A Don’s Life

Desert Island Discs -- the verdict?

No, I couldn't listen to the Desert Island Discs while it was actually broadcast. And for most of today, I just tried to judge how it was from what other people said.

Bluff and double bluff. I went to a meeting of our Leverhulme project (yes at 6.00 pm on a Sunday) -- and there was a good bit of ribaldry. Oh yes, they said (when I confessed that I didn't remember a thing I'd said), we loved it when you said what a silly c*** the Vice Chancellor said... brave to do it on the radio (isn't there a Dorothy Parker poem on these lines?) .

Anyway the programme is here (for a week) and the records, not in the right order necessarily, were:

University cuts, redundancies - and bye-bye palaeography at King's College London

Last week we had 'Two Brains' Willetts come to talk to us at Newnham. He was clearly a smart guy, but between the lines the prospects for universities looked gloomy. "Autonomy" (one of Willetts's catch words) was pretty clearly a euphemism for "find your own money -- no more from the government", not even the next one.

It would be nice to imagine that university cuts means just  larger class sizes. In fact it means redundancies and the end of crucial, but minority, subjects. There has already been a round of compulsory redundancies at Sussex.

Now it is the turn of King's College London - which is planning (very confidentially, so far) to lose up to 22 posts in Arts and Humanities by the end of the academic year. This means that at least one subject (which ought to be a protected species) will disappear.

Mary Beard the physicist -- on Desert Island Discs

As I hinted (buried in a link) in my last post, I have just recorded a Desert Island Discs show, which will be broadcast next Sunday.  It was, unsurprisingly, great fun choosing the records....I'd done it a hundred times in my head over the years, but this was for real. (You'll have to wait and see what got into my top eight . . .)

The funny thing was that actually recording it was wonderfully engaging (like talking about yourself tends to be, lets admit it), but also totally exhausting and in the end a bit of a blur. In that respect, it was a bit like ding your PhD viva: you have occasional flashbacks to one or two questions and moments, but overall you cant actually remember what you said. And as the days go by the possibility that you might have said something really stupid starts to loom large. The difference between Desert Island Discs and a PhD viva is of course that a PhD viva isn't actually broadcast to the nation.

On the other hand, I have been feeling a bit of quiet self satisfaction of the "wouldn't my Mum and Dad be proud" variety...until I was quite properly taken down a peg or two.

Quote Unquote

I guess that I am a sucker for exams of all sorts. So when I got an email a couple of months ago, asking if I would go on the Radio 4 quiz show,'Quote Unquote', I said yes. That's the show that quizzes about famous and not so famous quotations, who said what about whom.

Well it's not quite true that I said yes straightaway. My first reaction was to think that I could only lose by showing up my ignorance. The nice producer said that I didn't have to worry, as some of the questions would come from my specialist area. Even worse, I thought. If I am revealed as ignorant about quotes from the backwaters of James Joyce -- well so what? If I don't know my Virgil, then I look dead stupid.

But anyway I said yes.

Social mobility -- down and up? Like Roman slaves?

Listening to Gordon Brown waxing lyrical in another pre-election address, this time about social mobility, you wonder if he (or his think tank) have quite thought this one through.

No-one could possible object to the slogans: "opportunity and reward cannot be hoarded at the top and it is not enough to protect people at the bottom"; "the glass ceiling is not merely to be raised but broken"; plus a promise of the "biggest wave of social mobility since the second world war". Who, apart from the loony right, would ever get up and argue that the poor should stay poor no matter what their talents were, or that the glass ceiling should stay firmly intact....or that we should energetically push BACK such elements of social mobility as have been achieved since World War II?

But no political argument  to which it would be impossible 'in polite society' to object is worth the paper it is printed on or the airwaves on which it is disseminated. It is, in other words, only a slogan, not an argument.

In this case the real questions are twofold. First: HOW are we going to deliver on the promise of social mobility? The usual answer of 'blame Oxbridge for our ills and interfere with the well thought out system of university admissions in the <false> name of fairness' wont do.

The second is even more important, and usually neglected: namely, how are we going to manage the downward social mobility of some that must inevitably be the consequence of upward social mobility for others -- unless (on our current system) we imagine a period of unparalleled economic growth combined with the import of an underclass (with no upwardly mobile prospects) to do the shitty jobs that are left unfilled. All social progress has losers as well as winners. It is often, and probably correctly said, that the increase in numbers of women students at Cambridge in the 1980s (which, needless to say, I wholly support) came at the expense of working class boys (which I deplore).

The answer in the general social mobility case must be that government needs (or better WE need) to work towards a system in which success and social hierarchy are differently configured, and in which the thrusting upwardly mobile are not forced simply to trample on others on their way to the top, or wave them goodbye from above (sending the odd food parcel), or look happily on as others tumble down past them. Can we imagine a society in which if I leave my job as garbage collector, I am not simply forcing someone else into the undesirable place I have left? Doesn't this mean thinking again about what we value and what brings status and rewards? And how pay is distributed? (Is it awfully old fashioned Socialism to suggest that an interesting job is in part its own reward?)

You might think that ancient Rome was a paradise of Brown-style upward social mobility.

The "new" Parthenon, my new edition?

I wrote my little book on the Parthenon about a decade ago. It looked at the material of, and from, the temples in all its different locations -- from the Acropolis itself to the diaspora of the Parthenon in London, Paris, Rome and Wurzburg and other places.

Things have changed a little since then. A small fragment of the Parthenon frieze (and I mean very small) has been sent "back" to Athens from Heidelberg (thanks, largely to a Greek then in the administration of the University of Heidelberg); another, slightly larger piece, has gone back from Palermo.

But the biggest development since I wrote is the opening of the new Acropolis Museum last year. You can hardly have a book on the Parthenon on sale, which laments the fact that the new museum has still not yet opened after years of delay, when any visitor to Athens see a great pile the size of a multi-storey car park standing about 300 metres from the Acropolis.

So a new edition is called for.

What to cut in universities?

I went into work about 8.15 this morning, just when Michael Arthur, the chair of the Russell Group of universities, was on the Today programme, complaining about government cuts in higher education.

He was right, of course. Compare France and Germany, whose response to the recession has been to INCREASE university funding (even if that funding is more PR than real, it still says something that Sarkozy and Merkel think that more money into higher education will be a popular move). And he didnt do badly, but he didnt do that well either. You would have thought that he would have prepared some kind of answer to the obvious question: "So if we are not going to save money on universities, where SHOULD the savings come from?" I suppose it would have been hard for him to say what many of us think: ID cards, Trident, Afghanistan. But he might have had some clever riposte up his sleeve. In fact, he was floored.

And I didn't take too well to all that jargon about 'the knowledge economy' and 'the sector': the former is a bureaucrat's word for what I do (teaching and research), the latter a bureaucrat's word for universities. But overall for me Arthur was on the side of the angels, compared with many of the commenters on the Guardian's web site -- who posted in response to the paper's article on university cuts (the article which had prompted Today's interview).

OK some of them had some good words to say for us. But  a large number were of the opinion that universities were a waste of time, that degrees could well be done in two years because we didnt bother to teach the kids anyway, and that Oxbridge dons were an especially lazy load of tossers. As one put it, there were 'plenty of people doing  "useless" degrees, usually at Oxbridge with names like Classics and three 8 week terms with the final term dedicated to exams (yes that's 16 weeks per year for a degree level education and perhaps 3 tutorial hours per week)'.

I wish he (or she) could have seen my, pretty ordinary, term-time day -- which went something like this.

Conference in Disneyland

To those of you who asked whether I made it out of Heathrow to the American Philological Association meeting in Anaheim, the answer is YES -- but it took me 39 hours door to door.

OK, only 11 hours flying time; but a good few hours in the Sofitel at Heathrow, and a good few hours on the tarmac, wondering if we would outlive the legal flying time of the crew (in the end they gave us an extra pilot from some plane that had been cancelled to somewhere else). Still, the good news was that I got here, unlike our panel chair and organiser, who was stranded at Heathrow and forced back to Oxford.

So far as I can see, Anaheim is not my kind of place. And outside the conference hotel, there is little to do by explore Disneyland. This has its advantages for a big conference. Go to Chicago or New York, and the big rich guys are always off to some expensive foodie restaurant, or at least doing the galleries (for the not so rich). Here in Anaheim, everyone stays in the conference hotel, because there is no alternative.

The result is that I have seen more people in a shorter time than at almost any other recent conference I have been to. Moral, I suppose: hold conferences in nasty places and the delegates will meet each other much more easily.

Anyway, all the speakers at our panel (apart from the organiser) made it: me, then, in order, Sarah Iles Johnston, Robin Lane Fox and Jim Porter.

Why does 'election 2010' remind me of AD 54?

When Nero came to the Roman throne in 54 (thanks, scurrilous rumour had it, to his mother administering those poisoned mushrooms to his stepfather, emperor Claudius), his first job was to give a eulogy of his predecessor.

It was an eloquent address, according to Tacitus (Annals XIII, 3), even if a bit over the top on the old man's foresight and wisdom. The real trouble was that Nero hadn't actually written it; it had been run up for him by his old tutor Seneca. Some senators tutted: Nero, they observed, was the first emperor to "have to borrow someone else's eloquence".

The next stop was the senate, where Nero made another well targeted oration, full of vacuous but heart warming slogans, aimed to please to assembled Roman political aristocracy.He brought to the job, he assured them, no grudges . . . . there would be no bribery and corruption in his administration, he would keep his own household quite separate from the affairs of state, the senate would exercise its old prerogatives.

"Nor was the pledge dishonoured" remarks Tacitus archly (Annals XIII, 5), and goes on to list a few things done on the senate's initiative. But within a few lines he has given the game away. The senate starting meeting in the palace, so that Nero's mother Agrippina could listen to proceedings from behind a curtain. So much for the separation of household and affairs of state. And as if to rub the point home, Tacitus uses the same Latin word, discreta/m for the separation of public and private business, and the separation of Agrippina behind her curtain.

OK -- so hardly an election, but what is the similarity between then and now?

Borrowed eloquence, for a start.