ‘universities’ as ‘the sector’ (that is, I guess, ‘HE sector). Its well-meaning, market-oriented approach to grading represents another nail in the coffin of academic and intellectual values in the universities.

Why do they want to change?

Your not-so-flexible friend

When I first got a cheque book, there were no such things as cheque cards. If you tried to pay by cheque and a chop was a bit suspicious, they would ask you to write your name and address on the back. It was a kind of veiled threat that they might send the boys round if it bounced. No one seemed to suspect that you might put a fake address on the (stolen) cheque.

Then there were cheque cards (up to £30 I recall; it was still the name and address routine above that). Then there were credit cards for the likes of me (I’m sure the rich had had them before), then PIN numbers. And for a glorious few years you could spend money (if they’d lend it to you whenever and wherever you wanted).

Then it all changed. Nothing to do with the credit crunch, but with stolen cards. Any bit of credit card spending out of the ordinary that the computer noticed (and it was computers that enabled this kind of policing, the old push and slide slips couldn’t have managed it), and you’d be DECLINED. That could be an odd place (a sudden weekend in Dublin) or an uncharacteristically large retail amount (in my case Harvey Nicks or every other airline ticket I attempted to buy on the web). It was all for the spender’s ‘protection’ of course, but hugely inconvenient. The idea was that you ring up first to tell them your spending plans (and you know how long that can take).

Anyway, mindful of all this, the daughter emailed the other day from Djibouti, where she’s been working, to say that she had booked to stay in a hotel in Addis Ababa on her way back to Nairobi, but she hadn’t told her credit card company she would be in Ethiopia. She didn’t want to get frozen out of the hotel, yet phoning from where she was, was not easy.

Solution?

Does Crete need more golf courses?

In case you haven’t spotted this – there is a major investment plan to create a large ‘up-market’ holiday village/second-home/golfing resort in one of the wildest parts of north-east Crete, not far from Sitia.

The spot in question is 26 square kilometres of what is now a wilderness, on which a development company intends to build  five 5* hotels (with 2,500 beds), 3 golf courses, conference and exhibition facilities, 474 villas, 495 townhouses and apartments, water-sports facilities etc etc.

It is an area of tremendous natural importance (it intersects with the palm groves of Vai, the only ‘natural’ European palm groves) and is a Natura conservation area. Not to mention its archaeological importance – preserving rare and precious traces of cultivation and agricultural systems from  two millennia ago.

I can be suspicious of campaigns against such developments – often snobbish campaigns by intellectuals against what they see as more plebeian forms of enjoyment, and against the financial interests of the locals, who would rather bring money into their area than continue in the life-style of romantic (to everyone else that is) peasant.

And sure, this particular campaign has its self interested moments. The interesting article in the Guardian, for example, to which the ‘anti’-petition directs potential signatories is actually written by the petition’s organisers. That said, the campaign as a whole seems a good one, and I hope you’ll have a look and think about signing the on-line protest.

The case, for and against, comes to the Greek courts in early November. So hurry.

My Dad, John McCain

I have complained before about the prominence of the candidates’ children and grandchildren in this US election campaign. “Past your bedtime”, I find myself clucking whenever they are seen hugging the candidate at any hour after 7.00 in the evening.

What I hadn’t realised is that there is a whole genre of eulogistic books on the candidates written for ‘younger readers’. At first sight, My Dad, John McCain looks the worst. Written by daughter Meghan McCain, it is aimed at the pre-teen market (reading age 4-8).. Economical with some of the truth (the first Mrs McCain is airbrushed out, for example), it plays to the young, tough, blokeish rebels in its readership:

"He wasn't a very good student...he broke a lot of rules, but he liked football and wrestling. He wasnt' the biggest or the strongest guy on the football team - but he was one of the toughest. He just wouldn't give up."

But there’s plenty of patriotism too of course (combined with a distaste with parts of animals that  other people eat but we don’t). Try this (taken from the Huffington Post’s very full extracts) on Vietnam:

"My dad and the other prisoners were treated badly. He didn't get the right kind of medical care for his broken bones, and the food was really bad -- once he found a chicken foot in his lunch. ...But then my dad got a chance most prisoner's didn't. Since he was an admiral's son, the Vietnamese who had captured him said they would let him go home. My dad was hurt, sick, and scared. But he knew there were some things more important than himself - like his faith in God, his country, and the men he served with. My dad wouldn't go home and leave his friends. I think only a great man would have made that choice."

What’s especially the matter with a chicken foot, I hear you wonder (at the same time as you reflect on the cuisine on offer in Guantanamo).

But, dreadful as this is, the Obama books – and there is more than one -- hit even lower depths (except they’re not written by his daughters).

Sather Lectures

Thanks to you all for your patience.

And apologies to those who think that this might be one step too far in self-publicity.

But you can now get to the audio of my first two Sather lectures through this site.

I'd love to have your comments, good and bad.

But remember, I still have four lectures to give. So if you wish to be completely and devastatingly negative, I'd be ever so grateful if you kept the comment till after 6 November (date of last lecture)!

Enjoy -- as I'm learning to say.

"Are we Rome? Tu Betchus!" . . . or Tu Betchus Not

Several friends interrupted the Beard hermitage today (welcome interruptions, I should say, as I was struggling a bit with the start of Lecture Three) with the news that Sunday’s New York Times had an article half written in Latin. Or more correctly half written in half Latin.

Maureen Dowd’s regular column started with some reflections on the decline and fall of the American empire and a pat on the back in the global economic melt down  for Seneca’s advice to “avoid whatever is approved by the mob”. (I wonder if she realises that one Roman writer held Seneca almost single-handedly responsible for the Boudiccan revolt in Britain – by calling in all his loans at the same time and so causing a liquidity crisis. Now there’s something relevant to our times.)

Then, after welcoming the rise in the study of Latin in US schools (I’m with her on that one), she launches into several paragraphs of dog Latin on the election campaign.

Some of it is actually quite funny  -- featuring “Ioannes McCainus, mavericus et veteranus captivusque Belli Francoindosinini, et Sara Palina, barracuda borealis” and the rival “Baracus Obama”.

The best universities in the world

Should we celebrate that Cambridge and Oxford have been ranked third and fourth in the THE world universities league (an entirely unofficial one…despite the publicity it gets) – and that there are 17 UK universities in the top one hundred. Or should we lament that Cambridge and Oxford have slipped from joint second with Yale, and that last year we had 19 'unis' in the top 100? Or should we not give a damn?

My first instinct is to celebrate. The fact that Oxbridge can come out so strongly when it has the fraction of the endowment of Harvard (no. 1) and Yale (no. 2) is a tribute to the brilliance of its staff, their phenomenal hard work (“we live in a culture of competitive martyrdom”, as a senior colleague remarked to me recently), traditions of excellence that go back centuries and an administration that is more or less at one with the academics.

In fact you might say that it is the democratic structure of the oldest UK universities that has enhanced and protected their achievements – rather than held them back, as many voices in government and industry would argue. An apparently cumbersome, devolved, democratic, tardy system of governance is often the best support of great institutions, stacked full of people who are too clever by half.

If any other area of UK life was rated this high (primary school maths, for example) we’d all be cheering. The universities and the BBC surely must be what the country should be most proud of – and I feel luckier than I can say that I have spent most of my working life in Cambridge.

Yet it is hard not to feel anxious about the slippage downwards, and what it might portend.

Berkeley, Bin Laden and another 'Great Debate'

It’s nine o’clock Tuesday evening and I have just finished writing Thursday’s lecture. The aim is to finish in time each week to give me at least 8 hours to get my graduate class together (on Suetonius' Life of Nero, a text I know quite well, but still need thinking, planning and looking up time -- and these are very smart students, who are a pleasure and a challenge).

The second lecture in a series like this is in some ways worse than the first. How many people will turn up? The first occasion (plus the party) will always get a crowd…but what is the respectable drop off for the second? On this occasion the calculations are complicated by it being Yom Kippur (hence podcast of second lecture…I know you’re still waiting for the first too; I’ll let you know the progress as soon as I hear).

The anxiety is quite humbling. I’m not a hugely good attender of such events in Cambridge. If you’re too busy and will only sit through the lecture fretting about the things you haven’t done, you tend to think: what’s the point? Well the point is to boost the morale of the PBL (poor bloody lecturer).

Anyway, I’m up to speed. And, of course, as everyone finds, I have too much material to get in and the cutting hurts. I had so wanted to squeeze in the Roman medical writer Galen’s total uncertainty about the physical causes of laughter, partly – lets admit it – because the quotation comes from a book of Galen surviving only in Arabic, and I thought that would look very smart. Anyway this appalling piece of showing off was intercepted by the time constraints. 50+ minutes is only just a bit more than 5000+ words. So Arabic Galen hit the cutting room floor. Good job too, some may say.

The truth is that by the time I was reaching the last page or two, the second presidential debate was on the television – and I watched it (hermits are allowed the tv).