A Don’s Life

Gobbets

Have you ever done a gobbet?

If the answer is "yes", the chances are that you once studied Classics or History. For a "gobbet" (a word that also means a little piece of raw flesh) is a small snatch of historical "source" set for students to comment on -- and to explain the historical significance.

It's a venerable, traditional pedagogic exercise. And when I was an undergraduate, our history exam papers always started with a compulsory "gobbet" question: that was, about 10 short passages in Greek and Latin, with the instruction to comment on three. We dreaded this exercise. There were two ghastly prospects. Either you would be able to translate the thing, but wouldn't have a clue about the historical significance. Or you would think you could spot the historical significance, from memory at least (isn't this Plutarch commenting on the motivations of Tiberius Gracchus?), but you didn't remember it well enough actually to know what it was saying.

Soon after I went back to Cambridge as a lecturer in 1984, under the influence of the then Professor of Ancient History, Keith Hopkins, we abolished the gobbet question.

How many references do you write in a week?

This is a little moan about writing references. But let me make one thing clear right at the beginning: evaluating students, ex-students and colleagues is an important part of my job; I'm not complaining about being asked to do it (so no need to feel remotely guilty about asking me) -- I'm complaining about the cumbersome, inefficient and sometimes downright obstructive infrastructure.

Lets get the scale of the problem. Although the number goes down at other times of the year, between October and the end of February (the peak post-graduate, milk-round and research fellowship recruiting season), I write on average something like 10-12 references a week; in January this year it was more like 15-16. The time it takes to write and process each one varies...from say an hour and a half if you are writing something from scratch (and it would be longer for a complicated and unusual job) to fifteen minutes for something simple for a student whose reference you already have on you computer (whoops, is that or is it not against the data protection act?)

Overall then, it is an average of about 30 minutes a reference, or 8 hours a week at peak times.

Now in the old days when I did fewer (this is a task that naturally gets bigger as you get older and have more ex-students wanting jobs, chairs, research leave, promotion), the system was a lot more homogeneous. Before email, you would get a written request from the student, asking if you would mind them using your name -- and you would then get a letter from the employer or the college or department asking you to send it. You would pile these up on your desk and work through them one by one. For even the most untidy or scatty reference writer, it was hard to forget them or mislay one.

Normally when you had sent the reference off, you got a thank you letter from the potential employer. I remember that when Henry Chadwick was Master of Peterhouse he used to send beautifully hand written thank you cards (which made you feel good, and made you take care the next time).

It isn't like that now. In fact it's a nightmare.

Are you at risk of plagiarism?

On Friday evening I gave a Darwin lecture in Cambridge in a series on the theme of "Risk". These lectures -- which happen every Friday in Lent Term -- have been going for 25 years now and have become something of a Cambridge institution, with a new theme each year (Serendipity, Survival, Identity, Evidence . . . .), and a vast audience. I was in the Lady Mitchell Hall, which takes 500, and then there was a video link to an overflow hall.

My theme was "Risk and the Humanities", and most of the lecture was actually about how the ancients approached and faced danger -- and how and why the ancients didn't have a "risk agenda" anything like our own. But in the last five minutes I allowed myself a bit of a rant about how that risk agenda in the modern sense had distorted research and teaching in the humanities now. 

Grant awarding bodies like the AHRC are so risk averse, that when you apply for money they make you specify exactly what your outcomes are going to be, and exactly what your timetable of research is going to be. Not only is this a complete misrepresentation of how humanities research is carried out (you don't know how long it is going to take you to read a book.. it all depends how interesting you let it be), but it also encourages us all to dishonesty. For the only way sensibly to be able to conform to the AHRC guidelines is to apply for money for research you've already done....that's the dream ticket for risk aversion. There's no problem with the outcomes and you use the research time they pay for to get on with the next project....then in due course you apply for more money to fund that (even though you've already done it).

After the lecture people told me that was regular practice in lab based sciences.

But the other poisonous thing about the risk agenda in universities is that it has started to cast risk in the Chernobyl mode -- I mean as a nasty thing that you can be a victim of, rather than something over which you have responsibility and control yourself.

Take plagiarism: it's ceasing to be the crime of "cheating" and is becoming an appalling academic disaster that can happen to you unawares, without you even knowing you have done it..

If you don't believe me , check out the University of East Anglia, Anti-Plagiarism quiz: Are you at risk of plagiarism?

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:

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.

Vote first, think later: vetting (and Iraq)

 
I am of course pleased that there have been changes to the vetting arrangements for school visits etc. I would much prefer that we didn't live in a world in which everyone was assumed to be a danger to children unless "proven" otherwise. But even so, if there must be legislation, then it is better that some of the rough edges are knocked off sooner rather than later.

But the bigger question is: what on earth were the MPs doing when they passed this vetting bill, in its full form,  in the first place? Why did it take a group of authors, among other interest groups, to see what the implications were going to be for school visits by poets and novelists, or for language exchange arrangements, or for sports clubs? In their enthusiasm for flushing paedophiles out of the woodwork, did no MP spot these issues? Did they not have their brains in gear, or listen to those that did?

To offer a comparison with something much more trivial (though important to those involved): when we are changing regulations for our exams in Cambridge, we make sure to think through all the implications, however remote, very carefully. How might this change impact on someone who was reading Latin and French, and was currently on a year's placement in France? Might they possibly be unfairly disadvantaged by a change that is brought in for the benefit of the majority of students. Taking account of all the possible consequences is what making rules is all about.

So what has gone wrong to make our legislature so conspicuously sloppy?

It reminds me of a meeting we had in Cambridge in the run-up to the Iraq war.

How (not) to buy a subsidised bicycle

In case you hadn't caught up with this, the UK government has a "Cycle to Work" initiative, which allows workers for those companies who opt in to get tax relief (under a "salary sacrifice" scheme) when they buy a new bike to get themselves to work. The University of Cambridge have indeed just opted in --  and the procedures are currently administered by "Cyclescheme", who describe themselves as "the UK's number one provider of tax-free bikes for the Government's Cycle to Work initiative". (So there are number two and three providers? I found myself wondering -- then discovered Booost and Cycle2work.)

It is, of course, a good idea in principle. Anything that would get cars off the Cambridge roads and more bikes on, would be a great improvement.

But just look at the dreadful palaver that it takes to get one of these things -- and the nasty sting in the tail (namely that the richer employees benefit more from this scheme).

The Tesco University Library?

"The Tesco Library" doesn't exactly trip off my tongue very easily. Not that I have anything against Tesco. The "Cadbury Schweppes Library" or even "The John Lewis Partnership Library" wouldn't sound any better. But I'm sure I could get used to it -- if it came with a few million pounds to keep the library as great it has always been. This year has been the first time in 25 years working in Cambridge that I have had a suggestion for a library purchase rejected for the sole reason that it was too expensive. And if a Tesco (vel sim) "naming opportunity" would make sure I got the books I needed, I would be happy.

So I dont really understand the fuss in some quarters about the possible Tesco scenario. There are all kinds of dangers in raising private money to fund university research. But they are all about the possible power that the donor thinks they are buying -- over policy, academic priorities, or appointments. If Tesco thought that, for their millions, they could have a say in what books were acquired, who should be allowed to borrow, or who should be University Librarian, that would be a different matter. We have a regular and generous donor to the Classics section of my college library. The letter always comes saying "the choice of books is of course yours". That's exactly how it should be,

For mega-donations, naming is a good way of recognising benefaction which doesn't hurt anybody. After all it hasn't hurt the Bodleian to be called after their sixteenth-century bank-roller, Sir Thomas Bodley.

It's a don's life -- the book

The book of this blog is due out on 5 November. But advance copies are now available from Amazon, and are on their way to those commenters whose comments are included in the compendium (you know who you are). I like the look of it and, obviously, feel some trepidation about how it will be 'received', and -- of course -- bought.

The book reprints some selected posts, as well as including quite a few comments (and I think that debate actually makes the book). It also has an essay, by yours truly, on the nature of blogging -- and why I am a convert to the genre, despite many initial misgivings about dumbing down etc etc.

I hope you'll like it.

The history of holidays

I spent most of yesterday on a business park just outside Peterborough. I was at the HQ of Thomas Cook, the travel company -- not booking a holiday (though the vast number of people working busily here suggested that the holiday business had not been as hit by the recession as you might guess), but exploring the company's archive. For the company goes back to the mid nineteenth century, and to an excursion he arranged in 1845 from Leicester to Liverpool. In fact one of the objects on display in the archive was an 1840s Cook's guidebook-cum-brochure for Liverpool.

I was there, as you might guess, to try to find out more about Cook's travel to Pompeii and Athens in the nineteenth century. Now, Cook's customers were not anything like so downmarket as they are sometimes painted (and were painted at the time in the more snobbish sectors of the British press), but they do give you a glimpse of the travel experience of those who are not simply blue-blooded aristocrats. Amonhst his early travellers to the Mediterranean, you find retired army officers, families from New Zealand, single ladies and all sorts.

So what did I turn up?