A Don’s Life

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.

How to lose an election -- the Roman (or Nicholas Winterton) way

Some time in the second century BC, a member of the aristocratic Scipio family lost an election. Standing for the office of aedile, he had been eagerly canvassing the people -- and happened to shake the hands of a peasant. Now the peasant's hands were horny, from all his tough agricultural labour and Scipio -- being an effete toff -- was not used to the feel. "Wot," he said (as a joke?), "do you walk on these?"

Now Rome might not have been a radical democracy, but the Roman people didn't put up with toffs insulting the honest labouring poor and they took their revenge. Scipio lost the election. That, at least is the story handed down by the early imperial writer Valerius Maximus in a section of his Memorable Deeds and Sayings devoted to people who lost elections (The Latin text is here: Book 7, 5, 2; and the picture above is a denarius of 63 BC showing Roman voting in action). 

It's not the kind of revenge that the British electorate will get to take on Nicholas Winterton for his aspersions on those of us who usually travel in Standard Class on the trains. He is standing down from parliament anyway. 

(Actually, in fairness to Winterton, at many hours of the day it is totally impossible to work in Standard Class between Cambridge and London -- you would be lucky to get a seat, opening a lap-top would be impossible. Your blogger has occasionally been known to shell out for First Class, when she has been desperate to get something done.)

All in all, it's hard not to feel a bit envious of Roman face to face politics -- when compared with what we shall get in May or whenever.

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:

University cuts, redundancies - and bye-bye palaeography at King's College London

Last week we had 'Two Brains' Willetts come to talk to us at Newnham. He was clearly a smart guy, but between the lines the prospects for universities looked gloomy. "Autonomy" (one of Willetts's catch words) was pretty clearly a euphemism for "find your own money -- no more from the government", not even the next one.

It would be nice to imagine that university cuts means just  larger class sizes. In fact it means redundancies and the end of crucial, but minority, subjects. There has already been a round of compulsory redundancies at Sussex.

Now it is the turn of King's College London - which is planning (very confidentially, so far) to lose up to 22 posts in Arts and Humanities by the end of the academic year. This means that at least one subject (which ought to be a protected species) will disappear.

Mary Beard the physicist -- on Desert Island Discs

As I hinted (buried in a link) in my last post, I have just recorded a Desert Island Discs show, which will be broadcast next Sunday.  It was, unsurprisingly, great fun choosing the records....I'd done it a hundred times in my head over the years, but this was for real. (You'll have to wait and see what got into my top eight . . .)

The funny thing was that actually recording it was wonderfully engaging (like talking about yourself tends to be, lets admit it), but also totally exhausting and in the end a bit of a blur. In that respect, it was a bit like ding your PhD viva: you have occasional flashbacks to one or two questions and moments, but overall you cant actually remember what you said. And as the days go by the possibility that you might have said something really stupid starts to loom large. The difference between Desert Island Discs and a PhD viva is of course that a PhD viva isn't actually broadcast to the nation.

On the other hand, I have been feeling a bit of quiet self satisfaction of the "wouldn't my Mum and Dad be proud" variety...until I was quite properly taken down a peg or two.

Quote Unquote

I guess that I am a sucker for exams of all sorts. So when I got an email a couple of months ago, asking if I would go on the Radio 4 quiz show,'Quote Unquote', I said yes. That's the show that quizzes about famous and not so famous quotations, who said what about whom.

Well it's not quite true that I said yes straightaway. My first reaction was to think that I could only lose by showing up my ignorance. The nice producer said that I didn't have to worry, as some of the questions would come from my specialist area. Even worse, I thought. If I am revealed as ignorant about quotes from the backwaters of James Joyce -- well so what? If I don't know my Virgil, then I look dead stupid.

But anyway I said yes.

Social mobility -- down and up? Like Roman slaves?

Listening to Gordon Brown waxing lyrical in another pre-election address, this time about social mobility, you wonder if he (or his think tank) have quite thought this one through.

No-one could possible object to the slogans: "opportunity and reward cannot be hoarded at the top and it is not enough to protect people at the bottom"; "the glass ceiling is not merely to be raised but broken"; plus a promise of the "biggest wave of social mobility since the second world war". Who, apart from the loony right, would ever get up and argue that the poor should stay poor no matter what their talents were, or that the glass ceiling should stay firmly intact....or that we should energetically push BACK such elements of social mobility as have been achieved since World War II?

But no political argument  to which it would be impossible 'in polite society' to object is worth the paper it is printed on or the airwaves on which it is disseminated. It is, in other words, only a slogan, not an argument.

In this case the real questions are twofold. First: HOW are we going to deliver on the promise of social mobility? The usual answer of 'blame Oxbridge for our ills and interfere with the well thought out system of university admissions in the <false> name of fairness' wont do.

The second is even more important, and usually neglected: namely, how are we going to manage the downward social mobility of some that must inevitably be the consequence of upward social mobility for others -- unless (on our current system) we imagine a period of unparalleled economic growth combined with the import of an underclass (with no upwardly mobile prospects) to do the shitty jobs that are left unfilled. All social progress has losers as well as winners. It is often, and probably correctly said, that the increase in numbers of women students at Cambridge in the 1980s (which, needless to say, I wholly support) came at the expense of working class boys (which I deplore).

The answer in the general social mobility case must be that government needs (or better WE need) to work towards a system in which success and social hierarchy are differently configured, and in which the thrusting upwardly mobile are not forced simply to trample on others on their way to the top, or wave them goodbye from above (sending the odd food parcel), or look happily on as others tumble down past them. Can we imagine a society in which if I leave my job as garbage collector, I am not simply forcing someone else into the undesirable place I have left? Doesn't this mean thinking again about what we value and what brings status and rewards? And how pay is distributed? (Is it awfully old fashioned Socialism to suggest that an interesting job is in part its own reward?)

You might think that ancient Rome was a paradise of Brown-style upward social mobility.

Why does 'election 2010' remind me of AD 54?

When Nero came to the Roman throne in 54 (thanks, scurrilous rumour had it, to his mother administering those poisoned mushrooms to his stepfather, emperor Claudius), his first job was to give a eulogy of his predecessor.

It was an eloquent address, according to Tacitus (Annals XIII, 3), even if a bit over the top on the old man's foresight and wisdom. The real trouble was that Nero hadn't actually written it; it had been run up for him by his old tutor Seneca. Some senators tutted: Nero, they observed, was the first emperor to "have to borrow someone else's eloquence".

The next stop was the senate, where Nero made another well targeted oration, full of vacuous but heart warming slogans, aimed to please to assembled Roman political aristocracy.He brought to the job, he assured them, no grudges . . . . there would be no bribery and corruption in his administration, he would keep his own household quite separate from the affairs of state, the senate would exercise its old prerogatives.

"Nor was the pledge dishonoured" remarks Tacitus archly (Annals XIII, 5), and goes on to list a few things done on the senate's initiative. But within a few lines he has given the game away. The senate starting meeting in the palace, so that Nero's mother Agrippina could listen to proceedings from behind a curtain. So much for the separation of household and affairs of state. And as if to rub the point home, Tacitus uses the same Latin word, discreta/m for the separation of public and private business, and the separation of Agrippina behind her curtain.

OK -- so hardly an election, but what is the similarity between then and now?

Borrowed eloquence, for a start.