A Don’s Life

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.

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.

Why "good practice" can ruin good practice

When I was a graduate student, things were different. I didn't have to fill in many forms -- in fact, I think I just applied for a British Academy grant (as it then was) to work on a PhD in nothing more than "Roman history". I wasn't given a code of practice. If I wanted to learn something (like a new language), I went off and did it; I didn't demand a specially targeted Faculty class in it (Turkish for Roman historians, or whatever).

My supervisor didn't bother me too much (though he did give me a few big kicks towards the end). Whenever  I wanted to see him I sent him a note (pre-email) and he would have me round, and I would stay for as long as it took to go over my work or my problems. If I wanted to talk to one of the other senior Faculty members, I would catch them after a seminar or in the library, and we would have coffee or (more often) a drink.

I am sure that this laid back, unregulated system let some students down (we all heard stories/urban myths about PhD students who had not seen their supervisors in 12 months). But it worked wonderfully for me and for many of my friends -- and probably much better than what we now offer to our graduates.

Now, if students want funding, they have to explain what they will discover before they start (the best applications are, as most of us suspect, written by the supervisor). When they arrive on their course, they are given codes of practice up to their ears -- they know how often they should meet their supervisors, they have regular reviews with other members of the Faculty, they have a secondary supervisor (in case their first one isn't good enough), and they even have log books in which they can register their contact with their supervisor (in which I fear a jolly good, intellectually productive,  discussion in the pub doesn't quite count -- how wrong is that?).

All these initiatives were, I am sure, very well intentioned. They were intended to make sure that PhD students didn't go for 12 months without seeing their supervisors, or didn't take seven years to finish their theses, or, worse still, didn't fail at the end of the process. But I do wonder if the baby hasn't been thrown out with the bath water. To put it another way, despite (or because of) our good intentions, I suspect that most graduate students now have a worse "learning experience" than we did -- at a time before we knew what a "learning experience" was.

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 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?

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.

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.

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?