A Don’s Life

Exams

The Easter (that is the 'summer') Term in Cambridge isn't much fun honestly. All the students think about is the upcoming exams. This means that you get pretty full houses to your lectures, but instead of engaging and arguing and answering back, they are hanging on your every word hoping to commit it to memory, to be regurgitated soon.

For me, this is a downer.. and it's especially a downer if you are examining a paper you are lecturing for. There is not much that is more intellectually humiliating than reading 75 scripts, where each candidate has fed you back a more or less well remembered version of a lecture you gave a month ago (to put it another way, it shows you how unclear your lectures must be).

As for supervisions (that's our small group teaching), they move from the argumentative and productive exchange of views of MIchaelmas and Lent, into something more like a counselling session. I can't count the times I have said this term... the key is to ANSWER THE QUESTION and to ARGUE (don't just 'write all you know about . . . "); if the question looks simple, it almost certainly isnt .. so think why not; go beyond the lectures and dont just regurgitate them;  more marks are lost by being too tired or not answering the question or going to the wrong exam room than by ignorance....

So why do sudden death exams? Wouldn't some form of continuous assesment be fairer and better and more educationally productive?

Dirty linen in public?... Moses Finley and the archives

I have lived in Cambridge for more than 30 years, and generally I think it is extremely nice to stay in the same place for so long. I guess my Mum and Dad felt the same about Shropshire, which I left too long ago really to recall.

In Cambridge, I like going to the University Library and talking to the same people on the entrance desk, when I come to borrow my books, as I did years and years ago..we've all grown older together and have grown up with a similar set of self ironies about stamping books, and libraryfines and whatever. (Let it be said to all those in charge that I have a glow of pleasure when I walk in to the UL, and have a human encounter before plunging into the stacks..no more computerisation at the entrance desk please, and if we could have the Georges back, that would be great. Much nicer than the worthy modern stuff we now have.

And I like the conversations you still have across the generations. Our house was once the house of A N L Munby (he soon moved on to better and posher premises) and I smile when I go to the Rare Books Reading Room in the UL, which is named after him. And after a few decades of working on the later nineteenth century, I can walk around town and say.. "J E Sandys used to live there" vel sim.

It all sort of joins up.

 So far, so nostalgic... and comfortable. But a few days looking at the bits of Moses Finley's papers in the UL have given another side.

How Roman are the Olympics?

I've been suffering from a nasty case of pedantry. The Olympic Games may be one of the institutions given to the world by the ancient Greeks, but almost everywhere you look they are being dressed up in decidedly Roman colours.

Henry Porter had an article urging the return of the Elgin Marbles in yesterday's Observer (not a hugely well informed one, it must be said). It started with the Olympics and the Vestal Virgins who were supposedly in charge of the Olympic flame. Sorry, not only is the flame thing in its current form a 20th century invention, but the Vestals were Roman -- guarding the sacred flame in the Roman forum. And Vesta is a Roman goddess, Hestia is the Greek equivalent.

And then there are the commemorative gold coins (designs above) decorated by the Royal Mint with Roman gods (Vulcan, Mars, Juno etc) down to the last damn sovereign.

It's given us classicists (me included, I confess) hours of pleasure, tut tutting about each new apparent error.

But maybe we shouldn't be quite so quick to carp.

The Discobolus gets dressed up

Just as that wonderful symbol of Nazi power -- aka the Olympic flame -- arrives on these shore, the British Museum is announcing that it will be putting its "Discobolus" or "Discus Thrower" back on show (it's been travelling around foreign exhibitions for a few years).

This Discobolus is one of quite a few Roman copies of an original fifth-century bronze by Myron -- and it was part of the collection of Charles Townley, which went into the Museum in the early nineteenth century. He'd bought it in Rome, straight from being dug up at Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli (or so he was told).

The truth is that it is a bit of a patched up job. Even Townley was a bit worried about the head. He was assured that it had been found right next to the body -- but no discus thrower ever looked at their feet like that. The "Lancellotti Discobolus" (Hitler's favourite version.. just to continue the Nazi theme) is what you'd expect (left).

But the mis-restored head didn't hold Townley's Discobolus back, and he's become quite a symbol of Greek athletics and of the Olympics in particular. His most famous moment, I guess, was when he starred on the publicity posters for the 1948 London Olympics.

Anyway, as you might guess, the BM are putting him on show again for 2012. But they are giving him a Discobolus friend or two, in a little Discobolus exhibition.

Newnham in Paris, and the discoveries from the Rhone

At the weekend we did our annual Newnham Classics trip to Paris -- sponsored by some very generous donors. All the Part II students (plus me) hop on the Eurostar at 7.30 (after a unpleasantly early start), get to Paris by 10.45...do a swoop on the Louvre, have a long lunch, back for another session in the Louvre, have a drink in a pavement bar, and catch the 19.13 train back to London (knackered...but great revision, and fun).

The Louvre always springs surprises (not least this year a large hanging poster in the Pyramid of a colossal Tony Grafton, who is obviously about to lecture there -- on the left).

 But rather more to the point, there was temporary exhibition on show, of archaeological discoveries from the river Rhone at Arles.

The star of the show was meant to be the Roman portrait, optimistically identified as Julius Caesar ("Mon dieu, c'est Jules César" as the underwater archaeologist is supposed to have shouted as soon as he had emerged from the river and taken his breathing equipment off...with slight Schliemann-like overtones).

I had seen pictures and films of this piece, and talked about him in my Washington DC lectures, but I had never actually met him in the flesh, so I was particularly keen to visit this exhibition.

Question Time, Oldham and (not) gay marriage

I was on TV's Question Time last night. It had actually been fixed up ages ago, and wasn't simply a a response to my new-found, and no doubt short-lived, celebrity as the TV presenter who is too ugly for TV/doesnt brush her hair etc etc . (This did, of course, rather give an added edge to the pre show make-up session... but luckily the extremely nice make-up lady was completely on message with the idea that I really COULDN'T be made to look as if I had suddenly changed my mind, complete with mascara and lippy.)

I have done Question Time once before, and -- as I think I said then --  it is about the closest thing to doing an exam that I now know. First you have to question spot, then revise like hell. You also need to look at last year's paper (ie last week's programme) as the same questions aren't very likely to come up twice in a row (though as every canny examinee knows, you can never be quite sure of that).

The  difference is that the question spotting goes on right up to the very last minute. A controversial speech by some government minister, sounding off about (say) the state of the nation's teeth, can at a stroke make entirely wasted all that work you put into revising police pay and conditions.

But, of course, even without those little surprises, you are bound revise more than comes up. Yesterday I woke up to the Today programme featuring Obama "coming out" for gay marriage. And took a punt that someone would be asking about that.

Willetts, research, open access -- and wiki

I find myself in a dliemma about David Willetts's latest pronouncement about free access on-line to publicly finded research -- not unlike my dilemma about podcasts, I guess. There is certainly something in what he says: the public purse funds pricey research which then ends up being published in journals that even the richest of UK universities can barely afford to buy.

What could possibly be right in that? And why on earth throw more money after the likes of Elsevier and the other big publishers? Just to give an example or two: an individual annual subscription to the International Journal of Obesity is £2840, and an institutional subscription to Nature ( a pretty basic scientific journal) for a school or university with under 2999 students is £3682 per annum (and add £666 if you would also like Scientific American).

 So far so good.. and we can all think that this can't be good sense. But, if I've got the right end of the stick. the problem with Willetts' s bright idea (as with all well-intentioned, half baked ideas) is that one size doesnt fit all, and what goes for Nature doesnt go across the board.

M I Finley, reviewing, and what to do about student protests

I have spent most of the week (when I havent been dodging the BRICKbats) with Moses Finley. As I said a few posts ago, I am giving a paper at the end of May on Finley's journalism; and the more I go on the more of it there turns out to be.

Quite how he found the time, through the 1960s and 1970s, to write so many book reviews and radio broadcasts (not to mention the colour supplement articles on the temples of Sicily etc), I really cant imagine. There was, it is true, a bit of re-cycling (the comparison of etruscheria to chinoiserie comes up more than once), and he had a number of standard tactics (like the trope of isolating a key theme and then saying "it's not even in the index").

By and large, the reviews are pretty sparkling...and pretty devastating, sometimes unkind, stuff. Finley didn't really admire many of the books he was sent to review. And it is clear from their wounded "letters to the editor" that the victims smarted at such swipes as "There are limits of tolerance and respect for errors and I am sorry to say that this book transcends them" (for "sorry", read "delighted"); or "so much earnest effort to so little purpose".

Amidst the reviews I've also come across quite a few of his little essays on culture, the state of Classics, or university politics. Given the current debates in Cambridge about the punishment meted out to Owen Holland for disrupting David Willetts's speech here earlier in the year, one particular article caught my eye.