A Don’s Life

Sex with students? Is Terence Kealey as misunderstood as Juvenal?

A few weeks ago I had an email from a friend who works on Times Higher Education (THE) asking if I would contribute 500 words to their forthcoming feature on "The Seven Deadly Sins of the Academy".

I was tempted, but as my favourite sins (notably sartorial inelegance and procrastination) had already been taken, I gave it a miss. And when the article actually appeared last week, I hardly had time to look at it (except to notice a cheap pot shot at the complacency of nineteenth-century Classics by the multi-talented Simon Blackburn -- who should, in this case, have known better).

I hadn't realised that there was a storm about Terence Kealey's piece on Lust, till I was in Holland (doing some lectures and book promotion, I confess) and got an email from a man on the Evening Standard, asking me if I would like to comment on it -- largely because I had past 'form' on the issue of sex between students and university teachers. So I took a look at it.

"Clark Kerr" it began, "the president of the University of California from 1958-1967, used to describe his job as providing sex for the students, car parking for the Faculty and football for the alumni. But what happens when the natural order is disrupted by faculty members who, on parking their cars, head for the students' bedroom.   . . . . Why do universities pullulate with transgressive intercourse? . . . The fault lies with the females." You can read the rest here.

It was instantly clear to me that this was SATIRE. So I replied in these terms:

"I have looked at the Kealey piece . . . and thought it wicked satire, but certainly SATIRE (which is of course always meant to be offensive, thought provoking, and often intended to rebound on the very views it satirises . . . that's the point . . .try Juvenal, if you want an ancient precedent."

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.

How do examiners mark exams?

I wouldn't want to claim that exams are as bad for the markers as they are for the sitters. But the Cambridge Tripos is still a big investment of time and hard work for the dons. It's not just that you have to read each paper carefully (and I have spent more or less the whole of the last week on this, more than 12 hours a day). You have also to decide what principle of marking to adopt.

Put simply, if you are dealing with standard "essay" papers, you can either go question by question (that is mark all the answers to question one, then all the answers to question two and so on) -- or you can go candidate by candidate (that is, mark all the answers from candidate a, then move on to candidate b and so on).

The advantage of the former is that you can compare the answers more directly and see more easily which candidates have got new or more interesting material.

About 20 years ago I was marking a set of ancient history scripts in which the first candidate I marked referred to an anecdote about the fruit trees of the Athenian fifth-century politician, Cimon. I was impressed. But when I discovered that at least 20 of the first 30 candidates had the same anecdote, I realised that it must have been banged on about in lectures.

The advantage of the candidate by candidate approach is that you can see the profile of an individual student's answer much more easily.

Over the years, I've developed a (time-consuming) compromise between the two. A rod for my own back, but fair to the students I think.

Great lecturing disasters

Students (and ex-students) dream about exam disasters. I still occasionally wake up with the horror that I've just arrived in an exam room to find that it's the wrong paper (I've revised for Latin Literature, but it's Greek philosophy on the table).

The lecturers' nightmare is about something going terribly wrong when they are trying to perform in front of a hundred or so restless students. Most of these nightmares can come true.

A decade or so ago, I really did turn up to give a big-gish lecture in my Faculty with my sheaf of notes. I should have checked them carefully before, but my kids were playing up or something. Everything went fine until I got to page five of the notes, then --  when I tried to turn over -- there just weren't any more. Maybe it would have been fine if I had been expecting to improvise, but I wasn't. I cant quite remember how I managed (or where those other pages had gone; I never found them).

Then there's the being drunk problem.

Travel expenses: are academics on the fiddle?

A few weeks ago I was puzzled why my $250 or so travelling expenses had not arrived from a "leading American University" for lecture I had done in November. (It was, by the way, UCLA -- but let me say that no blame lies with any of the Classics department staff for the little story I shall recount).

I had submitted the e-ticket, and full confirmation that I had travelled (besides I had, after all. delivered the lecture, so I had got to LA from San Francisco somehow). There was a problem, they explained. They didn't have full confirmation to show that I myself had bought the ticket on which I travelled, on my very own credit card. They could not reimburse me until they confirmed that I had paid for the ticket.I had two instant reactions to this. First, why the hell should I give a full credit card bill of mine to the accounts department at UCLA (I mean, I've heard about what happens when they go astray, and about identity theft and so on). Second, why was it any of their business if (say) my husband had paid on his credit card (suppose, not too unlikely, that mine had maxed out)? Would they not have paid then?

Of course, though, I needed the money and dutifully faxed them the credit card bill.

The point is, I reflected later, that these systems of reimbursement (my airfares or MPs expenses, for that matter) only work on a system of trust. Once you are tracking down each individual receipt, the system is in melt down.

Until recently my own Faculty's travel money worked on just such a system of trust. Each member of the Faculty had a travel/research fund limit each year, and you submitted a claim for expenses up to that amount. You could submit receipts, and that was sometimes easier, but you didn't have to. Each claim was looked at by two senior members of the Faculty, and if it looked odd they would 'give you a call' (you didn't want that, I can assure you). Otherwise, you were free to spend up to your limit, as you chose, on your research travel expenses.

Now they have said that the 'auditors' require receipts, and sooner or later we will be in the UCLA position.

So were we on the fiddle?

Transparency is the new opacity

I have spent the evening writing my 'supervision reports' -- termly assessments for the students I'm teaching for essay work, either in small groups or 'one to one'. There's a strong incentive to get them done on time, because you don't get paid until you've submitted them. (OK, I know that at most other universities people don't get paid extra for this kind of work . . . In defence I'd say that teachers at Oxford and Cambridge have traditionally had more 'contact hours' of this sort than those at other universities.)

In the old days you used to do these on little sheaves of carbon paper, which made several copies of each of your reports (one for you, one for the director of studies, one for the tutor etc). You sent these off in the mail and the director of studies would mediate the contents to the students. It was a good way of not only reporting on the student's progress, as well as sharing concerns. "She never talks when she is in a group with Jenny." "Hasn't she got terribly thin....?" You relied on the discretion of the director of studies not to read that kind of thing out to the student. Occasionally some idiots did. But by and large the system, and the judgement calls, worked pretty well. The student got to know how they were doing, and you could pass on other useful, frank -- even if unrepeatable -- comments without fearing that it would be fed direct to the student concerned.

Now it's all computerised. This has done away with the infuriating mountain of paper. It also gives the students direct access to what you have written. No more confidential warnings. It's all bland 'record of achievement' kind of stuff ("Jenny has made good progress this term. She seems to be mastering making more complex arguments -- this was very clear in her essay on the reforms of Tiberius Gracchus" . . .and so on).

Ok, this all comes up to new standards of transparency. There are no secret comments hidden from the student. That must be good, mustn't it?

Well yes, except that there's less honesty in the record. All those frank, confidential comments are still made, but 'underground' as it were and not in the reports. If you have anxieties about, for example, a student's weight loss, or binge-drinking, the temptation is to convey it in a quiet word in the pub, or on the phone. So it never gets written down at all.

This is particularly awkward with graduate students, who get the same kind of open reports.

Imagine this fictional scenario. (Dont worry my grads -- it really is fictional and not about you).