All in a Don's Day (26 page)

SIRIANNE

The phenomenon you refer to is the on-line disinhibition effect, known colloquially (including in academic circles outside trade journals) as GIFT: the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. The equation is: normal person + anonymity + audience = total fuckwad. It has been proven time and time again by such comments as you have yourself received.

And on a fascinating Classical note, the idea apparently was originally proposed by Plato in his story about the Ring of Gyges.

CERBERUS

There was the recent case of a woman who sued for divorce (in the real world) because her husband′s internet character in some on-line game had been unfaithful to her own character with some other real woman′s character in the same game. I′m not saying the people who comment on Mary Beard′s blog under a pseudonym would go that far, but I think you can see the beginnings of the slippery slope.

MICHAEL BULLEY

I hate to say it, but your online etiquette piece sounded like a schoolteacher′s rules for engagement – listen and behave yourselves, otherwise I won′t reply. Blogging is the opportunity for adults and young at heart to express themselves in a way which makes them feel most comfortable, sobriquets notwithstanding, and in this diverse world of ours I would like to think that we could cope with others′ warts as well as their smiles. For somebody billed as ′wickedly subversive′ it would be in keeping with this image to poke fun in return. Sometimes, your more acerbic responses are hilarious, rudeness aside.

A DENNIS

30 November 2011

There is something deeply frustrating about many of the bright new educational ideas headlined by all political parties. I mean the ‘educational tourism' ones. They are easy to recognise. Some minister or shadow minister has been on a visit to Norway, the United States or wherever, and returns home with an ‘idea' for schools or universities – whether it is how to raise the basic skills of 11-year-olds, or how to increase diversity among undergraduates – which they proceed to wave around (often accusing the educational professionals here of blindness to exciting new developments overseas).

They sometimes haven't got wise even to such problems of these schemes as could be discovered by a quick trawl on Google (the issues surrounding New York charter schools, for example). They sometimes don't appear to have thought about the key structural differences between one (superficially similar) system and another.

That is especially apparent in admissions to university, where the USA and the UK are really non-comparable – for the simple reason that American kids normally aren't entering into subject-specific degree programmes right away, but specialise later. So they can reasonably be selected by non-specialists (who might indeed be charged with particular targets for ethnicity, social background etc.). We, on the other hand, are normally choosing students for specialised courses, to be completed in three years. You surely have to involve specialists, not general administrators, for that.

For universities, America is the usual stick with which the UK higher education sector is beaten. Some US universities are truly, truly excellent (albeit different from what we expect). But not all. So it was useful to read Tony Grafton's article in the
New York Review of Books
last week (24 November), discussing American universities across the board. Take the time an undergraduate student spends to get a degree at even the best public institutions: in a handful, 90% or more graduate within six years; most have a much lower rate than that … and the drop-out rate (not simply delayed completion) is much higher than anything we would be happy to accept. This article should be required reading for every minister of higher education.

The funny thing is that I saw the ‘boot on the other foot' a few days ago, and had a glimpse of what happens when you talk about the UK system when you don't really understand it. I was reading Martha Nussbaum's new book
Not for Profit
– in all sorts of ways, an excellent defence of the humanities at university level. But when she gets on to the terrible things that are happening in British universities, she is seriously misleading. True, terrible things are happening, but not quite what she implies.

‘British faculty do not have tenure any longer, so there is no barrier to firing them at any time', she writes. True, ‘tenure' was abolished, with the result that academics can now be made redundant (and departments closed); and I am sure that has sometimes been misused. But that is not to say that they can be fired at any time (and of course they could have been fired before, when they had ‘tenure' for a variety of crimes, like ‘gross moral turpitude' or whatever).

And she goes on to suggest that there is no regular sabbatical system in the UK any longer and the only way that
we can get leave is by applying for competitive grants. Again, simply not true in that form.

You have to be careful when you stray into some other country's educational system.

Ah yes, the wonderful charge of gross moral turpitude. JBS Haldane was accused of that, although the term may have been ′gross immorality′. He had deliberately got caught in bed with the lady he was to marry, in order to secure her a divorce. He appealed successfully against the charge, I think on the basis that while it was moral turpitude (or immorality, as the case may have been), it was not gross.

RICHARD BARON

One of the major reasons that five to six years is the ′average′ time needed to complete a university degree in the United States is because the classes that a student must take (we call them ′required courses′) in order to graduate are often oversubscribed. It is not unusual for a student to have to wait several years before there is room for him/her in a required class. So, it is not a problem of a student′s limited ability, but rather a problem of overcrowding.

EILEEN

In my experience as head of a teachers′ union in Australia for some years, top bureaucrats read the journals, listen to the gurus and go on ′study trips′, then come back and sell their newly acquired, recycled, ′initiatives′ to their minister, who, knowing little
about education except their own, falls for it and believes it will get him/her seen as the country′s brightest star.

It is then pushed down on to powerless teachers, who recognise immediately the unlikeliness of it to do anything to improve education but can do nothing to prevent it till the next new idea, which is usually equally bad. And so we progress …

JEAN

Cor blimey! I was gobstruck when I read Eileen′s letter so I checked some of the facts.

It does seem to be true that only 57% of American college students complete a four-year degree course within six years.

This in itself is extraordinary, but it was not really what amazed and shocked me. It seems that colleges do not provide facilities for all students to attend required classes, so students have to wait several years before a place becomes available on one of these courses.

Colleges admit students to courses and don′t provide the facilities for them to complete the course.

TOHU

20 December 2011

Tourist hot-spots come in many different guises. Only a couple of weeks ago the queue to get into the Colosseum was about an hour and a half in length – and all to see the rather depressing ruins inside the building, which are nothing compared with the splendid outside. (Tip: if you really want to see the Colosseum, go to one of the entrances to the Forum and buy the ticket there … the queue is never so long.)

In Verona, where we finished our stint of filming yesterday (not the amphitheatre, in case you are wondering), the place to go is the ‘House of Juliet', complete with balcony, as in
Romeo and Juliet
. There were no actual queues, but a tremendous, polyglot crush, even in mid-December – made all the more democratic by the fact that the view of the balcony and other bric-à-brac is free. You only have to pay if you want actually to go and stand on it, and to see the other Juliet memorabilia in the ‘museum' … pride of place going to the bed that starred in Zeffirelli's version of Shakespeare's play.

Of course, the place has nothing to do with the nonexistent Juliet at all, and was a clever invention of the nineteenth century, turned into a veritable tourist attraction in the 1930s. But overall it is as odd as the Colosseum, with the added tinge of slightly off-putting, slightly leering, slightly touching ‘romance'.

One high spot of the museum itself for most people is the opportunity to send an email (or even an old-style letter) to Juliet, who – it seems – will answer you (unless you are too
filthy in what you choose to say to her). Indeed it appears that they have a whole team of people employed just to answer the emails that Juliet receives in the ‘Club Juliet'.

But if you can't afford the 6 euros to go inside, there is still plenty to do. The walls of the entrance-way to Juliet's House are covered with the graffiti of at least the last few years of hopeless romantics – as if scrawling your name in the vicinity of a mythical balcony of a mythical couple somehow gives it added force.

But the weirdest thing was the 1970s' bronze statue of Juliet standing just underneath the balcony. It was clear from the ‘polish', and by watching what people actually did, that one hallowed custom was to go up and grasp Juliet's right breast, and have your photo taken in the act. This was the sport of almost every visitor from the seven-year-olds to the 70-somethings, male and female. A few looked a bit embarrassed. Most entered into the spirit of the fondle.

A new ritual, a bit tacky – but bringing the star-crossed lovers down to size.

Grasping the breast? Maybe a fertility rite or a good-luck wish? One wonders what Frazer would have made of it.

ANNA

I′m surprised, bearing in mind today′s social climate, that the fondlers have not been placed on a lifetime police register as sexual predators. Epstein′s stone Assyrian thingummy carved on Oscar Wilde′s gravestone in Père Lachaise cemetery used to have a large and distinctive penis that was polished by many hands touching it … it was broken off many years ago.

LORD TRUTH/RONALD ROGERS

From
New York Times
(15 December): ′Recently, descendants of Wilde, the Irish dramatist and wit who died here in 1900, decided to have his immense gravestone cleansed of a vast accumulation of lipstick markings from kisses left by admirers, who for years have been defacing, and some say eroding, the memorial in hilly Père Lachaise Cemetery here. But the decision meant not only cleaning the stone, a flying nude angel by the sculptor Jacob Epstein, who was inspired by the British Museum′s Assyrian figures, but also erecting a seven-foot plate glass wall to keep ardent admirers at a distance.′

NICK JOWETT

25 December 2011

‘Tradition always incorporates innovation' insisted the daughter (an anthropologist-cum-historian) on Christmas Eve. The reason for her insistence on this great anthropological truth was her desire that this year we should try roasting rather than boiling the sprouts for Christmas dinner.

Predictably enough, we chose to follow that other anthropological model: namely, ‘accretion'. The husband had liked our encounter with roast sprouts in the USA but rather doubted our ability to do them well enough on our first try (and anyway, he is still quite partial to boiled ones). So – as we had laid in well more sprouts than we needed – we decided to roast half and boil half, just to be on the safe side. (I expect that we will now do this sprouting double act as long as we have Christmas together.)

At this point, I rather pretentiously observed that our decision followed the model of our Christmas tree … it was growing tradition, a bit like the way we put new decorations on the tree each year, without throwing away the old ones. To be precise: a rather jolly hart, vaguely taken from the Wilton Diptych, joined the line-up this year, as did a shining ship (supposedly based on Turner's
Fighting Temeraire
).

Conversation, let me reassure you, doesn't usually run along these lines over our kitchen table. But it was perhaps a nice reminder of what a wonderful anthropological casestudy modern Christmas can be. In fact a friend of mine, Sue Benson, who taught Anthropology in Cambridge,
often used to ask candidates at their interviews to comment anthropologically on Christmas. She was never very impressed by those who went on about the terrible ‘commercialism' of it all; she was looking for a bit of analysis of our nostalgia, and the way the celebration (for many, no matter what religion – if any) still acts as a re-affirmation of ties of friendship, a focus of remembrance, not to mention gift exchange.

Sadly, for me, it now acts as a focus of remembrance of her. She died a few years ago, but Sue's question to her candidates (as well as her whole-hearted, exuberantly atheistic investment in all the festivities of the season) is now always part of what I think when I ‘think Christmas'. Exactly, she would have said. For that's the way that Christmas comes to mean more, the older you get … generating and preserving an ever increasing number of things to remember. (And I'm sure that's how she used to press her interview candidates.)