All in a Don's Day (16 page)

JANE-ANNE SHAW

Ah yes, smoking. When the Cambridge University Library tea room was in the South Courtyard, there was a smoking room near where one went in, that is, away from the counter. I think that the glass partition was eventually taken down, the ceiling cleaned and smoking indoors prohibited.

According to the rules, smoking in the courtyards is still allowed. As for sex, you must do it quietly (rule 14), not use any equipment that might disturb or distract other readers (rule 17), not prejudice anyone′s safety, well-being or security or the preservation of the collections (rule 24) and keep your socks on (rule 23).

RICHARD BARON

I don′t believe that smoking was allowed in any library ′a few years ago′. Sprinkler systems have been around for quite a bit, and while the smoke itself does no damage to the books, water certainly can. I lit up once in the Griffith Institute (Oxford) library back in the early ′70s and a gentle spray began to descend, but the sprinkler was turned off in time. No damage was done. If the library allows people to eat, thorough cleaning is necessary to avoid vermin. Many people nod off at their desks. I used to do it regularly. EO James used to bring an alarm clock into the Griffith to wake him up.

ANTHONY ALCOCK

For those of us who are not subsidised by the taxpayer, as opposed to just being, um, the taxpayer, it′s quite easy to imagine life without JSTOR, as we are still living it.

MARK

Smoking in the Widener or Houghton (or any other) libraries at Harvard in the nicotine-infused era of the 1950s was simply not done. I doubt that has changed. I can only note that I once smelled the smoke of the weed that appeared to come from the nook (many on each floor of the stacks) of a distinguished scholar.

JAMES WADE

1 December 2010

As I write, the student occupation of the Senate House in Cambridge is entering its sixth day. To be precise, they are occupying the University Combination Room – which is a wise decision, as it is a large room, has a lot of comfy chairs, a controversial lift and won't be much missed by most working senior members of the university, who haven't got a minute to take a coffee break/lunch there anyway.

They are protesting against the now usual combination of ‘fees and cuts'. Am I on their side?

Well, in one way, of course I am. It would be worrying if the students (and sixth-formers with some eye on the future) didn't see what government proposals were likely to do to higher education, to the realistic chances of the less well-off going to university (the coalition can go on till it's blue in the face about how there is nothing to pay up front, but the likelihood is that £30-40k of debt will put off many of the kids we want to attract), and to the strength of Arts and Humanities in particular (which can't possibly operate successfully on a supply and demand model). So, yes, they are right to make a fuss.

And anyone who looks at what the students have been doing in the Combination Room can hardly help but be touched: vegan meals, poetry readings, improving lectures, art-house movies and a good deal of essay-writing. In those terms, and let's hope this continues, it's a model of student protest. If I was 30 years younger (and didn't have getting on
for 20 hours teaching to be done in the rest of this week), I'd be there.

My only worry is what it is actually going to achieve, and who is to be convinced about what. And more generally, what the academic community in general should be doing to get their point across most effectively about this damage that is being done.

The students are trying to convince the university authorities. But, by and large, the authorities are broadly on the same side as the students (even if they have rather different ways of getting there). And the full range of student demands are probably not something any authorities could agree to anyway, not to the letter (‘That the university declare it will never privatise' … never say never). Interestingly the supporting letter from academics (which I have just signed) stops far short of backing the full student manifesto: the letters asks the university to ‘take note' of the student demands, and the Vice-Chancellor to express opposition to the current government's destructive agenda.

But on the other hand, what are the students supposed to do? If they have a peaceful little march through the city centre and go back to their rooms, then the government pats itself on the back for smiling benevolently on the citizens' right to peaceful protest, and takes not a blind bit of notice.

So what is the right answer? I'm not sure. There have been some good things said in television debates about what the reforms will mean for arts and humanities (close to death, being the answer) … but our spokespeople do tend to look like rather languid Oxbridge types.

And some of us did send a letter to the
Telegraph
, the Tory party paper of choice (asking for a public inquiry ‘on the
future of higher education' and muttering about ‘considerable unease'). Let's hope someone reads it.

Not one of the students′ spokespeople we have heard has said a single word about Britain′s economic situation. It is rather like 1947–50 all over again with the Chiefs of Staff calling for thousands of troops, garrisons, equipment etc. to be allocated around the ′empire′ to maintain our world-class position (
sic
!) without any reference to the uncomfortable fact that the country was technically bankrupt.

PETER WOOD

I am glad to hear that essays are being written in the University Combination Room. The eye-witness report I received from the Lower Radcliffe Camera in Oxford was of tap-dancing on the book issue desk and other oafish behaviour making it impossible for people to get on with their work.

OLIVER NICHOLSON

′My only worry is what it is actually going to achieve′. This line of argument is morally bankrupt. Sometimes a gesture is worth making even if it achieves nothing. Remember the parable of the woman who shields her child from a hail of bullets with her arm – George Orwell discusses it in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
. The gesture achieves nothing, but it is still the right thing to do.

DOCTORENO

5 December 2010

OK – as the
TLS
editor and others have pointed out following my last post, having an awful lot of teaching to do is not much of an excuse for failing to get my hands dirty down at the occupation at the Old Schools. (‘Where were you when the revolution needed you, Beard …?' ‘Teaching, Sir … ')

But that is just one of the paradoxes of this kind of political action.

I mean, if the students are protesting (in part) in order to save the study of Arts and Humanities from the forces of darkness, then there would have been something self-destructive in giving up the teaching of said subjects, just to join in at the Senate House.

And especially this week, when I was seeing all the third-years for whom I Direct Studies, one by one, as well as checking in with those whose undergraduate theses I am supervising, squeezing in the last essay supervision of the term with everyone else and making sure that the MPhils get their first assessed essays in in time … etc. etc. (If you ever hear any Mum or Dad complain that their kid is not getting the hands-on treatment at Uni that they expected – don't believe it; at least not for Classics in Cambridge.)

Anyway, this all coincided with the long-listing meeting for our college junior research fellowship competition – which meant reading carefully through 218 applications to pick out fewer than 20 to go to the next stage (in the end we have only one position to give). You can do the calculations for yourself.

Just imagine I took the bare minimum of 10 minutes per application (and that would have been a cracking pace) – it would have taken 36 hours solid … indeed it did, and more.

But there are other strange anomalies. And the biggest of those is the very nature of the law-breaking and transgression that the occupation implies.

Let me repeat that, politically, I am absolutely on the side of the students; they are standing up for a load of principles in which I believe. And I hope that the University lets them off very lightly indeed, and gets down to talk to them about the issues and dilemmas we are facing. For the students are our greatest allies.

But, all the same, there is something illogical in thinking (as some of my colleagues seem to do) that any threat of punishment or legal action is merely an example of the oppressive and vindictive power of establishment authority being wreaked on the innocent.

After all the students are occupying a place in contravention of custom, rule and law. That's the whole point. You can't ‘occupy' somewhere (like a JCR, or Students' Union) where you are allowed to be anyway. It
has
to be transgressive; and so it has to attract the attention (yes, and even the threats) of the authorities and the police, who in their turn have to make it clear that transgression is taking place. Otherwise it's more like a sleepover than a protest.

There is, in other words, a symbiosis here between action and reaction, protest and punishment, that goes unnoticed in many of the cries of anguish we are now hearing about the authorities' tough line.

It reminds me of when my son, a sixth-former, bunked off school to march against the Iraq war. I was dead proud of him.

Then the school rang to say that he had been absent without leave.

Yes, I said, and I hope that you will be punishing him. No, came the reply, he is very sincere.

Sincere or not, I thought, there was a lesson to be learned here. If you want to protest, that's fine, but you have to feel the pinch – otherwise it's too risk-free, and you are being smothered in well-meaning paternalism. (‘Off you go and march now/occupy the Old Schools … just so long as you are “sincere”'.)

In my son's case, I would have had him do 500 lines: ‘Mr Blair is wrong to go to war on Iraq' 500 times over would, I think, have been an appropriate punishment in the circumstances.

For our students, I would pat them on the back, give them a very big cheer and a party – then I would have them give 20 hours to a telephone campaign raising money for Arts and Humanities, or writing begging letters to old boys and girls explaining why they had occupied the Old Schools, why it was important to them and why a bit of cash would help.

It's called making the ‘punishment' fit the ‘crime'.

There was the odd teach-in at German universities in the events leading up to the hallowed ′1968′. Those in attendance at the first one
c
. 1966 in West Berlin (as it was then) had to listen to Rudi Dutschke on the subject of anti-authoritarianism. A woman I got to know later, who had attended some of these performances, told me that at the revolutionary meetings the boys demanded that
the girls get the coffee and sandwiches ready and do the washing up later on.

ANTHONY ALCOCK

7 December 2010

I confess, I have escaped to Rome (to the American Academy). The idea was to do some of the research which is my job. The truth is that I have spent most of the last 24 hours answering emails and writing references.

Since I left Cambridge, the students have ended their occupation of the administration building. (Well done, one and all, for keeping our eyes on what will happen to Arts and Humanities if the government proposals have their way.) And then the
Guardian
had an exposé of how few black students get into Oxbridge.

Can I stick up for us, again? There can be no sensible person who thinks that it is OK that 21 Oxbridge colleges took no black student last year. But before we go down the ‘Oxbridge snobs aren't interested in most of the ordinary kids of this country' route, can we stop to think? Oxbridge bashing is often a convenient alibi for not reflecting on what the bigger problem is … it's easier to dump on racist Oxbridge dons than to fix some of the big things that might be the matter with state education.

Let me put a few points:

1) The figures quoted by the
Guardian
were about black students, not about ethnic ‘minorities' over all … Asian, Middle Eastern etc. It is true that the number of black Afro-Caribbean students at Cambridge is woefully low, but that is not the case with other ethnic ‘minorities'.
Obviously it varies from subject to subject, but it is simply not true that Cambridge is a middle-class white place. My college (Newnham) came out badly in the number of black students it took, measured by proportion of applicants to places … but I defy anyone to come and say that it ‘feels' white.

2) The figures are always more complicated than they seem. There is no single variable when it comes to ‘getting in' (however much it suits journalists to pretend that there is) – you need to factor race against class and school/ educational background etc. before you get a start at understanding what is going on. On this scoring, Kwasi Kwarteng (black Etonian, ex-Trinity) counts for ethnic diversity (true, but not exactly what most of us mean by ‘access').

3) There are other ways in which you need to break the figures down. As the
Guardian
article was honest enough to point out, more than 29,000 white students got three As or better at A level; fewer than 500 black students did (though nearly 50% of those applied to Oxbridge, whereas fewer than 30% of the white students did). There is also a subject bias – in that black students disproportionately applied for the most competitive subjects. (Though that is tricky again: the fact that there are fewer applicants per place for Classics than for most other subjects does not mean that it is a backdoor route to Oxbridge for the privileged … kids who have chosen Latin and Greek have always ‘pre-selected' themselves, no matter what their backgrounds.)