It's a Don's Life Page 2
What is most dispiriting for us old liberals is more ideological. It’s the way the students have come to take for granted all the things we fought against and lost. They can’t imagine what life would be like with a nationalised railway or free eye-tests; and they can’t think what a second post would actually be for.
But even more alarming is that most of them have entirely bought into the idea of a surveillance culture. Show them a gloomy bike shed, a leafy path or a picturesque bend in the river, and there is nothing that your average Cambridge undergraduate would like to do more than install a CCTV camera in it.
They say it makes them feel safer. And I suppose that you can’t entirely blame them for not bucking the general trend. Ever since that macabre CCTV image of a pair of kids walking off with a toddler set the police on to the killers of Jamie Bulger, CCTV has had a peculiarly unchallengeable status among the British public as a crime detection or even prevention device.
Whether it is really effective or not is quite another matter. When my own faculty was broken into for the usual haul of laptops and data-projectors a few months ago, the police didn’t even bother to look at what might have been recorded by the camera trained directly at the front door. ‘Wouldn’t be a good enough image, luv.’
All the same, the majority of the population is, I suspect, rather proud that we have more CCTV cameras per head than any other country in the world – even though a glance at most foreign newspapers suggests that, from the outside, it looks like a very odd enthusiasm for a liberal democracy.
And it’s on those civil liberties grounds that I have always found the students’ embracing of CCTV such a puzzle. I wouldn’t mind it if they said, ‘Look, we know what the libertarian arguments are, but on balance we think that it’s worth the risk.’ But in fact these highly intelligent young people (and half of them Amnesty members) just look blank when some old grey beard like me warns darkly about the dangers of surveillance. If anything, they’ll mutter the stupid mantra that you have nothing to fear if you’ve done no wrong. How could this be?
I was beginning to blame the usual suspects – viz. they must have been taught this at school – when confirmation of these suspicions arrived by an unexpected domestic route. My son appeared at home, just before some big exams, having lost his backpack with all his notes. He seemed remarkably insouciant. (I wasn’t.) But sure enough the next day he came home, the backpack found.
What he had done was go to the school CCTV controller clutching his school timetable – and so he could be tracked through the day. There he was entering the French lesson with the backpack, and here he was coming out of it without. Hey presto, it was found in the French room.
This, I realised, must be a wizard procedure repeated over and over again in schools throughout the country, as disorganised adolescents get re-united with belongings thanks to the CCTV cameras. If Big Brother has always helped you find your lost property, no wonder you have a softer spot for him than I do.
Tampons for Africa
13 June 2006
I do have a soft spot for Woman’s Hour. I like the way it squeezes in wonderfully subversive feminist reports next to those drearily wholesome recipes for tuna pasta bake. And I have a particularly soft spot for it at the moment because one of the current producers is the inestimable Victoria Brignell. Victoria did Classics at Cambridge a few years ago, was clever and sparky, moved on to the BBC – and happens to be quadriplegic.
But, uncharacteristically, on Monday they missed a trick with a pious little item on sanitary protection in Kenya.
It was indeed tear-jerking stuff. There were interviews with young girls who missed school, even dropped out of education entirely, because they didn’t have pads. They couldn’t bear, they said, to go to school with blood on their clothes. So there’s a campaign – backed by NGOs and Kenyan women MPs – to get sanpro (as the trade calls it) given out free in schools, and to get the world’s women to donate their surplus.
To start with, it all sounded pretty compelling. But soon it was clear that a lot of questions were going to remain unanswered. What, for example, did the women of Kenya do before the prospect of Western sanpro was trailed before them? There were a few dark references to dung and lack of hygiene. And my mind raced to the idea of menstrual exclusion and the wonderful prospect of women all menstruating in the menstrual hut together, doing their school work and having a great time – until some well-meaning anthropologist came and told them they shouldn’t buy into these ideas of pollution. Who knows?
In this case it was hard to resist the conclusion that they might once have had some reasonably effective local method of dealing with the bleeding. But now these poor girls were sitting there worrying about making a mess on their skirts – and waiting for a supply of commercial pads that would never quite meet the demand.
More to the point – who is actually making this sanpro for Kenya? Was the campaign looking to build local, and locally owned, pad factories? Or to develop hygienic, reusable and eco-friendly methods? No, the idea seemed to be that we should airlift in the products of the great multinational companies, who already make a mint out of menstruating first-world women.
A quick trawl of the web shows that the business world has already spotted the African continent as a burgeoning market for top price sanpro. It recognises that there is a certain difficulty in ‘enlarging the consumer base’ and that ‘lower income groups are less likely to purchase sanitary protection’ (a market research triumph, for sure). But then, if you can get us to buy it and donate, you’ve made the profit anyway.
The case of Zimbabwe is horribly instructive, There is a pad crisis there, too. Why? Because Johnson & Johnson moved out of the country in 1999 when the economic going got rough and they have been forced to import from South Africa.
I thought that we had learned from the ‘baby formula for Africa’ débâcle. But, even if on a smaller scale, this looks like much the same story.
Comments
Mary, your ‘menstrual hut’ fantasy might have been fine 100 years ago but we’re talking about modern girls going to contemporary secondary schools trying to get a professional education. The idea that these aspirations have been foisted upon Kenyan girls by ‘anthropologists’ is insulting. We’re not talking about girls sitting round in villages grinding mealies while their menfolk hunt lions. These are girls who have to take the crowded public mini-bus to school, who wear uniform as they walk down city streets just like the girls you see in Cambridge ... Oh, and I wouldn’t describe myself as a subversive feminist. I’m an African man.
BOMAN’GOMBE
Mixed messages?
16 June 2006
The dust has quickly died down after St Hilda’s announced ten days ago that it would be admitting men. The last ‘all-girls’ college in Oxford (as most reports patronisingly put it) finally relented and opened its doors.
I wasn’t exactly thrilled by the news. There could after all be a knock-on effect on my own cherished single-sex Cambridge college. And besides, it was hard to follow the logic of why letting men into St Hilda’s would improve the educational opportunities of women.
But worse were the arguments that came out on either side of this debate. ‘Pro-mixers’ tended to heave a sigh of relief that this quaint anachronism had at last been done away with. The supporters of single-sex colleges, I’m afraid, did little better. Here, they said, was a place where women could be cherished outside the nasty, competitive hurly-burly of a man’s world.
Wrong on both counts. Women’s colleges are not havens of refuge for those that can’t hack it in mixed company. And as for the accusation of anachronism – they are probably better equipped for promoting women’s opportunities into the twenty-first century than most other institutions.
This isn’t the place for the PR about why my college offers a marvellous opportunity for clever women. Enough to say that it serves its students well because it is part of the wider university community, not a refuge from it.
&nbs
p; Most good teachers advising their sixth-form students have got this message. It’s only occasionally now that I visit a school, chat amiably to some engagingly articulate and forthcoming potential applicants to Cambridge and then find my eye drawn to a solitary soul in the corner – well-scrubbed, dressed in sub-Laura Ashley and quiet as a mouse. ‘That’s Deirdre,’ says the teacher. ‘She’s thinking of applying to Newnham.’
True, Deirdre may turn out to be really smart underneath (especially when she’s escaped from the orbit of her more self-confident but less clever classmates). But you see what I mean.
So why support women’s colleges? Aside from all the advantages for undergraduates, there are some very solid institutional reasons. The idea that women’s colleges are a strange Victorian anachronism, while the rest of the university is ‘gender normal’, is frankly bonkers.
For most of its 800 years, Cambridge University has been a ‘boys’ institution. Women only got degrees here after World War II (they took the exams much earlier, but didn’t get the piece of paper). Now there is a huge and sincere campaign to change this – but there’s also centuries of history to work against. Look around the portraits hanging in any college dining hall. With the exception of the occasional matriarch benefactor of the sixteenth century, they are all men.
The raw data are themselves an indication of the current problem. The latest ‘Equality and Diversity’ progress report records that there are just 46 women professors in the university, as against 404 men. To be fair, that was an increase of nine women professors on the previous year – but then again the number of women ‘Readers’, the next rank down, fell by two. To put it in an entirely personal way, for many of my 20 something years as a University teacher in Cambridge I was the only woman lecturer in a Faculty of about 30 men.
The University is certainly on the case. My own heart sinks at some of its initiatives. The idea that there should be at least two women on every University committee is a noble gesture, but it presages a lifetime of administration for me, while (some of) my male colleagues are let off the hook and get some thinking time in the library. What we really need is a place within the university where women are not just present in single figures but have a critical mass – and that is, of course, the women’s colleges.
Until things change, most women teachers at Cambridge are likely to be ambivalent about their careers. I have found it a wonderful place to work (otherwise I wouldn’t have stayed). But, like all of us, I bear the scars of a bloke-ish institution.
My favourite (and somewhat self-inflicted) scar is this – and it must be typical of many women’s experience here.
When I was pregnant with child number one, I was the ‘meetings secretary’ of the University classical society, the Cambridge Philological Society. This involved attending meetings three times a term and, in Victorian style, reading out the minutes of the last meeting. (‘Professor X read a paper on “The digamma in archaic poetry”’ or whatever). With ludicrous heroism, and loathsome self-advertisement, I turned out to do this chore less than a week after the baby was born. Never was I going to let the guys say that giving birth interfered with duties to my subject.
For the next term or two, I went on with the job. But at the end of a teaching afternoon (the meetings started at 4.30) I needed desperately, and uncomfortably, to go home and feed the baby. So I would read the minutes and, once the lecture had begun, I would slip away.
Ten years later, I had long resigned the ‘meetings secretary’ role, and they were looking for a new candidate to fill the post.
‘It’s a drag,’ I said to one of my colleagues. ‘You have to turn up for every meeting.’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘You were the lazy one who used to walk out before the lecture had even finished.’
I had got no kudos at all. Quite the reverse.
It had been pointless heroism on my part. But the jibe would never have happened at Newnham.
Comments
In the physics department of my undergraduate university, the door of the ground-floor women’s toilet had clearly read ‘MAIDS’ at some point in the past. The actual label had been removed, but its shadow remained etched into the faded wood. I’ve come to think of this gone-but-not-forgotten sign as a metaphor for the progress women have made in academia over the past few decades ... The corresponding men’s toilet, by the way, was located directly opposite the mechanical workshop, and was labelled ‘REAL MEN’.
AARDVARK
Is Latin too hard?
28 June 2006
Research at Durham University claims to show kids are put off taking Latin GCSE because it is too hard – about a grade harder than other supposedly ‘hard’ subjects. That is to say, if you can get a grade C at Latin, you’d be in the running for a B in Physics or German. And teachers, it’s said, have too much of an eye on the league tables to persuade their pupils to take the risk.
At least this is a change from the usual story about Latin. More than a third of all takers get the top A* grade (compared with less than 4% in Business Studies and around 6% in German – or, going the other way, 55% in Greek). And 60% in Latin get A* and A combined. How easy it must be, some wonder.
Actually, these stories are easily compatible. Latin is an extremely self-selecting subject, chosen by some of our very brightest kids. No wonder they do extremely well – and, as I see when they apply to us, often get a string of other very high grades. The question is, should Latin be the subject of choice for the less bright, too?
People – we classicists included – sometimes get in a muddle here. There is no question at all that Latin and Greek should be available to the talented of whatever wealth and class. The erosion of Classics in the maintained sector is a disgrace in Britain and elsewhere. But is it actually a sensible educational goal to try to spread Latin and Greek right across the ability range?
There’s a baby-and-bathwater problem here. At the moment Latin and Greek are the only foreign language GCSEs where you still read some literature in the original language. Thank heavens that OCR, the only exam board now offering classical languages, has valiantly kept on the ‘set books’, so some 16-year-olds still get more than a taste of real Virgil, Catullus or Homer. Sure, it’s difficult – but interesting, too, and it’s keeping some of our brightest-and-best engaged and on-message. You could notch it all down a level, but only at a cost. A simplified GCSE (with simplified Virgil) would not offer the same stimulus at all.
But there is in fact a bigger point here. What do we think that studying any of these subjects at GSCE is FOR? In modern languages, the repetitive, multiple-choice tests on how to find the cathedral from the car park, or how to order a pizza in Bologna are mind-numbing for the bright; but they do fulfil a function. Anyone might need to order a meal or ask directions in a foreign city. If GCSE promotes that skill, so much the better – despite the doomladen prophets of dumbing down.
Why then learn Latin? Certainly not for conversation. And not – at GCSE level, at least – just to learn about the ancient world (there’s an excellent Classical Civilisation exam for that). Nor to learn formal grammar (which can be taught more economically in a myriad of other ways). The central point of learning Latin is to be able to read some of the extraordinary literature written a couple of millennia ago. It can be formidably hard. Asking a school student to read Tacitus is a bit like asking an English learner to go off and read Finnegans Wake. But it is what makes the whole enterprise intellectually worthwhile. Make the whole thing easier (up the multiple choice and downplay the real literature) and you’ve removed the very point of learning the language in the first place.
And that’s what’s going to kill the subject.
Comments
Latin is anything but a ‘dead language’. For several decades Finnish radio has been broadcasting the news in Latin. They have even recorded Elvis Presley songs in the language.
Nuntii Latini – ‘News in Latin’ – is a weekly review of world news in classical Latin, the only intern
ational broadcast of its kind in the world, produced by YLE, the Finnish Broadcasting Company ...
So you see, Tacitus rides on ... the airwaves. Just tune in and listen and learn.
PETER ATHEY
Does Latin ‘train the brain’?
10 July 2006
Correspondents to The Times have been exercised over the value of a ‘classical education’, so I am returning to the topic. What IS the point of learning Latin?
There are several reasons often touted that seem to me wide of the mark. (Sorry – a typically academic way to kick off; but these do have to be disposed of first.)
You do NOT learn Latin because it helps you to understand the spells in Harry Potter, or to read the slogans on pound coins. That may be a side benefit, but frankly you’re not missing much in life if you don’t get all of Harry’s wizardry.
You do NOT learn Latin because it helps you learn other languages. Again that may be a knock-on effect. But if you want to learn (say) Spanish, it’s better to get on with it, not learn Latin first to make it easier. (Besides, I always feel that any subject that tries to justify itself by claiming that it helps you learn something else is on the way out.)
You do NOT learn Latin because it hones your critical and logical thinking. True, I rather like the jingle cited in one Times letter that ‘Latin trains the brain’ (just as I am touched by another plaudit for the sheer uselessness of the language). But Latin is only one of many subjects that does this. If we gave our kids three lessons in formal logic each week, we’d probably soon notice a difference in their critical power.
No, you learn Latin because of what was written in it – and because of the direct access that Latin gives you to a literary tradition that lies at the very heart (not just at the root) of Western culture.