A Don’s Life

The f-word and the c-word

I haven't  the foggiest clue about the John Terry case, but the BBC reporting of what he is supposed to have said on the field is side-splittingly awful. It runs "f-word, black, c-word".

Who the f-word does this protect? Or whose sensibilties is it meant to uphold?

Ok let's imagine that you are listening to some news bulletin with your 10 year old. S/he says what an f-word, mummy? Do you then lie and say "oh it means funny word" or do you tell the truth and say "fucK'?

And what is the down side of telling the truth? Either they know the score, or they don't...so where is the corruption? (It reminds me, as I think I've said before, of going to Greece with the kids 20 years ago, and finding that all the Greek toddlers were supping their Coke and crisps in front of films that no under-16 would get into in the UK..and no apparent harm was being done to the Greek children.)

Who used to live in my house?

We are having some building work done -- to put in a shower, after 15 years with just a bath. The kids are pleased, but point out that we are installing this new technology just after they have 'left home".

Anyway in the course of demolishing the bathroom, the builders discovered that it had been lined with newspapers from 1958. Now, for all kinds of research reasons, I spend hours looking at old papers in the University Library, and am used very to looking at (and mining) old news stories -- but it means something quite different when the paper in question has been peeled from the interstices of your own bathroom.

Anyway the Cambridge Daily News, as it then was in 1958, is full of the celebrations of "Ceylon Independence Day" -- with a picture of the High Commissioner "amusing the company at the Bombay Restaurant, in the company of his two daughters. And there are the usual Cambridge flurry of bike thefts (including the arrest of some unfortunate nine-year-old on the said charge). Meanwhile the Sunday Times was praising the virtues of the New Years Honours List (Julian Huxley's Knighthood "can hardly appear premature"... and the same for Lord Nuffield's Companionship of Honour apparently).

But who was it who had the papers stuffed in to the wall?

Escaping exams

I am knackered -- for a myriad of reasons, but partly because I have just finished being chair of our Part 1a exams. OK I am sure that taking exams is more exhausting than marking them; but marking takes it out of you too, and you don't get all the sympathy/ (The picture shows the examiners consuming a well-deserved lunch after their labours.)

It's tiring not only because of all those scripts to mark (pushing 200 in my case) but because of the absolute obligation to make the process as fair as it could possibly be. By fair I mean this: would it be possible to face each and every candidate with their results and explain to them why they had got a 2.1 or a 2.2 or whatever -- and to feel comfortable with that explanation? To put it another way, "classing" (explained here for those unfamiliar with this system)  candidates cannot possibly be fair if the classers themselves don't believe in the results.

That is not to say that the whole process is without its rough edges. There are candidates who do badly on the day because of all kinds of unpredictable and unfair reasons (row with girlfriend, toothache etc). And it is not to say that there might not be all kinds of other ways of assessing university achievement (some of which we already use, side by side with sit-down exams... dissertations, portfolios of essays etc). but -- the bottom line at the final stage -- the examiners' job is to assess and grade the results in front of them fairly.

In my experience, we do this as well as is humanly possible within the constraints of the system -- and it is  time-consuming.

How do we do it?

I blogged last year about using both alphabetical and numerical marks. But the nuances in our system don't stop there.

The key is to have principles and criteria, not rules. It's a key, in my view, that might have an application for other areas of life ( isn't part of the problem about MPs expenses that it has got fixated on universal applicable rules, rather the principles of what is reasonable  . . .).

Kings Cross to Cambridge: how nasty can a journey get?

I am afraid that this post will have most to say to those who travel by train between Kings Cross and Cambridge; but I suspect that my story will resonate with most other people who use London commuter  lines.

OK, first off Kings Cross -- and, I guess, a minor quibble. The underground station there serves both Kings Cross and St Pancras (now the Eurostar terminal). Until a few months ago, if you came into Kings Cross on the mainline train you went straight down to the tube -- and, within a minute or two, to whichever line (Northern, Circle, Piccadilly, Hammersmith and City) you fancied. The Eurostar-driven redevelopment of the station means that anyone wanting to get to (say) the Northern line from Kings Cross mainline station has now to walk through a labyrinthine series of passages by a circuitous route which seems to take you over to St Pancras, and then back to the relevant tube platform (10 minutes, briskly) -- even though you know the trains go from just underneath where you started out.

If anyone's worked out how to avoid this marathon, do let us know. I am sure there are some short cuts if you ignore al the forbidding notices saying "No entry to the Northern Line" or whatever (I think this means that there IS an entry to the Northern line this way, but we dont want you to use it.)

But the main whinge of this post (which is unashamedly a whinge) is the misery of the mainline train service, from Cambridge to London.

Should May Balls be banned?

Every year the local Cambridge paper runs a story about local residents complaining about May Balls --  the conspicuous consumption, the binge drinking and, most of all, the noise. May Balls were presumably (like most other things in Cambridge) a nineteenth-century invention, though they now come in various more or less politically correct forms.... those where you can buy a single ticket, for example, or those that call themselves a  "June Event" not a "May Ball".

But the basic principle remains the same. A lot to drink, a lot of noise, and a very late (or alternatively 'early') finish.

The campaign against this style of jollification has been led this year by the esteemed Professor of Palaeography at King's College London (who happens to live in Cambridge -- who would like all May Balls to end by 1.00 am).

There are some arguments against May Balls. Sure, this is after the end of our students' exams -- but there are still school students struggling with GCSEs etc. Why should they be kept awake by the uni students having fun? And it is also true that the DJ style (as pictured above) doesn't do much for out non-socially-elitist image.

But hang on. Can't the middle aged get a bit too curmudgeonly about the whole thing?

Should universities teach better?

In the 1980s, my clever friends who had gone into the Civil Service used to complain about the press they got. There they were, young people working 15 hours a day, trying to improve the conditions in prisons (or whatever); and there was Thatcher saying they were a load of expensive lay-abouts, and that they were a waste of space. My friends always said that, however much they had good arguments against that, the Thatcher rhetoric still got you down. It made you want to change your job.

Well, it isn't all that different in UK Universities right now.Mr Willetts is telling us that we should all teach better. As if we were all letting down our students with poor teaching. We are, in other words, doing badly. Or so the coalition says.  Really?

Better off in Brussels

I am in Brussels for most of this week, interviewing for the European Research Council Starting Grant programme (and what you see is the view from our interview room in EuroTower; the less scenic aspect below). Which is probably just as well, as it means I escape the rumpus caused by my last post on the sigma on the new Faculty doors (or rather the absence of the sigma).

This little squib has now been picked up by the Cambridge News, The Mail, The Telegraph, Corriere della Sera, and Anglia TV News -- to name just a few. That itself has a moral. In the old days bloodhound reporters would get out in all weathers to track their scoops down (or that's the myth at any rate). Nowadays it's easier to find them via Google.

But why on earth did this particular little item of news capture the imagination?

Well, in part, it must be that the idea the boffins getting it wrong always has a certain pleasure.  In this case a load of journalists who didn't have the foggiest clue about the difference between a Roman 'S' and a Greek 'Sigma' laid into Cambridge classicists for getting their spelling wrong. (In fact The Mail was so muddled that the first version of its headline said that we had got our LATIN wrong . . .)

In any case it wasn't a question of spelling -- and my first blog never said that it was.

Door rage (and wedding bells)

We have a sparkling new extension to our Faculty building in Cambridge, which wonderful in every way -- except for its FRONT DOORS. They look OK (although the photograph here doesn't quite bring out the best in them). The problem is opening the damn things. Because they are both (that is the exterior ones and those  that then lead into the lobby) fitted with Health and Safety approved disabled operation.

This means that, in order to open them, you have to press an electronic 'open door' button -- and they then sweep aside dramatically in front of you. Dramatically and slowly. So, at busy times (like, on the hour, when lectures are changing over), there is a mass of bodies trying to get into and out of the building, but needing  to wait for the stately pace of the doors' operation.

Can't you just push them anyway? Yes you can, but they are very heavy indeed (because of their motor), and not for the frail or those carrying a pile of books. In any case, as soon as you come along and push them open and then someone pushes the button from the other side, the doors take on a life of their own and come back and attack you.

The Cambridge vote

No I don't mean the vote that has just closed. I'm writing this in front of the television before the first result from that one has come in....and already I am fed up with the Labour crew mouthing the phrase "strong and stable government" (which is their euphemism for trying to do a deal with Clegg and waltz back into Downing St), and with the Tories crowing about "a decisive rejection of the Labour party" (when the exit polls suggest that it hasn't been half as decisive as they hoped).

But we shall see in a couple of hours.

The vote I'm talking about is the University vote (closing tomorrow) on "disciplinary, dismissal, and grievance procedures" -- or on what we call "Statute U".

One of the several advantages of working in Cambridge is that it still retains a semblance of democratic self-governance; big decisions still get voted on by all of us. In this case the issue is about emending the University Statute (U) that was brought in, as I recall, when Mrs Thatcher demanded that we should have a procedure for making academic redundant. Before that, redundancy was thought of as a potential threat to academic freedom -- and no university officer could be made redundant. (Contrary to popular report, they could be SACKED, simply not told they had become surplus to requirements -- that was what "tenure" meant.)

Everyone, even the people who wrote it, recognises that Statute U in its current form is unsatisfactory. That's different from knowing what to do about it.

From Cambridge to Brussels, again

Monday was a big day for us classicists in Cambridge. It was the day of the handover of our new Faculty building extension (a bit of expenditure that just got under the wire before almost all the money in the British university system disappeared). It gives us a little suite of new offices which are intended to house all those externally funded research projects that bring us in the money to keep going.

The point is that you have to say that you will give your funded project an office, otherwise you don't get the funding (nice view from new offices is seen here, on the left). But the really good news for us was that we also got more library space in the process -- almost one third extra shelving. For old fashioned books. Arts and Humanities are probably not good enough at explaining (even to colleagues in the university) why books and print journals are still crucial to research.

Scientists tend to think that any periodical more than 10 year old is chuck-able. I am still finding gems in Eastern European journals of the 1950s, even the 1850s.

Anyway, the new library has bags of space for that. 

Meanwhile, after the new building handover, I was off to Brussels - for another round of the the European Research Commission Starting Grants.