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

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.

Professors for hire

I’m writing this in the “151 Bar”  of the Hyatt Regency hotel in Chicago, to the accompaniment of a Diet Coke (an unusual tipple for Beard) and a chicken quesedilla (an equally unusual food). Apart from two brief cab-rides to restaurants, I haven’t left this hotel for three days. The only real glimpse of the Windy City for me has been from my bedroom window (thirtieth floor but still not particularly inspiring – being face to face with a yet taller office block).

The reason for being here is the annual APA conference, the biggest classical conference in the USA (and therefore the world). These vast American jamborees are strange affairs. There are literally thousands of punters, which means that “plenary sessions” are more or less impossible (you need a vast ballroom to fit in even half those who attend). Instead there are dozens of “parallel panel sessions”, four to six mini papers of 15 or 20 minutes, grouped (rather optimistically sometimes) around a single theme.

But like with most conferences, it’s not the lectures that you go for.

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?

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)?

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.

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”.

Is "Religious Studies" sexy?

The fact that the USA counts as a single country, makes you feel that all travel within it is somehow ‘domestic’. So. last week, I blithely hopped over to the East coast – a journey which took, and felt, as long as going from London to New York (and cost about as much).

The first reason for going was to talk at a conference-cum-workshop at Yale (at the Divinity School in the picture) for Religious Studies graduate students from Yale, Harvard and Brown. This proved a bit of an eye-opener.

I might as well admit that I operate with a pretty old-fashioned stereotype of students doing Religious Studies. I know there are bound to be exceptions, but I do tend to assume that, nice and clever as they are, they’ll be pretty straight. And probably religious as well as in Religious Studies (in much the same way as it’s generally gays that do gay history, women that do women’s history, and so on).

These students were a very bright and talkative bunch, and I had a good time banging on about the Roman ritual of Triumph (once my book on the Triumph comes out in October, the subject will be off-limits…so I’m making the most of these final months). And their comments were spot on. But to all outward appearances, they ran to Religious-Studies type. That is to say, they were rather better scrubbed and tweed-jacketed than the average doctoral student.

Or so I thought until the time came, after an excellent dinner, when they went round the table and explained one by one what they worked on.

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.

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.

Small World?

In my own specialism (I haven’t a clue what happens in English or Modern Languages, let alone in Science), there are two basic types academic conference. The one squashes as many papers as it can into the time available: 15+ papers in a day, with as many participants speaking as many different languages as the organizers can muster, with hardly a moment for proper discussion – but if you’re lucky a good party, and generous quantities of alcohol at the beginning and end of proceedings. 

The other is a more gentlemanly affair. A small group of experts round a table, just a handful of papers, and hours and hours of discussion, to which everyone is expected to contribute. As a rule of thumb, you consume less alcohol but learn a lot more, and have to work harder, at this sort of occasion.

The conference at Williamstown, hosted by the Research Institute attached to the Gallery, was emphatically of the second type. There were just ten of us and we had each submitted a written paper in advance. Some of these were weighty foot-noted affairs; mine, I must confess, was rather lighter. At the conference we were given just fifteen minutes to re-introduce what we had written; I was more obedient on this time-limit than some, I can boast. Then it was just discussion for two days --  fortified by copious amounts of healthy food, fruit-juice and mineral water.

The subject was the “Art of Spoliation”. It wasn’t actually quite as relevant to modern geo-politics as that title might imply.

"Let them learn Latin"

Have university “students” turned into “consumers”, more anxious to get value for money for their fees and loans, than to expand their minds? How have traditional subjects – like Classics – fared in this last round of expansion in higher education?

The answers aren’t quite as simple as you think (“yes” and “badly”). In fact, just before I left for the conference in Italy I did an interview for an “Analysis” programme on Radio 4, which is taking a careful look at the debates and discontents around the twenty-first century university. It is being broadcast tonight, repeated on Sunday.

I am usually a bit nervous about this kind of thing. Whatever you actually say, it’s all too easy if you’re in my position to get edited into something that sounds like a cross between an Oxbridge toff and Marie-Antoinette: “Let them learn Latin”.

But I tend do such interviews anyway, on the not wholly worthy grounds that I’d rather it was me having my say than someone else. And on this occasion the programme was being put together by Ruth Scurr (biographer of Robespierre and historian in Cambridge) who wasn’t likely to play fast and loose with my no doubt elitist stumblings.

One of the questions was along the lines of “Why should the state pay for university courses in Latin and Greek”.

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.

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.

Where are the academic super-stars?

The Vice-Chancellor of Manchester University is reported to be recruiting Nobel Prizewinners to join his team of academics. In fact he has already signed up the economist Joseph Stiglitz, from the USA, to work part-time. He is only the first of a series of promised “iconic appointments”. It is all part and parcel of nudging Manchester up the super-league of world-wide academic institutions.

I have no idea on what terms Stiglitz has been attracted to Manchester. But the usual deal in the international race for university super-stars is to offer them a lot of money, no ”coal-face” administrative responsibilities and a teaching load that is made up of a few chosen seminars with clever graduates – none of the basic undergraduate teaching or the standard stint on the catering committee that the rest of us undertake.

Vice-Chancellors tend to love this kind of head-hunting (for Manchester University read Manchester United?). It adds lustre to their University, and kudos to their own cv. Stiglitz is, I guess, the Beckham of Economics.  But the truth is that the brightest lustre ought to go  to  those institutions that actually produce the Nobel Prize winners, not those that just buy them in.

In the news in Pompeii

I am still reeling from the reaction to my “Keeping Sex out of Scholarship” blog. More than a year ago, I reviewed a book in the TLS (a “Dictionary of British Classicists”), in which I pointed out how the reliable stories of what is euphemistically known as the “wandering hand”  of Eduard Fraenkel, a professor Latin at Oxford had been ignored. I wrote that I had an ambivalent reaction to what Fraenkel was supposed  to have done: on the one hand sisterly outrage at the abuse of male power; on the other, a wistful nostalgia (shared, I can assure you, by many of my age) for an earlier era of pedagogy, an age perhaps of greater innocence. What was the reaction?  I received just a handful of letters from outraged pupils of Fraenkel, denouncing me for sullying the memory of their teacher.
A couple of weeks ago, I return to the issue briefly in a blog. This gets suddenly picked up by the media, from the Mail to the BBC. This time I am denounced for exactly the opposite crime. Now I am supposed to be the out of touch Cambridge don who “hankers after” an age when professor slept with students. Not what I said, and not true.

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.

What are academics for?

Because we have very few fixed hours of work, university teachers are often assumed to have loads of free time. People see us taking retail therapy on a Tuesday morning or having a long lunch, and they tend to forget that all our weekend and most of the night was spent in the library. Not great for family life, as most partners of academics complain.

This makes us easy prey to all kinds of demands from those who think that we can easily give some of that “free time” to them. There are scores of  “independent television makers” who will ring you up and try to get you to plan their new programme on gladiators, sex in the ancient world,  the fall of the Roman empire, or whatever, over the phone. Now that e-mail is the standard medium of communication, we’ve got out of practice at the old art of putting the receiver down – which is, of course, why they ring.

Then there are the eager sixth-formers, who think that an enthusiastic letter or e-mail will prompt you to give them more help with their A level course work than you should by rights offer. As I can testify, there are more kids in this country working on “Roman Women” than you could possibly believe.

It is presumably in response to this kind of pressure that a senior Oxford academic has published on the web his, punningly titled, “Rules of Engagement”, for anyone wanting to use his services.

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.