by Mary Beard
ALL IN A DON’S DAY
Also by Mary Beard
It’s a Don’s Life
Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town
The Parthenon
The Colosseum (with Keith Hopkins)
The Roman Triumph
ALL IN A DON’S DAY
Mary Beard
First published in Great Britain in 2012 by
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Copyright © Mary Beard Publications Ltd, 2012
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ISBN 978 1 84668 536 1
eISBN 978 1 84765 863 0
Introduction
My blog, ‘A Don’s Life’, has been running for six years now, since early 2006, regularly commenting on a whole range of things that matter to me … from ancient jokes to A levels, political humbug to Latin mottoes. According to the usual life-expectancy of blogs, six years puts ‘the Don’ well into late middle age (like its author, in fact). For blogging, as everyone knows, is rather like going to the gym: easy to start, and to work out enthusiastically for a few months, harder to stick at when the novelty has worn off.
Like most regular, long-term gym users, I have kept going for two main reasons: enjoyment and discipline. Enjoyment? Well, after a sceptical start, I soon found that I really relished writing these little essays, composed late at night on the kitchen table. It was fun to point out why that evening’s television programme on Roman banquets hadn’t got it quite right (p. 15) or to share a discovery I’d made in the library that day (p. 201). And it felt almost therapeutic to reflect on what was really happening day-to-day at the front line of university teaching (none of those long holidays you read about, and precious few claret-swilling dinners, I promise – try the truth about reference-writing, p. 100, or the Human Resources Compliance Unit, p. 140). I loved the immediacy of it all: you think, you write, you click on ‘publish’ and it’s out there.
And discipline? My firm rule has been two posts a week, rain or shine (with only very, very occasionally a third thrown in). The point about blogging – like the exercise routine – is that you have to set your target at something manageable, and never waver. The best advice I could give to a would-be blogger is don’t post every day in your first flush of enthusiasm; you’ll never keep it up.
And after that, the best advice would be to try and attract a community of readers, who will comment on your site thoughtfully, wittily and politely. In general, blog commenters as a species do not have a good name. You don’t have to trawl very far in the comment areas of even the most high-minded and liberal blogs, or in the ‘Have Your Say’ sections of the BBC website or serious broadsheet newspapers, to come across pages and pages of abusive, uninteresting and often deeply sexist responses. (‘This is rubbish. Who got you to write this trash? Stick to your knitting, granny’ and far worse.) What encourages otherwise perfectly ordinary and polite people to write like this on-line is a mystery to me (though I offer some suggestions on p. 245). But the ‘Don’s Life’ commenters, both the regulars and the occasional visitors, are a very different breed. They may disagree strongly with what I have to say, but they comment with tremendous style, as well as courtesy – contributing intriguingly arcane facts, quirky anecdotes, specially composed verses and multilingual jokes. The distinctive character of ‘A Don’s Life’ comes in part from this (rare) dialogue between poster and commenters.
It is for that reason that this second book of selections from the blog, covering the years 2009–2011, continues the tradition of the first selection (It’s A Don’s Life, 2009) and includes some comments as well as my posts. Both appear almost exactly as they did on-line. I have only occasionally trimmed, corrected the typos, inserted much-needed apostrophes (mine, not the commenters’), ungarbled the garbling and every now and then added a bit of crucial information that was originally delivered through the hyper-links (which are one advantage the web has over the printed page).
Blogs are, in a way, a version of autobiography, or of a diary. And I’m struck, whenever I read my past posts (not a regular habit of mine, you’ll be relieved to know), how much, in some respects, my life has changed since I started blogging in 2006. Over the past few years, I have been very lucky indeed. I’ve been handed some great opportunities and I’ve done things that twenty years ago (as an exhausted junior lecturer with two small kids and a pretty dismal publication record) I could hardly have dreamt of. No one back then – least of all me – would possibly have predicted that, well past fifty and uncompromisingly grey-haired, I would have ended up presenting television programmes on the Romans on BBC2. (You’ll find some of the inside story on these programmes on pp. 173, 178, 226.)
But the changes are only at the margins. The bottom line is that most of my time and energy goes to my day job, as a university teacher and Classicist, and as part-time Classics editor at the Times Literary Supplement (where I’ve worked for almost twenty years now and which is the generous host of my blog). At the TLS I commission reviews and then patiently wield an old-fashioned pencil to edit them (inserting all those apostrophes that the commenters complain I so often omit myself). In the university I’m occupied a good twelve hours a day giving lectures, researching in libraries and archives, supervising undergraduates, setting exams, writing articles, marking essays, advising doctoral candidates, attending seminars, visiting schools, ordering library books, responding to government ‘targets’, assessing theses, interviewing would-be students … and all the other things that come with the territory of being a professional academic. I suspect that some of this work doesn’t come over very loud and clear in the blog, and as a consequence my life appears a bit more glamorous than it really is. The reason for that is simple. It’s perfectly OK to blog about BAFTAs and filming, or about flying round the world to conferences. It’s even occasionally OK to sound off about the university’s HR department. It really isn’t fair to share with the world your day-to-day frustrations at a student’s lousy essay, at the silly things some unfortunate candidate said in an interview or for that matter at the incomprehensible last paragraph cobbled together by an inexperienced reviewer. But those things are my bread and butter.
The university that has employed me for most of my working life is the University of Cambridge (and I am a fellow of Newnham College, still – I’m glad to say – for women only). As I hope ‘A Don’s Life’ does capture, Cambridge is a wonderful and in many ways a privileged place to work, and it has some quirks and customs, both charming and irritating, that you will not find in any other university anywhere, except perhaps Oxford. For good or ill, there are only a handful of educational institutions worldwide where the wording of a Latin grace could possibly a cause of controversy between students and teachers (p. 32). But Cambridge is also a much more ordinary university than newspapers, television and movies like to suggest. It has cash shortages, cuts, early retirements, new-style management rules and jargon, risk assessments, impoverished students, compliance units and exha
usted staff – just like any other. The vast majority of us – students or teachers – don’t live the ‘Cambridge myth’; we don’t punt or drink port or wear blazers. And we haven’t come from dynasties of Oxbridge graduates (for what it’s worth, I am the first member of my family to get a university degree, Oxbridge or not).
But if you’re smart, you won’t study or teach in Cambridge for long without finding a way of coming to terms with the myth – knocking it on the head (p. 91), parodying it or, best of all, somehow find a way of turning it to your own advantage. And that’s exactly what we find the intrepid investigative journalists of the student newspaper doing in the first post in this selection, when (tongue in cheek) they decide to do a survey on how rich the Mummies and Daddies of Cambridge undergraduates really are, and which the poshest colleges might be …
How rich are Cambridge students?
29 January 2009
One of the local student newspapers – Varsity – has got another scoop. Last term it conducted an online questionnaire, which apparently revealed that 50% of Cambridge students had at some time or other in their university career ‘plagiarised’ (whatever that meant).
I wasn’t sure how much weight to put on these anonymous confessions, honestly. But now Varsity has run a new questionnaire to find out how rich the average Cambridge student is and how much their parents earn – and, for the benefit of the punters, they’ve broken this down by college and Tripos subject. It’s the lead story this week, even upstaging the article on that burning Cambridge controversy on the wine served to students at St John’s Formal Hall. (That’s irony, by the way, before you write in …)
Some of this new scoop plays to our usual prejudices. History of Art comes out top of the subject ‘rich list’ – with a claimed average weekly budget per student of £182 per week and an average parental income of £118k. Not enough to buy young Rupert a Caravaggio to work on, but still a generous cushion against poverty.
But there were other, surprising, results.
I’m not sure whether to believe the stories of students who claim to have to feed themselves by scavenging from supermarket bins or, for that matter, the stories of those who claim to drink bars dry of champagne. They are both boasts, of a different variety, I half-suspect. Of course, if they’re true, I have hugely more sympathy with the former than the latter, but (rather primly) would advise both to go and talk to their college’s financial tutor. Most colleges have funds to help students who are really short of money, and they also understand the problem of student debt – which certainly is getting worse. They no doubt have plenty of advice to dispense to the stupidly spendthrift too.
But it was funny to see the average parental income at King’s (with all its radical image) coming out well above St John’s (with all their wine at Formal Hall problems). And what about the women of Murray Edwards College – which is still ‘New Hall’ to most of us, partly because its new name sounds more like a rugby prop than a college – having Mums and/or Dads bringing in £108k and at the top of the college table? Old-fashioned Peterhouse, with all its slight hauteur, had an average family income of £54,800, putting it at the very bottom (and reassuringly at first sight for those who want to dispel Cambridge’s snobby image), rather lower than twice the median wage of a forty- to forty-nine-year-old in the UK.
It was at this point that I began to see the problem with this bit of online ‘research’. It wasn’t just that there were only 783 respondents (fewer than 40 per college). That’s not a bad rate as Cambridge student questionnaires go, actually. And it’s not that they were all lying.
Isn’t the problem that most of these students don’t have the foggiest clue what their parents take home? And isn’t it possibly the rich who are least aware of what the family income is and where it comes from? After all, they’re not always having to fill in benefit and claim forms with exactly that kind of information.
Still a nice try, Varsity!
Dixon of Dock Green on-line
25 February 2009
A few weeks ago we registered for ‘e-cops’. This is Cambridge’s attempt to keep the police in touch with the local community by sending out email news of crime in your area and what the boys in blue are doing to apprehend the offenders.
I had been rather looking forward to this. But for the first few weeks it was deeply disappointing. Was there so little crime in leafy Cambridge that all they could put in the emails were invitations to crime education events? Or were they keeping something from us?
‘Once more we will be celebrating Valentine’s Day – helping people in need of some crime prevention’, ran the e-bulletin on 28 January (urging us to come and find out about more about window locks). This was quickly followed up by a message suggesting that we might like to put an ‘In Case of Emergency’ (ICE) number on the contacts of our mobile phones.
Nanny state stuff.
But recently things have looked up. Particularly exciting was the Sergeant’s blog that arrived on 11 Feb.
Paul (for that is the Sergeant’s name) explained to his flock that he’d been a bit too busy for blogging recently, working on two ASBO applications. But he was now back on-line. There had been, he went on, an upturn in ‘dwelling burglaries’, but the good news was that two felons had been ‘recalled’ to prison. And this was followed by a tally of road traffic penalties in our area: 38 penalties for no seat belt worn; 27 penalty notices for using a mobile phone; 7 vehicle rectification defect scheme notices; 5 speeding tickets; 1 penalty notice for using a bus lane etc. etc. (It wasn’t clear what the period for this was: a week? a month? a day?) Finally came the report of ‘four “days of action” at the Fen Drayton Nature Reserve to tackle mini moto and off road vehicle nuisance’. (‘As is a Sergeant’s lot I sat on the side lines whilst Phil and Dave had their fun in the two BMXF650 off road bikes …’)
In less than two weeks, there was another blog. This time Sergeant Paul had been doing ‘a bit of hiding behind walls’ in the Histon area and (oh dear) had ‘had a productive hour’ in the village centre ‘finding four people with cannabis’. (Four people with cannabis wandering round sleepy Histon, in a single hour … ??) Then there was more good news about burglary arrests, some intelligence about possibly rogue cold-callers in Swavesey – and a mysterious ‘potentially volatile community situation within Cambridge City’, which had got the Sergeant up early in the morning (‘resolved …. very quietly’).
At first, I confess, I had rather chuckled at all this. It was all too like Dixon to be true. But then I kicked myself for my snooty lack of generosity. Because, actually, Sergeant Paul’s commitment to the job came across loud and clear. He is obviously a decent chap who (apart from those four poor cannabis users, and the unfortunate ASBO victims) is doing a great job. And, yes, if I had a burglary I’d be happy to see him knocking at my front door.
Which I guess is the point of e-cops.
Comments
Last week, our e-cops summary contained a number of hidden gems, but ‘As well as above please remember to register your electrical goods or anything with a cereal number′ was the line that had us in fits of laughter for some time …
CRIS
For us not in the loop, please explain ‘ASBO’
PL
It’s an Anti-Social Behaviour Order, which (to cut a long story short) can curtail the movement etc. of those who have ‘indulged’ in anti-social behaviour.
Opinions differ as to whether they: a) protect innocent grannies from having their gardens wrecked by young thugs; or b) provide a counter-productive badge of pride for said thugs/ pick on the relatively innocent/shift the anti-social behaviour elsewhere not eradicate it.
MARY BEARD
Transparency is the new opacity
11 March 2009
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 yo
u 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 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.
