All in a Don's Day (5 page)

The debate got more complicated than this. Did the undergraduates want a
secular
grace or a
multi-faith
grace? If secular, then whom were they
thanking
in the new version? If it was simply a multi-faith version, then couldn't we just remove the ‘Jesum Christum' bit. (Presumably Jews and Muslims and almost every faith could tolerate a ‘deum omnipotentem'.)

After the meeting, we wondered if we shouldn't actually be thanking the cooks (or, to put it more crudely, those arguably exploited by us to bring us our nice food). But how would that go into Latin? ‘Servi oppressi', suggested the Keeper of Antiquities at the Fitzwilliam (roughly translated as ‘oppressed slaves'). Hardly a tactful way of thanking the staff, piped up the Bursar.

We then began to wonder if we needed formally to approve any form of grace at all. Maybe anyone who said grace should be able to say whatever form of grace they wanted. A
carte blanche
there, I thought, and suddenly warmed to a task I had previously shunned. And then there was the issue of the history of the existing grace. How long had it been said, and who had devised it? No one knew. (Some later research revealed that it had actually been framed by Jocelyn Toynbee, one of Newnham's most illustrious fellows ever – and a Catholic.)

Anyway, after this meeting, we went as usual to dinner. What grace would the Principal say?

She cleverly avoided the issue. ‘Please be seated', she invited us.

′No one knew. Do you mean to tell me that Newnham dons don′t all keep a well-thumbed copy of
The College Graces of Oxford and Cambridge
, by Reginald Adams, by their bedsides? Shocking.

BEN WHITWORTH

′Everyday story of academic folk′: no. ′Everyday story about Cambridge′: perhaps …

RICHARD

Your students
understood
the grace?! Are you sure they′re not winding you up? All credit to your teaching, I′m sure, but at my college it was a point of pride for the academic in question to reel it off as quickly and pompously as possible. We are very fond of the college ducks whom we enticed off Emmanuel, and as our grace starts ′quidquid nobis appositum est′, it′s called the ′quack quack grace′.

LUCY

It would make more sense to turn ′gratias agimus′ into a conditional: ′we would be grateful for food …′ This would then involve entering into a new discourse with the Supreme Being.

ANTHONY ALCOCK

The Newnham ′Pro cibo′ proposal strikes me as close in general
sentiment to the Selkirk Grace:
Some hae meat and canna eat,/ And some wad eat that want
it;/ But we hae meat, and we can eat,/ Sae let the Lord be
thankit.

RICHARD BARON

How about: ′To what we are about to consume we are perfectly entitled′? An honest-to-goodness, graceless grace, that avoids all the inter-faith bother. Would it add any relish to members′ eating, though?

NEIL JONES

15 May 2009

It was perhaps (as has been pointed out to me) a little beyond propriety to blog about Newnham's internal discussions on its college grace. But I just couldn't resist. (‘It is easier for a wise man to stifle a flame within his burning mouth than to keep
bona dicta
to himself', as the Roman poet Ennius said.) Besides, I thought college came rather well out of it, over all – students taking multiculturalism, multi-faith and the traditions of their institutions seriously, dons taking students' comments and suggestions seriously, the discussion going at the problem from every angle. Amusing from the outside it might have been, but it was feisty stuff – showcasing argumentative young women at a flourishing single-sex institution, not a load of Laura Ashley-clad wimps.

I feared the worst when the
Cambridge Evening News
rang up to get some more information, but was assured (!) that the story would be carefully and accurately handled, when it appeared in the Thursday edition. Well, the story itself was. But the headline (on the front page) ran ‘GRACE BANNED' (which it certainly hadn't been).

It was only a matter of time before it was picked up by the
Mail, Express, Telegraph
, Jeremy Vine etc. etc.

How naive could I have been?

There was something in this story for every journalistic prejudice. The
Mail
managed to combine a hit at ungrateful students (‘Students lucky enough to have won a place at Cambridge have plenty to be thankful for'), with a side-swipe
at their anti-Christian sentiments (the Christian content of the traditional grace had ‘proved too much for them'). This was followed by my objections to the Latin and some sensible words from the Senior Tutor. (Barely a mention of the non-denominational traditions of the college … which was a big part of the students' point.) The comments on the article turned out to be a very mixed bag, from those cheering the abolition of the fetters of religion (yes, in the
Daily Mail
) to those lamenting the decline of Christian Britain (with a good bit of student-bashing mixed in).

The
Express
managed a cruder version of the above – ‘Grace is ditched before dinner …' (no it's not) – while the
Telegraph
and the
Times's
Ruth Gledhill were predictably more measured, and researched. Ruth had even got Philip Howard to comment on the Latin (‘I quite like its rhetorical triptych form. Not sure that Cicero would have liked those ‘Inters') – and on the college (‘Newnham is a college for high-minded ladies, and I dare say they want to think about peace and world poverty as well as pudding before sitting down' – sounds a bit Laura Ashley to me.)

All this has, of course, taken up a lot of time of the college officers, and as you can imagine, I am not exactly flavour of the month round here (though actually the publicity has been pretty good, by and large, and they had very nice pictures of the college).

I can′t help feeling sorry for those members of Newnham reading who happen to like wearing Laura Ashley … I understand the cliché you are working against, but you might choose not to go
along with it, and rather acknowledge that young women who like floral dresses might also be serious intellectual beings with their own independent-minded take on the world.

RICHARD

Going to Oxford from Catholic Liverpool all those years ago, as I did, I was quite surprised to hear Latin being used by Protestants to thank the Omnipotent One for food on the table. We were told at school by the Jays not to read the Thirty-Nine Articles under any circumstances, so of course we did at the earliest opportunity. I was quite struck by the handsomeness of the English. I wonder why the ′clever men at Oxford′ didn′t produce a grace in English, which is an infinitely more beautiful language than Latin.

ANTHONY ALCOCK

Hold on, is it actually wrong to be thankful? I can see it being wrong to feel entitled – but thankful? ′True′ thankfulness would produce generosity … I suppose the other option is just not to eat, etc. A possibility the morally ravaged have indeed explored, to their undying ethical credit.

Q

Being definitely not a Christian, I still took pleasure years ago from having to recite the college grace, that being the duty of scholars by rotation, a week at a time. Long Latin periods still resonate in my inner ear. And driving to work of a morning, I pass the west front of Westminster Abbey, where an English translation of much the same text is incised in stone letters about 6 inches high. These are experiences that you cannot buy, and one somehow feels that the young are misguided in pushing them away!

JEREMY STONE

12 June 2009

I have a new exam nightmare. For the last 35 years I've woken up every few weeks with the same one: I've just gone into the exam room and it's the wrong paper on the desk, or I've revised for the wrong paper, or the whole thing is written in some language I don't understand.

Anyway, I now have a new real-life nightmare. I don't get to the exam room to start the exam.

The Cambridge system is that one examiner from every ‘board' turns up at every room in which one of their papers is to be sat – in case a student has a question, or has spotted a mistake, or whatever. Anyway I was down to turn up at the Corn Exchange on Monday morning, nine o'clock, to be there for the first thirty minutes of the Part IB Ancient History paper.

The truth is that I completely forgot.

It wasn't that I was doing something fun. I was in fact at home emailing my fellow examiner about how we were to divide up, and swap, the scripts between us. I just completely forgot I should be there in the Corn Exchange, all dressed up in my gown.

So at 9.20 a.m. (20 minutes after I should have been there) I had a call on my mobile from a member of the exam room staff, asking where I was. Actually I didn't quite get to the mobile in time, but soon enough, another call came via the Faculty. There wasn't a major problem, they explained. One student had had a question about the paper, but one which one
of my heroic colleagues (who was there to supervise another paper) had been able to answer. But where was I, they wanted to know.

Answer: in my dressing gown at the kitchen table. After the call, I instantly got dressed and rushed off to the exam room (borrowing the husband's academic gown). When I got there, five minutes past the magic hour of 9.30, the chief invigilator was very nice to me (just like she is, I guess, to students who crack up or try to walk out).

I talked to the student who had had the question, then I chatted to the invigilator about the different behaviour of different students in different subjects. (Apparently students in some subjects will take a loo/fag break between every question they answer …)

Then I got on my bike to go back to the office to wait for the scripts to be delivered (70 overall), and I've been marking ever since.

I live to fight another day, I think.

15 June 2009

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 1, then all the answers to question 2 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.

First of all I go through the papers, question by question. Then I go back to take a second look, candidate by candidate. I read each script quickly again, this time thinking of the overall performance of the individual student.

It
is
very time-consuming, but at least I can look the students in the eye. And that seems to me the basic principle of old-fashioned examining. There are all kinds of brutalities about it, but if you can face the candidate and feel OK about explaining why they got what they did – that's good enough for me.

Anyway what was I marking this year? Technically, I think I am not supposed to say. We are a communal
board
of examiners and take communal responsibility. But it wouldn't take long to guess that I have been marking Ancient History in Part IB (taken by most of our students at the end of their second year) – and indeed I have confessed so already.

These were the questions: two sections, three questions to be answered in three hours, one from each section. (I should say that these relate to the pre-defined syllabus of ‘Paper 7' … this wasn't just a random set of questions.)

Section A

1. Was Demosthenes right to say that King Philip of Macedon was a threat to Greece?

2. ‘The individual was the only thing that mattered.' Is this true of Greek politics and society in the fourth century
BC
?

3. Was the fourth-century Athenian Confederacy simply an imitation of the Athenian Empire in the fifth century?

4. Imagine you are a Roman senator in the reign of Hadrian. What would you see as the personal advantages and disadvantages of taking the governorship of the province of Asia?

5. ‘Greek culture was more or less unaffected by Roman rule in the East.' Is this true?

6. How coercive was Roman rule in the Eastern provinces?

7. ‘Religion at Rome was, in essence, a branch of politics – there was no such thing as private religious devotion as we know it.' Argue against this proposition.

8. Why did some Rome emperors punish Christians?

9. ‘Goodness gracious me, I think I'm turning into a god' (Vespasian, on his death-bed). Can you explain why Romans took the deification of their emperors seriously?

Section B

10. Is all history writing about the present as much as about the past? (Answer with reference to at least two Greek or Roman historians.)