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

Disabled access

I know it’s all too easy to knock Health and Safety rules, and the like. I’ve done it before and – yes – that smirky cynicism will be knocked out of me, if ever I get trapped in a blazing building because the Evac chairs have not been properly installed, or the emergency lighting isn’t working.

All the same . . . try this story.

The Classical Faculty building in Cambridge (where I tend at the moment, finishing my Pompeii book, to spend rather more hours of my life than I do at home) has just installed disabled access: (semi-)automatic front doors. This isn’t anyone’s fault. We were obliged to do this to be “compliant” (and, as one of my senior colleagues put it, to be “transparent” and “robust” too, no doubt).

So, until two weeks ago we had perfectly manageable front doors : a double set - one pair of outside doors plus another pair the other side of a small lobby. They were very easy to handle. The outside pair were heavy-ish, opened one way only and were still just about possible to manage if you had a large pile of books in your arms. The inner pair swung both ways and were easy to push or pull from whichever way you approached.

They have now been “up-graded’ to disabled use, and are almost unusable by the rest of us.

Do physicists need French?

If you have academically elite universities, it’s only predictable – indeed it's right and proper – that people debate exactly what qualifications students should have to get into them.

A hundred years ago, the headlines were all about whether ancient Greek should be a  necessary qualification to get  into Cambridge. Technically speaking it wasn’t actually a qualification you needed to be admitted in the first  place. But, if you wanted an honours degree, you had to do a preliminary exam in Greek soon after you arrived – which was pretty much the same thing in practice.

The arguments went as you might expect. The abolitionists claimed that the Greek requirement was preventing highly intelligent boys (sic) from coming to Cambridge, if they weren’t already at a select group of socially elite schools (the access argument). They also suggested that it was pretty ante-diluvian requiring a dead language when you could be getting the boys to learn a modern language, French or German (the utility argument).

On the other side, the retentionists argued that Greek was an essential part of a liberal education, and that it would disappear from schools unless Cambridge continued to require it. To this the abolitionists retorted that it wasn’t Cambridge’s job to take responsibility for the school curriculum.

The arguments went on from 1870 to 1919, when in the brave new post-war world the Greek requirement was abolished (and, true to the retentionists fears, the decline of Greek in schools had begun).

A hundred years on and the radical choice of the early twentieth century – namely French and German – are now in their turn to be toppled. Cambridge is planning no longer to require a modern language from all students across the board.

Dead men's books

When my mother was dying, she made it very clear that she didn’t want anyone wearing her clothes after she was dead. I didn’t quite understand this at the time. After all, she would have happily have given away her internal organs if they hadn’t been past their sell by date. And she happily distributed her used clothes during her lifetime. So why not after her death?

I vaguely supposed that it was something to do with the final annihilation that people going through, choosing or rejecting your clothes would seem to entail. And didn’t give it much more thought.

But last week, I came face to face with that sense of annihilation when the vultures(self included) descended to take the pickings of my old, recently dead supervisor’s books.

For many academics, books have much the same significance as clothes. They are what you use every day and you have your favourites as well as your expensive mistakes. Not to mention the carefully mended, the carelessly torn, the messily annotated.

The trouble is what happens to them when you’ve gone to the great library in the sky.

A day in Guantanamo

OK not quite. But I have just spent a day in an orange Guantanamo style jump-suit, as part of our student Amnesty Group’s “Orange Wednesday”. This was a bit of harmless and colourful street theatre, designed to draw attention to the injustices of illegal detention all over the world. A few hundred of us, mostly students but some staff, went about our daily business dressed as Guantanamo detainees.

I volunteered for this fancy dress partly because I believe in the cause. But partly because most students seem so un-bothered by issues of  surveillance, civil liberties and human rights that it is important to show some solidarity with those who are.

That said, I’m afraid I’ve lost some of my old knack for political action.

The first problem was: was I going to be able to get into the damn suit? (Not an issue for the poor thin creatures at the real Guantanamo, needless to say.) I had ordered an extra-large, but still had my doubts – particularly when the word went about that they only came in one size.

The good news was that it fitted. The bad news was that once in, it was almost impossible to get out. Going to the loo involved a good five minutes twisting and wriggling, before I could manage to release my shoulders and gradually pull the whole thing down.

Why didn't the Athenians give the women the vote?

I have had a dreary cold, which in other circumstances would mean postponing teaching and taking to bed with a glass of whisky and a DVD. But the term-time schedule here (see previous moaning blog) means that if you put off an afternoon’s teaching, there’s really nowhere to put it except 7.00 in the morning or 10.00 at night sometime beyond next week. And I can assure you that students find that no more agreeable (or quaintly idionsyncratic) than you or I.

So you muddle through, like I did this afternoon from 2.30 to 7.00 solid, spreading your germs, trusting your voice will hold out, and hoping that the young will get you interested enough to forget you’re feeling so ghastly. It usually works. I can’t claim I was particularly looking forward to the three consecutive hours on the Critics (ancient and modern) of Athenian Democracy, but the students – pairs of my college first years – got me engaged. (If they didn’t, this job would be a lot less worth doing.)

One of the issues we skirted round was, of course, the Woman Question. Why didn’t those lovely democratic fifth-century Athenians give women political rights? And do we think worse of them for not doing so?

A life in the day of a don

This week I am off to Brussels to be a Euro-academic – for the final selection round of some big Euro-research-grants. I’m on the awarding panel, not one of those seeking the research money. But no plutocrat me. As it’s the end of the month, I’m off on the Eurostar equipped with a range of plastic, none of which will be able to extract any cash from any hole-in-the-wall – which adds a sense of boy-scoutish adventure to the voyage. (It’ll have to be reef knots and a compass, rather than a taxi from the station!)

Part of the reason for this particular cash crisis is that the European Commission still hasn’t  managed to pay me the expenses from my last trip to Brussels in June. This circumstance alone is enough to make me very suspicious of the whole new-Europe project. If they can’t get me my expenses within 4 months, then what hope is there for financial management on a bigger scale? (The husband points out that he is largely in favour of the treaty etc and is, in fact, subsidizing my trip, so it kind of cancels out.)

Anyway, I’ll be reporting back on this expedition soon. Meanwhile, to a question that several emails have raised. What on earth do you dons do? I had a moan a few weeks back about the general idea that our long vacation is in fact an extended holiday. But what is it we do during term-time?

Tips for new students -- from an old don

The first week of term has ended, and our new students have just gone through the increasingly absurd ritual that is “Freshers’ Week”. I don’t much mind the old-fashioned rites of passage that many of them organise for themselves: a bit too much alcohol and getting off with the wrong bloke to huge, but temporary, embarrassment all round. ("Wrong bloke" nicely illustrated on the left -- but to be fair this isn't a Cambridge ad!)  It’s the ridiculous quantities of “information” that we now feel obliged to impart.

They have lectures, workshops and leaflets on safe cycling, safe sex, how to write an essay, how to recognise meningitis, what plagiarism is, how the library works (in triplicate), how to deal with budgeting, how to have a good time without it getting in the way of the 2.1 of your dreams – and that’s before they have even met their Director of Studies, received their work schedule or been to a lecture.

We must be mad. In the rest of our teaching lives, we are only too well aware of how much information the average highly-intelligent young person can possibly absorb in an hour. At the beginning of term we simply ignore that. Though you only have to look at the behaviour of many of our first years on their bicycles to see that the safe-cycling advice falls on deaf ears. Luckily, for most of them, experience teaches that one.

So why do we do it? It’s partly unthinkingly well-meaning, and partly tick box again I fear. Do you explain to your students about aids/plagiarism/loan management. . . ? asks some higher authority (whether the government or the students’ union). Yes, sir, we can reply.

Left to myself, I’d cut it back down to a speedy hour or so.

But what would you say, if you could give them just one piece of advice?

Orientalism . . . or, What's in a name?

On the front door of what was the Faculty of Oriental Studies in Cambridge, I have just spotted a new notice. Next to the stern warnings about not leaning your bicycle against the windows (a hopeless prohibition in Cambridge), is the following equally stern announcement: “Name Change. We are now known as The Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies”.

I am sure that this has been the subject of long discussions. And I can see why they wanted to change. The word “Oriental” now reeks of unacceptable “orientalism”, a nastily Western construction of any culture slightly to the east: decadent, effeminate but at the same time slightly menacing. (It’s what the Greeks felt about the Persians, and the Romans in their turn about the Greeks, and so on westwards.) How, for a start, do you explain to a group of new first year undergraduates what an “Oriental” Faculty is all about, and why it doesn’t exactly mean what they might think it does? More to the point, how do you get them, in the first place, to apply to something with a name like that?

It’s a bit like having “Women’s Studies” being called the “Department of the Second Sex”.

How many academics does it take to buy a coffee maker?

Are academics hopelessly incompetent boffins, who couldn’t run a chip-shop?

I usually get very cross about this silly myth. In fact, I have a US bumper sticker on my office window which says (words to the effect of): “The trouble is that the people who ought to be running the country are too busy teaching school”. If nothing else it amuses the passing tourists.

But just occasionally, we (or, lets be honest, I) do seem to live up to the myth.

Take, for example, the idea that the hard-working Fellows of Newnham might have a coffee machine that would make good coffee 24 hours a day in their Senior Combination Room (that’s what we call our “Common Room”) -- replacing the thermos jugs that are now put out three times a day, and quickly lose their freshness, taste and heat.

This subversive idea was first mooted about three years ago. Specifically, some super-brain came up with the idea that we might have one of those Flavia machines, which makes you a very nice cup of coffee from a little foil sachet (as you see in the picture).

But there were closely-argued objections from two sides.

First there was the eco-lobby. Some of the fellows were far from happy with the environmental wastage caused by all those sachets. Then there were the taste police, who thought that this bulky modern machine was an inappropriate intrusion into our lovely, Victorian Combination Room.

Death in the family

Well not quite in the family. But my old PhD supervisor died last week while I was in Italy and it feels a bit like losing a parent.

That’s partly because you run through much of the same gamut of emotions with your supervisor as you do with your Mum and Dad. I mean a mixture of abject devotion and admiration, oedipal hostility, irritation, love and awe. Which is why, I guess, the Germans use the phrase Doktorvater or (if only!)  Doktormutter.

But it’s also to do with the succession of generations – biological or intellectual. The death of others, after all, brings out self-obsession in every one of us. I don’t know anybody who hasn’t thought, as they weep for their parents in the grave, that it is now “their turn next”. Suddenly it’s you that the grim reaper is going to have in his sights. 

What do we do in the Long Vacation?

A few years ago the canny person who designs the Cambridge University Pocket Diary (an essential tool for life in this place) decided to rename the summer. No longer did the months of June, July, August and September go under the banner heading “Long Vacation”. Henceforth they would be called the “Research Term”.

The reason for this is obvious: to dispel the idea that the summer is one long holiday for academics – a nice excuse for lazy afternoon on the river, picnics, garden parties or extended trips to the South of France. Not that it has been wholly successful. I still meet people who say “Ooh, I do envy you the long holidays you get in your job”. Even students, amazingly, sign off their summer emails with a cheery  “Hope you’re having a good break!”

So what do we do in the Long Vac (as it used to be called)?

Esperanto, Welsh and the language wars

Could Esperanto save the world? When I was a kid I did learn a few words of this proto-global language, invented (as a gesture to intra-planetary understanding) in the 1880s by the doctor-cum-linguist, Polish-cum-Lithuanian, Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof. He had, it was said, toyed with idea of bringing back Latin as the world’s second language (that actually would have been easier for me). But instead he decide to construct his own, making it nicely simple, with no pronunciation traps and easy, consistent rules.

It ended up as an odd hybrid of Latin and German, with a smattering of French and Italian (not to mention a bit of ancient Greek “kaj” is “and” in Esperanto, after “kai” in Greek). So “plena” is “full”, and “plenplena” is “very full” (Greek reduplication, I suppose). And “mal” is the negative: “ami’ means “to love”, “malami”, “to hate”. Get it?

It was through my Dad that I ventured into Esperanto a little. He, in the spirit  of his times, saw Esperanto as a weapon in Moral Rearmament – as well as a blow to Welsh (which, as we lived in Shrewsbury, crept incomprehensibly through our letterbox on the phone and electric bills).

I didn’t meet Esperanto again till the 1990s.

Brideshead rejected

This week’s confession is that last week, to pass the time on the way to Durham, I bought a Tatler to read on the train. Such vice, it turned out, was rewarded in a way, because they had a feature on the Spires of Oxford – that is, on the new generation of undergraduates, “hot . . . clever and . . . on the cusp of greatness”.

Now, I spend a lot of time persuading perfectly normal and clever kids that coming to Oxbridge is not to enter the maw of Brideshead, that we want to encourage the brightest of whatever background, wealth or race to come here, to feel at home and do well. Reading this sort of rubbish, which was of course about a handful of the glossy privileged and their pranks, makes me want to weep – or scream.

Beware: tradesmen in the library

It only takes a quick visit to the Cambridge University Library to dispel any suspicion that the book is dead, or even approaching the last stages of terminal illness. The whole place is bursting at the seams with new accessions, which have now outgrown all the shelves and are spilling over onto tables, window-sills and even the floor.  All over the library you find little notes saying, helpfully, things like: “Classmark 534.6 c 95 continues on the table by the window”. I rather approve of all this (the UL is one of the few big libraries where a lot of the books are open to readers and don’t have to be ordered up from some compact-shelving dungeon) – but it does mean that the whole place is coming to look more and more like my own office. That is to say a bit of a mess.

I’ve just been spending a few rare days in the UL. Rare? Yes, and not only because I’ve been away for three months. Despite what you might enviously imagine about the working life of the average Cambridge don, I hardly ever get the time to go there during term. And even in the vacation, the excellent library in the Classics Faculty is only two minutes from my office and meets most of my needs. So some solid hours in the main library (the one with the “up yours” tower) seems quite a luxury.

The UL is a marvellous combination of high-tech library science (or “information science” I guess I should say) and some endearingly quaint old-fashioned habits.

Parent Power

The rise and rise of the school-run is a familiar story.  In the 60s and 70s my own virtuous generation used to get ourselves to school  on foot, by bus or bike. Now the kids get driven there in the 4 by 4, Ford Fiesta or whatever. Whatever the reasons (parental anxiety about murderous traffic and/or wandering paedophiles), the results are obvious in the shape of pollution and overweight/underexercised kids. Not to mention the fact that the average 10 year-old has lost the only half hour or so of independence that they used to enjoy during the day.

What people don’t realise is that the same phenomenon extends to universities too. When I was a student we used to go from home to college by train or bus, sending our assorted possessions in a large trunk – dozens of which you would see piled up at the Porters’ Lodge. (There was a British Rail service, I seem to remember, called “Passenger Luggage in Advance”, which I don’t imagine exists any longer.)

Now, most of them seem to get brought and picked up by their doting or long-suffering parents, in cars stuffed to the gills with clutter (and I confess that, wearing my parental hat, I do this too). Part of the reason may be practical. When we came home at Christmas and Easter, we used to stuff our things in cupboard and hop on the train. Certainly at Cambridge many colleges, with an eye on conference business, insist that the undergraduates – unless they can prove that they really do live on the other side of the planet – remove all their possessions every vacation.

But it’s not just practical (after all, there’s still the trunk option). Mums and Dads seem to appear much more often around college than their traditional single epiphany at graduation.

Seminar power and willy-waving

When I go to a lecture or seminar paper, I expect it to end on time. If it is billed for 30 minutes, and Professor X is still talking at 45, I feel very itchy. Likewise if what Professor X says is plain wrong, then I expect to say so (politely enough) in the discussion session that follows.

All this seem to me to be quite “natural”. But actually, I’ve learnt, these reactions are distinctively British. Although at first glance academic seminars look much the same anywhere in the world (a group of people banging on about subjects that would leave most of humanity quite cold), they are in fact governed by all kinds of culturally specific rules.

When I first went to such gatherings in Italy, for example, I couldn’t understand why the chair didn’t just shut a speaker up when he (or occasionally she) was still in full flood 30 minutes after he should have stopped. And I couldn’t understand why the rest of the audience tolerated rambling responses from the audience lasting almost as long as the paper, and often on a quite different subject.

It took me years to see that in Italian terms this was the whole point of the occasion. For here academic power was calibrated precisely according to how much of the audience’s time you could grab for yourself. If your junior colleague spoke for 8 minutes, then you were losing out in status very publicly if you didn’t take at least 10 for yourself. And so on. Aggressive chairing and timekeeping would not only be breaking the implicit rules of the seminar; it would be disrupting the very roots of the academic power structure which the seminar supported.

In the UK (or at least in Cambridge, which may be a particularly extreme version of the British  case), things are much briefer and – to put it politely – punchy. How often have I heard my colleagues coming out of a seminar, one saying to the other “I thought you made a good point”? What “good” means in this context is, “a comment that in two witty sentences completely demolished the whole paper of the poor visiting speaker and showed how much cleverer you were than her”.

Praxiteles in Paris

Just three days before leaving for the Getty I took myself to Paris to see a new exhibition at the Louvre on the Greek sculptor Praxiteles. Not just myself, actually –this was a day trip we organised for our third-year Classics students at Newnham. You can just about squeeze seven Parisian hours in, if you leave London at 9.00 and take the last Eurostar back in the evening.

The idea is that it’s fun and bonding, a reward for hard work and ‘good behaviour’, plus a kick start to their revision for the final exams. Praxiteles is spot-on relevant to most of them. Some are taking our paper on the Classical Body in art. He’s a key figure in that, partly because it’s generally thought that he was the Greek sculptor who in the fourth century BC produced the first female nudes (his ‘Aphrodite of Cnidos’ usually takes the prize for being the very first).

Others are doing a paper on Sexual Ethics, and he comes in there too – largely because of stories the ancients told about this particular Aphrodite. One of the most extraordinary of all passages of Greek literature is found in a work (“Erotes” or “Loves”) by Lucian, the second century AD essayist. It is discussion between a couple of men, around this very statue, on the topic of whether the love of girls or of boys is preferable. Or to put it another way, do you admire the front or the back of the Aphrodite? In the course of the discussion one of them tells the story of a poor young boy of Cnidos who fell in love with the statue of the goddess, got himself locked into her temple and made love to her, leaving a tell-tale stain on the marble on the front of her thigh (and front is crucial to the argument, of course).

Praxiteles is in principle, then, a great subject for an exhibition. The only trouble is that with the exception of a statue of Hermes at Olympia (and there’s a question mark over even that) no certain original work of his survives.

So how do you make an exhibition?

Where's the loo?

Most Cambridge colleges “went mixed” some twenty years ago. But they still preserve unexpected corners of male power and privilege. None of these corners is more irritating than the location of the female loos.

Imagine it. You’re sitting in the SCR – that’s the fellows’ common room – after dinner. You casually ask for the Ladies. The chances are that there will be a bit of a flap, while the equivalent of an AA route map and a compass is produced. It usually involves going out into the courtyard, through the rain, into the next court, up a staircase three doors on the left – only to discover a set of facilities which you know to be decidedly inferior to whatever is laid on for the men, and much less ‘convenient’ in almost every way.

Some colleges, to be fair, are a bit better organised; and my own, I confess, treats male needs with almost equal disdain. But the general rule seems to be that women’s ablutions are lower down the pecking order than men’s.

I have never really understood why single sex loos are necessary, anyway, in a place like a university (King’s Cross station late at night is probably another matter).

Why can’t we just share?

Is university entrance squeezing the middle class?

Reinventing the wheel often causes a flurry of headlines. This time (once again) it is about university entrance and the decision to have information about parents included on the University (UCAS) application form. The idea is that it will help to “widen access” if admissions’ tutors know what the potential student’s Mum and Dad do, and whether have been to university themselves.

Squeals of horror from the usual (middle class) suspects.

There is in fact nothing new at all here.

De-mob happy

It’s coming up to the last week of Cambridge term, and my third-year Roman Britain class has been enjoying the end-of-course field trips. De-mob happy, last week we all went off in a coach to the Castle Museum in Colchester; this Saturday it was a train to the Museum of London.

First stop in London was actually the amphitheatre of the Roman city, partly preserved down in the basement under the Guildhall Art Gallery. Opened to the public in 1999, this gallery houses the Corporation of London’s art collection --  including some amazing Victorian stuff, from a clutch of A-list pre-Raphaelites to some of my favourite bits of nineteenth-century Hellenism (Lord Leighton, Alma-Tadema, Poynter and co).

The whole set up is pretty strange. There’s an airport style security system when you go in  -- ever since some free-thinker came along with a cricket bat and took a swipe at the head of their statue of Margaret Thatcher. I don’t know if that puts the hordes off (and maybe the place is swarming with city-workers during the week), but on the three occasions I’ve visited on a Saturday, it has been deserted. In fact it gives the distinct impression that its main function is to provide overspill cloakroom and loo space for the VIPs from the Guildhall next door – and that the paintings etc are really just the background decoration.

There is actually a little spy-hole down into what is left of the amphitheatre from just outside the palatial made-for-royalty loos. And it does look wonderful – with a green laser effect to reconstruct the seating, plus some green laser spectators and fighters.

Entertaining Boris Johnson

Or rather “Boris Johnson entertains”. For the Member for Henley came to the Classics Faculty today to give a seminar called “The Love of Classics” (his choice of title, not ours). BJ read Classics at Oxford – and is one of the keenest supporters of the subject we have. “Love” is hardly too strong a word.

Our idea in inviting him was to get him talking Classics to Classicists. This wasn’t to be a lobby on tuition fees, or university funding. No-one even mentioned Patrick Mercer who was being ejected from the Tory front-bench practically as we spoke. This was all about Rome.

My verdict? Well, it is only in a fit of madness that I would find myself  actually voting for this endearing toff (even if I did live in Henley). But he passed this particular test pretty well. To put it another way, I ought to hate the guy – but, in fact, I cant help but think that he’s rather a good thing.

Why teaching can harm the planet

This has been the first week of the Cambridge term and I have been launching one of my favourite lecture courses. This is a series on “The History of Roman Britain” for third years (Part II students, in our jargon).

Despite the title it isn’t mainly about archaeology. I have to confess that I retired from proper “dirt” archaeology when I was 21 – when the pleasure of spending a fortnight in a field, sharing tents (and more) with a load of other late-adolescents and consuming vast  quantities of alcohol suddenly seemed outweighed by the hard work, the hangovers and the sheer discomfort of a soggy campsite after a week of rain.

The course does include a bit of dirt. But it is more literally about the History of Roman Britain…and how it has been represented from the Roman world right up to now. Tacitus rubs shoulders with Asterix, Cassius Dio with Manda Scott and Rudyard Kipling.

One of the highlights is watching some well chosen clips from the dreadful Channel 5 drama-doc of Boudicca made a few years ago, in which the Romans are cast as some ersatz American, Halliburton-style, corporate capitalists smooth talking the noble (but dim) Brits into parting with their valuable natural resources. Actually not a bad analogy, some of us may think.

Exams are getting harder -- shock

Yesterday I was sent an intriguing present. It was the exam papers taken by a Newnham Classics student in 1901-1902. I’d seen these before, in their pristine, bound volumes in the University Library. But actually fingering the ones that come direct from the exam room, still marked with the blood, sweat and tears of the poor student (well, almost) makes a more powerful impression.

It’s hard not to ask yourself the obvious question: are these degree exams really more difficult than what our students do, like the gloomy commentators claim?

Well, put aside any romantic nostalgia for the glory days of rigourous classical education at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The good news is that what our undergraduates face at the beginning of the twenty-first is actually rather more challenging.

True, these papers look a bit more formidable (something to do with the close set typeface, I think), and there was a gruelling run of two three-hour papers per day (our students take only one a day). And you certainly had to know a lot. But there isn’t much evidence that a lot of thinking was required. Imagine the brightest and best classicists sitting down after three years at Cambridge to: “Mention the chief works of Zeuxis, Timanthes, Nikias and Timomachos” (a question about ancient painting, for which you just need to know the relevant passage of the elder Pliny). Or “Describe with a sketch-plan the Circus Maximus at Rome”.

My favourite is the one that asked “for a short description, showing where possible its evolution in classical times” of the “lock and key”.

No peace for the wicked

I am spending Christmas in the library. Well, that’s not quite 100% true. The whole family is taking today off work for the ritual turkey, presents and inebriation. But that’s as far as it goes.

I should say that I can think of many more exciting ways of spending the festive season (I’m not that sad). But I have an unmissable deadline on 2 January, which can only be “un-missed” if I get to work for a regulation eight hours or so, on most days between now and then. (OK that trip to Egypt didn't help!)

I realise that my blog may give the impression that a don’s life largely consists of whirlwind tours to exotic foreign locations. But most of what I do is infinitely more humdrum, and much less blog-worthy. Right now, it involves putting on my fingerless mittens and “checking references” in the Classics Faculty Library, whose heat has been firmly turned off until the beginning of January.

I feel a bit like the academic equivalent of Tiny Tim.

The dirty books in the library tower

Every Cambridge undergraduate, as well as a fair few of the dons, believes that the University Library stores its collection of pornography in the tower. It’s a myth encouraged, I suspect, by the distinctively phallic shape of this structure, which rises almost twenty floors over the main entrance to the Library.

But it is just a myth. I now know that the tower contains something much more exciting than pornography – and something more exciting than its title, “The Supplementary Collection”, would hint.

Cambridge, like the Bodleian, the British Library and a few others, is what is known as a Legal Deposit Library, which means that since the eighteenth century it has received a copy of every book published in the country. Nineteenth-century academic librarians operated a hard-line policy on these books: those that were considered “academic” were fully catalogued and put into the main system; the rest (from school textbooks through Christmas annuals to board games and Penny Dreadfuls) were put into the B stream, with just a rudimentary hand-written slip for a catalogue entry.

When in the 1930s the Library moved into its new Giles Gilbert Scott, industrial-style, building, the B stream was lodged in the tower – which I visited for the first time a few days ago. It was an utterly memorable occasion, and not just for the lift getting stuck repeatedly on the way up!

Lecturing in the flesh

It is close to madness to leave Cambridge in the middle of term. Coming to Buffalo meant, for a start, that I had to miss one of my first year lectures (though here I was rescued by a kind colleague who agreed to stand in for me). It also meant that every morning I dragged myself out of bed to deal with the 50+ urgent emails from back home, reviewing minutes of meetings, agendas and a host of admin. documents (let alone the queries from students, who quite reasonably expect an answer whether you are at your desk or not).

There was also the nagging question of whether I would manage get back to the university in time for my lecture of 10.00 a.m. on Monday if I took a flight from Newark on Sunday evening . . . scheduled to get to Heathrow at 6.45 a.m.

Buffalo weather at this time of year tends to be cold and windy -- and threatens to disrupt any travel plans. In fact the streets were still littered with the corpses of the trees that had not survived the blizzards of mid-October. Apparently these storms were particularly destructive because they came just a couple of weeks too early, when the leaves had not yet fallen. So the weight of snow on the branches was crippling – and indeed did cripple, beyond repair, more that 70% of Buffalo’s trees, which are now waiting to be hauled away. For me it was one of the most powerful arguments for being worried about climate change…never mind about sea levels, if snow just two weeks early in the season can do THIS….

But my immediate worries were more parochial.

What did the Romans wear under their togas?

If you teach at Oxford or Cambridge, you get used to the regular bursts of outrage about “the Oxbridge interview”. I posted a few months back about the myth that we are all a load of upper-class twits who use the interview to pick students just like ourselves. Wrong on both counts.

Just recently a different variant was doing the rounds: the one about all those weird, donnish and – this is the subtext – UNFAIR questions we ask at the interviews. Just to make sure the poor squirming candidate never feels at ease. A whole list of them were reeled off in the press and even on the Today programme. “What percentage of the world’s water is contained in a cow?” (Veterinary Medicine, Cambridge)  “Are you cool? (Philosophy, Politics and Economics, Oxford). “Why can’t you light a candle in a spaceship? (Physics, Oxford). The Evening Standard even dredged up some celebs to have a go at answering them – not very well.

What did not get headlined was the fact that the survey that had brought all these questions to light had been commissioned, and then hyped, by a company which specialises in helping potential students prepare for their Oxbridge interview – for a fee. There’s nothing like a bit of media panic to send frightened kids (and their over-anxious parents) rushing off with their cheque books to get some “specialist” advice.

My thoughts on this will, I hope,  be reassuring. More than that, they are free.

Where is your spleen?

This week I started my lectures on Ancient History to first year students. Following a tradition invented by one of my colleagues 20 years ago, I kicked off the very first lecture by handing round a skeletal map of the Mediterranean – and asked them to mark several key places (including Athens, Sparta, Troy, Crete, Rome and Pompeii). The results are collected in for scrutiny, but entirely anonymously. No names are required,.

The idea is to demonstrate to the freshers that they really do need to get an atlas out before they start sounding off about the Peloponnesian War, or whatever. The accuracy this year was no better or worse than usual. Most of the my 100 or so clever first years could place Rome and Pompeii, but Sparta wandered dangerously (from time to time popping up in modern Turkey) while Alexandria was a mystery to many, and one at least appeared not to know that Crete was an island. Are they pulling my leg I wondered….?

Over the decades this little exercise has given the new students a wonderful feeling of shared ignorance. The dons on the other hand have enjoyed shaking their heads at the very idea that a student with straight (classical) As at A level still doesn’t know where Sparta is.

Freshers week

Tuesday is the beginning of the Cambridge academic year – and thousands of new students have turned up. Going through the elaborate welcoming routine, I find it impossible not to remember what it felt like more than 30 years ago when  I was in their place.

For a start it was much less elaborate. Nowadays the kids go through almost a solid week of induction, so intensive that I can’t imagine much of it goes in. There are briefings on Health and Safety, tours of the various libraries, computer training sessions, meetings with student reps of the Faculty, JCR tea parties and “bops”, plagiarism avoidance classes (well almost) . . .  and that is before they have been to meet any of their teachers and lecturers.

I remember it all being much more down to earth. A big college “feast” with a pep talk from the Principal, a brief meeting with our Tutor and Director of Studies – and off we went, in at the deep end (and amazingly we did soon manage to fathom how the University Library worked).

Apart from the predictable anxieties and indiscretions of the first few days (which I do not intend to share!), I now remember only two things of those first encounters with the College Fellows.

The perils of league tables

Cambridge summer rituals don’t end with the exams, or even with the fancy dress of degree day. The final pantomime is the college league tables. The version that gets most publicity is the “Tompkins Table”, which is basically a first-past-the-post style of ranking. It gives 5 points for a first, 3 points for a 2.1 and so on. Then it produces a score for each college by reckoning their actual points total against what they would have got if every student had been awarded a first. A bit of “weighting” goes into the process, to cancel out the undue influence of subjects which score a lot of firsts. Otherwise any college could “win” by packing the place with (male) mathematicians.

This isn’t an official university ranking (we do have our own internal version, the “Baxter Tables” driven by every imaginable statistical correctness – but they are not made public till September). Peter Tompkins is a Cambridge Maths graduate (what else?) who compiles this table for fun.

Our public line is that is not something that much bothers us. Winning colleges may blazon their success on their website (but even some of those affect a more lofty disdain, and boast only in private). Winners and losers alike join together in patiently explaining that this is all very misleading, that it gives an inappropriate weighting to firsts (when for most of the students it’s a 2.1 that counts), and that anyway very little separates the top from the middle (if not the bottom).

But underneath we’re all a little bit more anxious.

Plagiarism

The crime that is buzzing in Cambridge right now is plagiarism. In fact, we are more immune to this disease than most universities, as so much of our assessment is done by old-fashioned 3-hour exam. This used to make us look like dinosaurs. Now it means that we are at the cutting edge of authenticity testing. You can’t  plagiarise in a 3-hour exam, you can only (try to) cheat.

All the same there is a flurry of excitement about one particular company that offers model essays (at 2.2,  2.1 or 1st standard), custom-built to the question of your choice. According to the local paper, this company claims to attract most hits to its website (which is, of course, different from most paid up clients) from Cambridge.

Frankly I don’t believe that many of our students actually sign up (or they are stupider than I take them to be); nor do I imagine that anyone with any financial acumen whatsoever would slave away producing the model answers that they are flogging.

The knife and fork test?

There has been disappointing news about university entrants. The number of kids from state schools going to university has fallen. So has the number from the poorest families going to what are called “leading universities”. So too (though no-one seems quite so bothered about this one) has the number of boys.

News like this tends to provoke another round in the favourite national sport of Oxbridge bashing. The general line is that we sit round after dinner, quaffing our claret and plotting to let in thick privately educated  toffs, and keep out the brightest and best from ordinary schools. Just occasionally this is backed up by a  cause célèbre: an unlucky applicant with 15 A stars at GCSE and a raft of perfect A levels who was rejected, in favour (so the implication is) of a less qualified bloke who knew how to hold his knife and fork.

Mixed messages?

The dust has quickly died down after St Hilda’s announced ten days ago that it would be admitting men. The last “all-girls” college in Oxford (as most reports patronizingly put it) finally relented and opened its doors.

I wasn’t exactly thrilled by the news. There could after all be a knock-on effect on my own cherished single-sex Cambridge college. And besides it was hard to follow the logic of why letting men into St Hilda’s would improve the educational opportunities of women.

But worse were the arguments that came out on either side of this debate. “Pro-mixers” tended to heave a sigh of relief that this quaint anachronism had at last been done away with. The supporters of single-sex colleges, I’m afraid, did little better. Here, they said,  was a place where women could be cherished outside the nasty, competitive hurly burly of a man’s world.

Wrong on both counts.  Women’s colleges are not havens of refuge for those that can’t hack it in mixed company. And as for the accusation of anachronism – they are probably better equipped for promoting women’s opportunities into the 21st century than most other institutions.

Brushing with royalty

Cambridge University is a bit like ancient Rome: grandeur exists cheek by jowl with squalor. One minute you’re in a lavish, wood-panelled, portrait-lined dining hall, with silver on the table that anywhere else would be safely behind museum glass. The next you can find yourself in some seedy back-stairs or damp, forgotten store-rooms of which even the most under-funded FE college would be ashamed.

This always makes for a dilemma if you’re thinking of chatting up some Labour party bigwig. Take him (or her) to high-table with a nice glass or two of claret and the full “Cambridge experience” and there’s the fear that he will soon be sounding off about the lives of fetid luxury we lead here. Take him to the buttery (our jargon for “canteen”), where most of us usually eat, and he’ll be distinctly miffed that he wasn’t given the claret treatment.

Last Wednesday I went  myself for a rare taste of the grandeur. A garden party in a marquee on a college lawn, policed by officials in top hats and bowlers – carrying strange poles topped with gold (for ceremonial purposes only, I think).

The amount of security on the way in suggested a mystery guest. The hot tip was Bill Gates.

Big Brother at Uni

Living in a student ghetto in a student city can make you feel horribly middle-aged. It’s not so much their extravagant – or extravagantly revealing – clothing, that you could no longer get away with yourself. Actually I rather like the annual summer display of belly buttons down King’s Parade. And it’s not their youthful argot either. Even I find myself saying “uni”, when I mean “university”.

What is most dispiriting for us old liberals is more ideological. It’s the way the students have come to take for granted all the things we fought against and lost. They can’t imagine what life would be like with a nationalized railway or free eye-tests; and they can’t think what  a second post would actually be for.

But even more alarming is that most of them have entirely bought into the idea of a surveillance culture. Show them a gloomy bike shed, a leafy path or a picturesque bend in the river, and there is nothing that your average Cambridge undergraduate would like to do more than install a CCTV camera in it.

To strike or not to strike?

As I remember them, lecturers’ strikes in Cambridge used to be faintly absurd affairs. When the “day of action” was called (it was only ever a single day) you would cancel your lectures and supervisions and re-arrange them for later in the week. You couldn’t let the students suffer.

On the day itself, you’d send a letter to the administration telling them you were on strike, so that they could dock your pay. After all, if you don’t have designated working-hours or working-place, it’s hard for the boss to know whether you’re on strike or not. Then you’d toddle off to the library for a solid day’s research, “work” in another sense.

The net result was a ghastly week of rearranged teaching squashed into all hours. You had lost a day’s pay and your employer (against whom you were supposed to be striking) had saved it. All in all, a pretty decisive own goal.

So is the current AUT “action short of a strike” – that is, the exam boycott – any more on target? I really don’t know.