All in a Don's Day (12 page)

ROSEMARY MEECHAN

Perhaps Mary should be aware that one has the right to see references written about oneself, so the pseudo-security has little effect.

Personally, I use references to confirm that the person is not actually lying when they say they studied Coptic. Beyond that, I seldom find them useful as a discriminator between candidates. About as much use as that bit on the application form where they list ‘reading, playing computer games, and travelling as their interests.

SEBASTIAN RAHTZ

And then there′s the related problem of refereeing conference and journal papers. In the old days that, too, was a gift economy: people helped each other. You referee this paper for my journal: I′ll be on the jury of your student′s thesis. Now that′s gone, and
it′s all just spam: endless requests for reports on papers in which I′ve no interest. So I hit the delete button. So does everyone else, and the volume of requests keeps on growing as the robots get more desperate. Where does it end? Shall we see a paper in ten years time entitled ′The Peer Review System – Tragic Loss or Good Riddance?′

ROSS ANDERSON

′It′s hardly enough to keep an enterprising applicant with a kettle from finding out what you′ve written …′

How mysteriously interesting! A kettle! Could you be more explicit as to what the process actually entails …?

CLEM

Clem – the old technique of STEAMING a letter open!

MARY BEARD

My tutor at Girton was a Classicist. She did her best with the small crowd of engineers. Since my industrial sponsor built objects normally painted olive-green, they needed to check up on my activities to see if I had become a Communist spy – not unusual at Cambridge in those days. So they wrote a letter, and she called me to her office and I had to tell her what to write: ′Did you join the Communist Party? Well, you would hardly tell me if you had. Did you have homosexual relationships? An impertinent question!′ And so on. She did put the right answers, though, good of her, the old dear.

OURSALLY

OK, Henry Chadwick. I was around when he was as Dean of Christ Church. He looked every inch the part, was a serial
embarrassment. He once insisted that an undergraduate who had been reported as having a girl (yes!) in his rooms overnight be sent down on the grounds that the College – no, the House – was religious property and could not allow that sort of thing, whatever happened elsewhere.

Chadwick was clearly living in some neglected corner of the nineteenth century. If only Trollope were still writing.

PAUL POTTS

It′s not what you know, it′s what you′re known for … and – worth noting – it′s not an individual thing. Most people sharing a set of views will have the same criteria by which they judge people. The exceptions – a Chadwick, say – are sapphires in a cesspool, or pearls in a pigsty.

XJY

22 February 2010

Some time in the second century BC, a member of the aristocratic Scipio family lost an election. Standing for the office of
aedile
, he had been eagerly canvassing the people – and happened to shake the hands of a peasant. Now the peasant's hands were horny, from all his tough agricultural labour and Scipio – being an effete toff – was not used to the feel. ‘Wot,' he said (as a joke?), ‘do you walk on these?'

Now Rome may not have been a radical democracy, but the Roman people didn't put up with toffs insulting the honest labouring poor, and they took their revenge. Scipio lost the election. That, at least is the story handed down by the early imperial writer Valerius Maximus in a section of his
Memorable Deeds and Sayings
devoted to people who lost elections. (The Latin text is Book 7, 5, 2.)

It's not the kind of revenge that the British electorate will get to take on Nicholas Winterton for his aspersions on those of us who usually travel in Standard Class on the trains. He is standing down from parliament anyway.

(Actually, in fairness to Winterton, at many hours of the day it is totally impossible to work in Standard Class between Cambridge and London – you would be lucky to get a seat, and opening a laptop would be impossible. Your blogger has occasionally been known to shell out for First Class, when she has been desperate to get something done.)

All in all, it's hard not to feel a bit envious of Roman face-to-face politics – compared with what we shall get in May or whenever.

It's not just the trained-monkey, American-style spectacle of the televised debate that looks set to remove yet more real argument out of the electoral process. The papers have been full of the Labour Party's clever wheezes in using social networking etc. to get to us voters. What this appears to mean is that we will be bombarded with text messages on our mobiles, automated phone messages and whatever they can possibly get on Facebook or Twitter.

Douglas Alexander boasted last week of a new phase of ‘peer-to peer communication', saying that ‘Labour had made 400,000 voter contacts in marginal seats since the start of the year, using software that allows members to set up phone banks in their own homes and build a relationship with them.' I hope you don't live in a marginal seat. Because if you do, what this really means is that you will be bombarded with calls connected to a taped message urging you to vote Labour … which will go on regardless, whether you tell them to piss off or not. Forget the ‘relationship'. When I was in Berkeley, during the last presidential election, I was renting a house from a registered Democrat – and the automated democrats were on to him about 20 times a day.

What happened to doorstepping? And what happened to going down to your local forum, shaking the candidate's hand and seeing what you think of him (or her)?

Come back, Scipio, you're forgiven.

If my MP were reading confidential correspondence on the train, I would certainly hope he were doing so at his own table in First Class.

GEOFFREY WALKER

As for Mr Winterton, I think that his precise mistake was this. There are people in the market economy who get to travel First Class, because their employers have decided that it is worth it, allowing them to get more done on the train. Employers are entitled to take decisions like that, because they are subject to the discipline of the market: if they are too extravagant, they go bust. Mr W decided that it would be good value to send himself First Class, but there is no independent (market) check on the accuracy of his evaluation of his own time and productivity.

RICHARD BARON

16 March 2010

I have moaned before about pointless health and safety notices (like the one urging drunks to take care on the station platform – for those drunks compos mentis enough to stop and read the notice). But the USA sometimes presents even more aggressive examples of the nanny state.

I have just had a great time in Madison, but was a bit surprised to find one of those containers of hygienising ‘wipes' on the podium in the lecture room. I wasn't sure exactly what the point was. Was I supposed to sterilise my own hands so that I didn't pollute the lecturing control panel? Or was I supposed to use them to wipe the microphone and the switches and computer connections etc., in case there were some threatening germs still lurking from the previous user?

It reminded me of those US supermarkets where they give you an antiseptic wipe to clean the handle of the trolley with (or your own hands?) before you load it up with your food … and indeed of all those women whom I found in Berkeley used their feet to flush the loo, and assumed that was normal.

I guess I am counter-suggestible in the hygiene department, as in others … but when I see a notice in a loo urging me to wash my hands to prevent the outbreak of whatever plague we are currently fighting, I am
less
likely to do it than if there is no warning notice at all, and I can treat myself as a responsible individual who can and will make responsible decisions.

I was reflecting on this as I waited at Madison airport, following a visit to the Ladies, which was more than usually kitted out with hygiene notices. In fact, I was wondering if those wartime posters about ‘Careless talk costing lives' would have made me more or less likely to blab to the handsome stranger about the current location of all the soldiers I knew, or the latest developments at Bletchley Park … when, even worse, a loud announcement was made over the airport tannoy to all and sundry.

Yes, it was urging all passengers to wash their hands carefully and to sneeze, if they must, into a tissue.

At least, we can be thankful that the States has so far resisted the British obsession with CCTV cameras, else they would no doubt be installed in loos just to make sure that no hand was left unscrubbed.

Some emails I now receive from offices have an automatic closing message: ′Think of the environment – do you need to print this email?′ My instant reaction is always, ′Why yes, now you mention it, I should print it for my records′

ALEX

If we stop spreading germs, our immune systems will be weakened and we will fall prey, with horrific results, to the first unusual epidemic. So the nanny state has got it wrong as always.

THELEASTER

It is certainly interesting to note different practices currently and through time in things that are marginally to do with hygiene (like the foot-flushers of Berkeley). In southern Europe you will see men in the open air (men, rather than women) closing one nostril and jet-propelling the contents of the other on to the ground (I′ve never acquired the knack myself). Many northern Europeans find that revolting, while many southern Europeans are equally revolted by the sight of someone putting their snot into a cloth handkerchief and then putting the handkerchief into their pocket.

MICHAEL BULLEY

Here in Sweden they want you to sneeze in the crook of your arm. But at the office we have a culture of explosive sneezing to brighten everyone's day and show our lungs are in good shape.

XJY

I recently attended a negotiating session with (or I should say against) some HR types. We shook hands cordially and customarily. The HR types promptly sanitised their hands but did not pass the container over to our side of the table. Never felt so insulted in my life.

PAT CHANDLER

Lavatory etiquette′s quite a to-do.

How should you flush when you′re done in the loo?

Some push the handle while still on the seat

And the women of Berkeley all flush with their feet!

MICHAEL BULLEY

6 April 2010

When I was a graduate student, things were different. I didn't have to fill in many forms – in fact, I think I just applied for a British Academy grant (as it then was) to work on a PhD in nothing more than ‘Roman history'. I wasn't given a code of practice. If I wanted to learn something (like a new language), I went off and did it; I didn't demand a specially targeted Faculty class in it (‘Turkish for Roman historians', or whatever).

My supervisor didn't bother me too much (though he did give me a few big kicks towards the end). Whenever I wanted to see him, I sent him a note (pre-email) and he would have me round, and I would stay for as long as it took to go over my work or my problems. If I wanted to talk to one of the other senior Faculty members, I would catch them after a seminar or in the library, and we would have coffee or (more often) a drink.

I am sure that this laid-back, unregulated system let some students down. (We all heard stories/urban myths about PhD students who had not seen their supervisors in 12 months.) But it worked wonderfully for me and for many of my friends – and probably much better than what we now offer to our graduates.

Now, if students want funding, they have to explain what they will discover before they start. (The best applications
are, as most of us suspect, written by the supervisor.) When they arrive on their course, they are given codes of practice up to their ears: they know how often they should meet their supervisors, they have regular reviews with other members of the Faculty, they have a secondary supervisor (in case their first one isn't good enough), and they even have log books in which they can register their contact with their supervisor (in which I fear a jolly good, intellectually productive, discussion in the pub doesn't quite count – how wrong is that?).

All these initiatives were, I am sure, very well intentioned. They were intended to make sure that PhD students didn't go for 12 months without seeing their supervisors, or didn't take seven years to finish their theses or, worse still, didn't fail at the end of the process. But I do wonder if the baby hasn't been thrown out with the bath water. To put it another way, despite (or because of) our good intentions, I suspect that most graduate students now have a worse ‘learning experience' than we did – at a time before we knew what a ‘learning experience' was.