A Don’s Life

Is it a bollard? Is it a sculpture? Is it a book?

A couple of weeks ago, as I biked past the University Library (my usual route from home to my Faculty), I saw what I took to be a series of new bollards 'under wraps'.

For years now, car-parking at the UL has been increasingly out of control. When I was a student cars at the library were kept firmly in the car parks. Then one area of the car parking was re-assigned to university staff who work in the central administration (a sign of the times . . .) and readers' cars started to spill over -- first along the grass verges, then right in front of the library steps themselves.

It was only a matter of time, I often thought, before "the authorities" will put a stop to this. And here were the bollards.

But what emerged from the wrapping was rather different. It was a work of 'public art'.

Greek love and museum labels

I am currently a small part of a small team, engaged in re-displaying the Greco-Roman collections in the Fitzwilliam Museum. Most of the hard work is being done by the Museum Curators (guided by the Curator of Greek and Roman, Lucilla Burn - of the Fitzwilliam and Newnham). But we have a substantial AHRC grant to get a dialogue going between the local academic classicts and the museum professionals (including conservators) ... the idea being to inform" the new display. You can find out more about the people and the project here.

Anyway, we have a regular meetings to talk about the philosophy lying behind the new galleries -- and to get get down to real practical details. What is going to go on the labels?How many words are going to be on the information panels? (We are a university museum -- so can we escape the usual modern museum Stalinism.... nothing over 75 words, reading age of 11 and no more than three syllables . . . ?)

As so often, actually getting round the table and thinking about how you are going to describe a pot (say) turns out to expose the tricky issues, and to bring up all kinds of questions about how we know what we know, and what we want to say to visitors about these objects.

Today we had fun with one particular Athenian pot -- which appears to show a load of sexually predatory blokes, moving in on a desirable boy. Greek love, in other words.

WHO says British universities are complacent?

Almost every newspaper in the UK today had a story about the failings of universities. A parliamentary inquiry, they said, had branded British universities as complacent, unwilling to justify their standards to outside scrutiny, unable to justify the facts that (eg) the proportion of firsts had risen significantly in the last decade or so.

As usual, if you actually look at the original report from which all this comes (rather than just the press release),  the story is rather different. In this case, it is both better and worse than the newspaper reports make out.

Better?  Well, the "Students and Universities" report of the House of Commons' Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee has some pretty harsh words for the government. It criticises the idea that more university places can be made available without extra funding. It queries the effect of so much emphasis on research output (writ in stone by the RAE). And it recommends that the government takes a hard look at school education before simply bashing the universities (the standard response to any question of aspiration, social mobility etc etc ). So far so good.

But there is worse in the small print.

Keeping out the academic terrorists

I suppose we should be grateful to Mr Brown and his government for trying to keep out terrorists from our land. But the new visa regulations, which are meant to tighten our defences against potential suicide bombers, are a sledge hammer to crack a nut. They are likely to exclude more innocent academics than violent ideologues.

Surely there is a problem here. On the one hand we are told that the international distinction of the UK university system is a shining star in the national firmament. On the other, the intricate new rules (and points system that underlies them) for anyone wanting to come here from outside the EU make it more and more difficult for people actually to take academic jobs or pursue their research in the UK. It's no good having a wonderful international reputation if you cant  be a real global academic player in the real world because people cant penetrate your borders to teach or study.

Imagine that you are a Classicist from, lets say, the United States -- a US citizen. You have just been offered a university job in this country. Will you get a visa to come here to take up the job? Your first port of call is likely to be the UK Border Agency website.

They have a handy calculator to see if you are likely to get a visa, based on the points you have accrued.

So what happens to our notional young academic from the States?

What were job references like in the old days?

Anyone who has been involved in academic job interviews and selection -- especially for early career posts -- knows how important the references are. The candidates in question probably have very few publications that you can read; you need a supportive but honest assessment of strengths and weaknesses from someone who knows them.

Anyone who has recently been involved will also know how difficult it is to get a supportive but honest assessment. The current rhetoric is of unadulterated praise, sometimes (I fear) laughably dishonest. It's worse among American referees, but the Brits are fast catching up. In writing the instructions to referees for our college research fellowship competition a few years ago, I added some phrase to the effect of "an unadulterated eulogy will not help your candidate". I can't say that it had much effect among the persistent offenders.

I always vow to write to these with a few simple queries. "Could you please compare Dr Y whom you rate this year as "the most brilliant student you have ever taught" with Dr Z of whom you said the same last year. It would help the committee to know which in your view was absolutely the most brilliant". But I never quite get round to it.

Anyway, clearing out my study, I found some references for a Cambridge job, advertised and appointed well over 20 years ago.

They were both better and worse than their modern equivalent.

Getting vetted for school visits

It has just occurred to me that if Philip Pullman needs official vetting to do his school visits, then so do I. I do more than 12 school lectures and talks a year -- and this appears to bring me within the terms of the ghastly "Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups"  Act (explained in a relatively user-friendly way here). Though, as I talk at schools for free, I assume that I count as a volunteer and so will not have to pay the £64 fee. Are these best-selling authors really charging struggling under-funded state schools for their appearances -- I hope not.

But, in general, I am absolutely behind Pullman and the others (despite the slight sense that comes across in some of the reports that these writers think that the laws that apply to the rest of us don't really apply to our more creative brethren).

For a start the act is a terrible knee-jerk response to the Soham murders, riding the waves of the mass terror of paedophilia. It goes without saying that the harm of children is a dreadful thing -- but in 300 years time there will be doctoral theses being written about our obsession with it, much as today's graduates write on seventeenth-century witch hunts.

There is something dreadful about the name of the Act anyway. It seems to imply that if you are against it, you really don't care about Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups. A better title would be "Mass compulsory registration and tracking of all those working with the under 18s". Act. Because it is simply the "throw a database at it" solution to the problem -- in this case one which will include well over 20% of the UK population (minus Scotland where it doesn't apply). That would not be an insignificant step on the way to the government's desire to have us all registered, tracked and coded, in case we might commit a crime some time in the future.

Except, of course, it will presumably be as inefficient as all such databases are (and so won't actually stop the next Ian Huntley anyway -- for that, a completely different approach would be needed).

I have another, personal, grouse though.

Victorians in Cambridge

Yesterday I gave my "Pompeii for Victorians" lecture to the big Victorian conference in Cambridge: the joint meeting of the British Association for Victorian Studies and the North American Victorian Studies Association. I thought it went OK, though it was five minutes too long (55 minutes is somehow always better than 60). The truth was I had dug up huge amounts of material and had to much to say.

I came away thinking that there was a great book to be written about Victorian Pompeii, even if not necessarily by me. I started with the re-enactments of Roman life staged on the site in 1884 (in aid of the victims of the recent Ischia earthquake, though in truth the whole spectacle made such a loss that the poor victims got nothing).

There were three days of performance -- a staged chariot race, a Roman wedding (that's in the picture) and a funeral, and of course some gladiators in the amphitheatre (with 'Falernian" served from the original bars of the city in genuine fake "antique vases". The British reaction to this was a bit mixed. One of my old friends, Jane Ellen Harrison, was characteristically acerbic: "Some of us,” she wrote in the Magazine of Art, “have perhaps felt that all this, amusing and archaeologically interesting though it is, is just a trifle out of tune. We may study the dead past to our profit, but we need not call it back to life and bid it dance for us.” 

Anyway, my point was that the nineteenth-century reaction to Pompeii (like the twenty-first I suspect) was always caught between seeing it as a place of the dead -- and seeing it as a place where the past could come, literally, to life (as in the re-enactments). Earlier in the nineteenth century, there are even weirder stories of idiosyncratic British men actually choosing to "become Roman" for a week or two, living in reconstructed houses in the city.

Crime victim in the University Library

I have been spending rather more hours than I have managed for ages in the University Library. And I am as happy as a sandgirl. I am working on a paper that I am giving on Monday to a big Victorian Studies conference in Cambridge. I'm looking at how Pompeii was visited, imagined, painted and written about in the nineteenth century. It's a pool I've stepped into before, but of course I've now found so much more material than I had ever unearthed before. So much it's making writing the paper very hard.

Some of the most fun stuff has been the spin-offs from Bulwer Lytton's, The Last Days of Pompeii. I knew about the sculptures and paintings inspired by this novel (all those blind flower sellers). But I hadn't realised quite how many theatrical adaptations there were... and parodies. I've had great fun with an 1870's squib called (a century before Frankie Howerd) The Last Daze of Pompeii (in which the virtutous Ione turns out to be a wicked little flirt) and another 1870s parody, The Very Last Days of Pompeii (in which Nydia is a very nasty piece of work).

Anyway in the middle of all this I was the victim of another crime!

Graduation: no animals killed

Our students graduated on Saturday. In Cambridge graduation lasts three days, from Thursday till Saturday. They go to pick up their degrees by college, in order of the date of foundation of the college (which means that Newnham in 1871 comes at the beginning of the last day).

I never go to the ceremony itself. In fact I have never been to a graduation ceremony at all, not even my own -- for any of my degrees (I just got the certificate through the post, in absentia as we say). When I was first graduating with my BA, I just couldn't face all the rituals -- the dressing up in the fur-lined hood, the clasping the fingers of the "praelector", the Latin and the hand-clasping with the vice-chancellor (or the vc's deputy -- the top-dog understandably doesn't sit in the senate house for three days presiding over this).

I also couldn't face organising the whole show for a pair of divorced parents (they werent technically divorced, as it turned out -- my Dad had lost interest in the whole proceedings after the decree nisi and had never bothered to apply for the decree absolute, despite reminders from his solicitors. . . . but they were divorced in spirit). I told both of them a real whopper: graduation wasn't any longer what most people did, it was just for the blazer brigade.

It is now one of my biggest regrets. At the cost of a little embarrassment to MB and some deft negotiation of parental squabbling, I could have given them a really proud and memorable day. So now when any student says to me that they don't fancy it, I try my hardest to persuade them to go through with it.

And I always try to go to the party that Newnham lays on for every one after the ceremony itself.

The plain man's guide to alphabetical marking

The exam season is ending. Our Classics Part II results came out on Monday (of the six Newnham students, two got Firsts and four got  2.1s -- well done, ladies!). The final meeting for Part 1B happened yesterday, and the Part 1A and Prelims examiners meet today to agree their final grades.

The main job at these meetings is to go through all marks scored by each individual candidate and to assign a "class" to their performance: at the top are the "firsts", then the 2.1s, then the 2.2s, then, at the bottom but still passing, the thirds. (Actually in Part 1A, which is taken by most students at the end of their first year, we don't divide the second class into 2.1s and 2.2s -- it's just firsts, seconds and thirds, if you follow me.)

Each examiner gets a mark book, containing all the marks of all the candidates (known by number not by name -- this is all anonymous), ranked in order of achievement, and we go through the candidates one by one, looking carefully not only at the total number of marks they got, but also at their "profile". So for example a candidate might not have quite enough marks in numerical total - notionally 60% -  to get a 2.1; but of their six papers, 4 might be at 2.1 level with the total brought down by a couple of 2.2 marks . . . That would still get a 2.1. It all takes a long time. Yesterday we took all morning to class about 90 candidates.

To the outsider, the mark books would look like incomprehensible gibberish. Not only does each candidate have three marks for each paper -- and independent one from each of two examiners, but also an" agreed mark" assigned after they have met to discuss the different assessments and possibly revisit the paper. But in addition, each independent mark is given in two forms: in numbers and letters (a series of Greek letters from alpha to delta, with a variety of modifiers, pluses, minuses and question marks. For example, "68: b + +/ a - -" or "63: b+?+" or "51: b - - -" or (lets go up) "80: a ?+"

What's the point.