All in a Don's Day (2 page)

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
!

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.

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

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 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 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. (Don't worry my grads – it really is
fictional
and not about you.)

Suppose that I am supervising a relatively weak PhD student … let's call him Jim. Jim is reaching the end of his fourth year of research and is struggling to finish his thesis, is on the verge of depression and of giving up. (The end of a PhD is a tense time for even the most robust individuals.) Frankly I am not confident that Jim will make it, but I meet him every week, with a pretty upbeat message: what he's written so far is more or less fine, and all he needs to do is get those last 20,000 words done. This isn't entirely true, but if at this point I tell him that his first two chapters aren't really up to scratch and will need a lot more work, he
will
simply give up … and I reckon that the best chance of successful completion is to get some kind of draft finished. Then we can work on
improvements. ‘Do you really think it's OK?' asks Jim. ‘Yes' I say with some caveats … though Jim doesn't spot the caveats. And I don't really intend him to.

Then the termly report has to be filled in on-line. The truth I ought to be conveying is that we have a potential disaster on our hands here, but if Jim reads that, he'll simply give up or go right over the edge. It'll be a self-fulfilling prophecy, and he'll accuse me of gross hypocrisy to boot. So I tailor something to be not entirely untrue, but with roughly the same upbeat message that I'm transmitting weekly and not much anxiety showing. (‘Although there has been some slippage in his timetable, Jim is now making great strides towards completion …')

Let's suppose I don't win with Jim, and he does give up – or finishes but doesn't pass. My colleagues try to find out what went wrong and summon up all the reports. There's not a single one which predicts the disaster that came. The disaster was completely unpredictable, they conclude.

No it wasn't, I think. This isn't transparency, it's opacity in a new guise. Can't we accept that a bit of secrecy might be a price worth paying for honesty?

Yeah, Jim's a worry … but what is the actual difficulty here? Wasn't it better he should give up, which Mary put all that effort into coaxing him not to do?

PAUL

Wouldn't it be possible to try and be frank with this fictional Jim well before it comes to potential disaster? If he doesn't think you've noticed and you continue giving him positive feedback, he won't ask for help he knows he needs or for the push he knows he should get (let's face it, sometimes you know you need a good solid push from your supervisor).

ZAREEN

15 March 2009

I should have known that giving a big lecture about the late Roman joke book (called the
The Laughter Lover
or, in Greek,
Philogelos
) in Comic Relief week would attract more interest in this particular byway of the Classics than usual. But when – months ago – I fixed the date to go to Newcastle for the gig, I hadn't realised that it
was
Comic Relief.

In fact, I didn't actually realise the coincidence till someone pointed it out just before the lecture started. ‘Funny you're lecturing on Roman jokes when it's Red Nose Day tomorrow,' they said.

Anyway, thanks to the efficient press release put out by Newcastle University, there had already been a number of media inquiries to my mobile phone before I reached the banks of the Tyne. In this case, they were quite hard to deal with. The problem was that most of the journalists had got the impression that I had actually discovered – or dug up, perhaps – a new and entirely unknown book of Roman jokes.

The
Daily Mail
asked if they could have a picture of it and didn't seem quite to think that a picture of Roger Dawe's published edition in the Teubner text series (which is all I could offer) was actually what they were looking for.

It was hard to get the point across that the text had been known for centuries (Dr Johnson had been keen on it, and Jim Bowen had recently performed parts of it), but that I was looking at it harder than anyone had done for ages and in
a new way. That's what being ‘new' is, for the most part, in Classics.

Still, I soon found that having a little repertoire of ancient jokes that I could quote, tailored to the paper or show in question, did the trick. I even found some that pleased the man from
The Sun

I think the biggest hit with
The Sun
was this one.

‘A man says to his sex-crazed wife, ‘What shall we do tonight – have dinner or have sex?' ‘Whichever you like,' she replied, ‘but there's no bread.'

Oddly the interest didn't fade once Red Nose Day had passed. The
Today
programme wanted a joke or two for the programme on Saturday morning. This was a bit of a problem, as I was due at my Speed Awareness Training in Milton Keynes by 9.30 (and the husband had rightly said that I was to be out of the house by 7.30). In the end, I told the gags over the phone at 7.25, before zooming (no, not zooming) off in the car.

But not before the World Service had rung to ask for an interview for
Newshour
. The only time for this was in the car park at the Safety Training Centre,
if
I got there in good time.

I did, and spent the last few minutes before 9.30 prerecording an interview via my mobile, to be used later in the day. Plaudits where they are due. The World Service outstripped even the
Today
programme in intelligence. There was no need to explain the nature of the ‘discovery', and we spent five minutes talking about the interesting way that these Roman jokes played on questions of disputed identity (which I'm particularly interested in).

And I gave them my favourite joke.

‘Three men – a
scholasticos
(an egghead), a barber and a bald man – were going on a long journey and had to camp out at night. They decided to take it in shifts to watch over
the luggage. The barber took the first shift, but got bored. So to pass the time, he shaved the head of the
scholasticos
– then woke him up to take his turn. The
scholasticos
got up, rubbed his head and found that he had no hair. ‘What an idiot that barber is,' he said, ‘he's woken up baldy instead of me.'