All in a Don's Day (15 page)

Worth a trip, and a ponder on the politics – though, as the husband points out, not quite on the scale of Highgate.

Mary, I was taught that in English prose an adjective precedes the noun to which it refers. I am amused by the thought that a cemetery can be brainy. Its deceased residents certainly, but the cemetery itself … ??

SUE SKINNER

Sue Skinner – If I were in the condemned cell, my despairing hope would be that you were the planning official responsible for condemning it.

No careless error on Mary′s part but hypallage.

TOHU

Another university burial ground worth a side-visit if you are passing near is the Alter Friedhof in Bonn on the Rhine. I used to live just along the same street.

The monumental tomb of Robert and Klara Schumann is most impressive, but you will also find the last resting places of Beethoven′s mother and of his violin teacher, the graves of the
wife and son of Friedrich Schiller, and the burial place of August Wilhelm Schlegel, translator of Shakespeare, Calderón and the
Ramayana
and one of the founding fathers of linguistics. (Loads of others for those familiar with German literature and history.)

BILLY

23 September 2010

I have been doing some work in the archives of the Fitzwilliam Museum, and particularly the nineteenth-century history of the place (on which more later). But a very quick trawl produces some eye-opening surprises.

I had always imagined that the idea of holding parties in museums was an invention of (well?) the 1970s. It was, I thought, a consequence of the underfunding of museums, with an added push from a Thatcherite business ethic. Indeed, when the Greeks objected in the 1990s to the British Museum serving sandwiches in front of the Elgin Marbles, I gave them the benefit of the doubt – that the British practice of eating and drinking in front of works of art might actually be new.

I have no idea what happened in the BM in the nineteenth century. But in Cambridge, in the Fitzwilliam, the practice of museum hospitality goes back to before the Museum was fully built.

In July 1842, even before the building was finished, there was a grand royal ball in the shell of the Museum. In addition to a clutch of London royalty, who presumably came ‘free', 1,750 tickets were sold in aid of the (then) nearby Addenbrooke's Hospital – dancing went on all night, till 6.00 a.m., and the next morning the loyal hoi polloi were let in to see the detritus for 2s. 6d. It was obviously a pretty glamorous occasion (the walls were hung with bunting and other material
in red and white stripes) – but not without its dangers: the
Illustrated London News
reported that the hundreds of candles hung about the place dropped their wax on to the bare shoulders of the ladies, and made a real mess of the men's suits.

But the tradition went on. There was another big-shot gala (this time with the pictures fully installed) in 1864, and a gala lunch provided in the galleries again in 1904, when the King and Queen were in town, not to mention the regular honorary degree lunches too. But there were also rather more cerebral occasions.

By the end of the nineteenth century conferences in Cambridge (and who is one day going to write a history of ‘the conference'?) were having conversazioni (plus music and a good deal of refreshment) in the Museum. In 1899, for example, the National Union of Teachers showed up for a reception, with some nice autograph copies of music specially laid out for them to enjoy, in between the Egyptian sarcophagi and the Greek marbles in the basement. A few years earlier, in 1896, there had been a conversazione at a conference on secondary education – with an on-the spot-demonstration of Roentgen rays!

Actually the tradition continues. We are arranging a big Classics conference for next year – and guess where we are having the reception?

The Fitzwilliam.

Richard Owen organised a dinner in December 1853 inside the reconstructed iguanodon that he had commissioned for the 1851 Great Exposition in Hyde Park.

It′s not quite a museum reception, since the Crystal Palace was closed then, but it′s close.

BRIAN W. OGILVIE

14 October 2010

Britain has a good number of world-class universities, and many more than you would expect for its population and GDP. One of the things that
keeps
those universities world-class is the exchange of lectures, seminars, examiners etc. across the globe.

So, reflect on this: just recently a directive has come down to us from the ‘management' (as I have regretfully come to call the administration … only ten years ago they felt like my ‘colleagues'), explaining that in future we will only be allowed to appoint external examiners for PhDs from those who have a right to work in the UK (i.e., no Americans, Australians whatever). Apparently, so our ‘Human Resources Compliance Unit' (I am not joking) assures us, reading a PhD thesis, writing a report and giving the candidate a viva of (say) two hours counts as ‘employment'. So if you are appointed to do this, you need to prove your eligibility to work in this country, by showing your passport.

If this is correct (and I mean
if
), then this is just one little blow to the idea of the UK as a home of world-class scholarship.

In my Faculty, we normally use UK scholars to examine PhDs (we don't squander travelling expenses), but sometimes students have been researching subjects that really do require a non-EEA examiner. Tony Grafton of Princeton, for example,
may be one of the very few people in the world properly qualified to examine a specialised PhD – but he would no longer be appointable, at least on this interpretation of the law. And indeed it is lucky that the recently appointed ‘Australian' examiner, who has just taken on one of our theses, turned out to have a UK passport.

So what are our options? Well, HR seems to offer none. (So much for being a world-class university at the cutting edge of international research … or should we now say ‘European' research.) One idea in my neck of the woods is that we do it all by video link, so that the examiner doesn't have to come into the country. (So much for those face-to-face exchanges of views that make academic life worth living and top-notch.) Another is that we fly the candidate and the external examiner to the US or Australia or wherever. Or maybe we just use the Channel Islands.

This is a just tiny example of new immigration madness. But the idea that the best students in Cambridge should not be examined by the best and most appropriate scholars in the world
must
make mockery of our claim to be one of the top universities on the planet (for that is what the international community of scholars is all about). And indeed why should reading a PhD thesis count as ‘employment' anyway? Could our HR department have actually got this wrong?

The next thing they will be telling us is that when we invite people to give our prestige-endowed lectures, we will only be able to invite those with a right to work here.

This can't be what the immigration legislation intended. But, for what it is worth, any university which asks me to produce my passport before I accept the 100 quid for a minimum of 25 hours work examining a PhD thesis can BOG OFF.

Anyone remember the ′Protect & Survive′ leaflet?

Our last remaining export is ideas. Thinking. ′Intellectual property′. Now we′ve given up. We′re closing it all down. Pin the blankets over the windows, make a nice cup of tea, under the stairs with a paper bag over our heads and wait quietly to die.

MICHAEL BYWATER

It may be what the legislation intended, but more likely it merely exemplifies, what I have long suspected to be the fact, that no one in the civil service understands elementary Aristotelian logic, otherwise they would have seen the implications while the relevant bill was still in the drafting stage.

When I was at school (too long ago to contemplate) we had classes in ′Use of English′ which involved (among other things) applying elementary logic to English texts – but I guess that has all gone by the board nowadays. One wonders: is there anyone in Whitehall capable of recognising, let alone producing, a syllogism?

DAVID KIRWAN

People in Whitehall don′t know what a syllogism is? That′s terrible. I must send them one at once. Let′s see. How about this?

A work permit allows you to work in Britain.

Mary Beard isn′t a work permit.

Therefore Mary Beard doesn′t allow you to work in Britain.

MICHAEL BULLEY

May I say how hateful these regulations are? Examining students in Cambridge and London has brought me extraordinary benefits – friendships and exchanges with brilliant young scholars whom I wouldn′t otherwise have known, for a start. And I′ve done my best to help the examinees with detailed reports on what they wrote and letters of recommendation and the like afterwards. Many of my colleagues have done this as well – in fact, more often in recent years than in the past – and they too have profited and helped others. It′s very sad to see this small but vital part of academic cosmopolitanism destroyed.

TONY GRAFTON

Doesn′t it seem like we – this once rebellious generation – are becoming a bit cowed by this onslaught of administration? Having no respect for these rules and their enforcers, I think a little legerdemain may be in order.

Do you all trot down to the council to get the necessary permissions for all the repairs in your homes? Never a little black market traffic in the odd plumbing, electrical or decorating job?

It seems to me that you need to start padding your expenses and lay in a store of cash. When a check isn′t possible, an envelope with a few hundred pound notes would do quite nicely.

LEX STEVENS

The good news is that shortly after this post was published, HR decided that PhD examiners did
not
need to apply for visas
!

30 October 2010

Earlier this week I took part in a debate at the British Library – ‘Is the Physical Library a Redundant Resource for Twenty-First-Century Academics' – organised by
Times Higher Education
. To put it another way, should we all stay at home/in our studies and call up all the resources we need on our laptops and let the country save all the money that bricks and mortar and bulky things like books eat up.

Now no one could accuse The Don of being a Luddite (I have my laptop open in the breakfast table and can't imagine what life was like before JSTOR), but I don't intend to give up the physical library without a jolly good fight.

My paean of praise for the physical library included some of the familiar lines … You don't just go to the library for information, you go there to learn how to think differently, and that is about ordering, classification, serendipity (what book you find on the shelf next to the one you thought you were looking for). And you go also for the people, the other readers and the librarians. And you go for the sheer pleasure of having space and quiet to
think
, not to mention the pleasures of transgression. And on this topic I had a little nostalgic reflection on all the things we used to do in libraries … eat, drink, smoke substances legal and illegal, have sex. I was tempted to ask for a show of hands from those who had ever made love in a library bookstack, a bibliophile's Mile High club, but thought embarrassment might produce a misleadingly low score.

In case any younger readers are puzzled, smoking used to be allowed in libraries a few years ago. Again a bit like on planes, the back two tables of the Cambridge Classics Library used to be the smoking tables, and the husband recalls how the Warburg Library went on allowing smoking well after other London libraries. Banning it would have caused a riot among its elderly Eastern European readers but did – he points out – make the place a bit whiffy for everyone else. (Health and Safety gurus might like to reflect that none of these libraries burned down!)

In some ways the most interesting area of disagreement between myself and the other panellists was in terms of speed and ‘academic output'. There is little doubt that a lot of information can be more quickly retrieved electronically. Most of the other speakers treated this as an unproblematic good, and one went so far as to relate our embracing of new technology to the fact that UK academics produce more outputs per head than those of other nations.

At this point I felt very much in the opposite corner. The fact is that really good thinking is often a very
slow
process … and it is the kind of process that goes on when you are waiting the 30 minutes that it takes for the book to arrive on your table, or on the 15-minute (for me) bike ride to the library. Indeed, speed of information retrieval can actually work against good thinking. (Should we, I wondered, start a
slow thinking
movement like slow cooking … ?)

And as for congratulating ourselves on producing more than other nations … it's quality we want, not quantity. We probably should slow down a bit.

Anyway, by a nice coincidence I am now in New York for some meetings. And I am staying in The Library Hotel … a niche market hotel near New York Public Library – and on
a library theme. All the rooms are numbered according to the Dewey decimal system and are kitted out with books to match. (I'm in Management 600.003, which isn't too much of a temptation, but the husband had philosophy a couple of weeks ago.)

A Library where eating, drinking, sleeping – but not smoking, of course – are all encouraged.

I recall people smoking in even the most hallowed of libraries – including eye-wateringly strong shag tobacco – I missed out on that other indulgence between the stacks. Altho′ there were corners to fall asleep in, undetected. Libraries aren′t as quiet as they used to be. I haven′t heard a librarian hiss ′Shhh!′ in aeons.