It's a Don's Life (17 page)
Authors: Mary Beard
21 February 2008
OK, not quite. But I have just spent a day in an orange Guantanamo style jumpsuit, as part of our student Amnesty Group’s
‘Orange Wednesday’. This was a bit of harmless and colourful street theatre, designed to draw attention to the injustices
of illegal detention all over the world. A few hundred of us, mostly students but some staff, went about our daily business
dressed as Guantanamo detainees.
I volunteered for this fancy dress partly because I believe in the cause. But partly because most students seem so unbothered
by issues of surveillance, civil liberties and human rights that it is important to show some solidarity with those who are.
That said, I’m afraid I’ve lost some of my old knack for political action.
The first problem was: was I going to be able to get into the damn suit? (Not an issue for the poor thin creatures at the
real Guantanamo, needless to say.) I had ordered an extra-large, but still had my doubts – particularly when the word went
about that they only came in one size.
The good news was that it fitted. The bad news was that once in, it was almost impossible to get out. Going to the loo involved
a good five minutes’ twisting and wriggling, before I could manage to release my shoulders and gradually pull the whole thing
down.
No coffee for the day seemed the obvious answer to that one. But worse was the fact that, even when strutting about the Faculty
Library in my bright orange, I still didn’t seem to manage to get the Guantanamo message across.
Maybe classicists really are the absent-minded, faraway creatures that I’m always claiming they’re not. Or maybe, as one of
my colleagues suggested, the handbag I was carrying slightly detracted from the overall impact. But the commonest reaction
I got, if anything, was, ‘Gosh, you’re bright today’, ‘Wow, great colour’, etc.
One wag asked me if I’d just been hired by Drainco. (Their guys do look pretty similar, but I thought actually I looked closer
to an Easyjet engineer.) Another, who at least got the point, asked if I was dressed up to celebrate Fidel Castro’s departure.
I rather envied one of my classicist co-demonstrators who had been giving a lecture and so at least was able to explain to
his captive audience why he was so colourfully dressed (and that he wasn’t actually moonlighting as the drain unblocker).
Was it this difficult in the 70s? I don’t remember it being so. But perhaps in truth it was.
Comments
I am continually amazed at the ignorance of the politically active. In fact, orange jumpsuits are a virtual uniform for ALL
prisoners in the US. Ordinary offenders appear in court wearing them regularly, not least on TV. And they are also shackled
while being led into court, though not in the Box. Similarly, in the comics of my childhood (which you
TLS
types are now trying to make me call ‘graphic novels’), convicts were always pictured in black and white stripes. And of course
with ball and chain. Guantanamo is a bad place, and we would be glad to see it closed, but the prisoners were apprehended
in circumstances which would lead rational people to suspect they may be bad lots.
WAVYDAVY
Prince Harry: the Roman solution
3 March 2008
I’ve found the adulation of Prince Harry – who appears to have spent a couple of months driving a laptop and something called
a ‘Spartan vehicle’ in Afghanistan – a bit hard to take. OK, it’s easy for me to sneer, as I haven’t been in the Taliban firing
line, but you know what I mean. Wouldn’t it actually have been more honourable if he had faced danger on some humanitarian
project rather than pushing forward whatever military folly we’re committing in Afghanistan?
Almost equally insufferable were the interviews with the said youth, including his memorable comment about how he didn’t like
England much. To this, I had two reactions. One is that it is Harry’s
job
to like England. The rest of us are allowed to feel as ambivalent as we like. But, as third in line to the throne, he doesn’t
have that luxury (though he has plenty of other ones). So he’d better just get on with it.
Second is that, if it’s the paparazzi who are bothering him, then maybe fewer late night romps at Boujis nightclub could do
the trick.
But further thought suggested that there was a Roman angle to this trip of the young prince to the military front line. In
fact, Roman emperors knew a thing or two about the problems of sending the son and heir off to war.
The emperor Augustus had particularly bad luck. Two of his grandchildren and chosen heirs were sent to the front and never
came back. Young Lucius was off to fight in Spain, but died at Marseilles on the way out. That was in 2 ad. In 4 ad, his brother
Gaius died in the east, after a war wound.
At least we’ve got Harry back.
Tiberius had bad luck of the opposite kind. He sent his adopted son Germanicus to the German frontier. The glamorous prince
didn’t manage to round up Arminius, the chief terrorist of the region – who was presumably holed up, Osama-like, in a cave
somewhere. But he did score a number of successes which went down rather too well in Rome for the peace of mind of his jealous
father.
Tiberius’ answer was to declare the war resoundingly finished (even though it wasn’t) and bring him back home for a triumph
in 17 ad. It must have been uncomfortable for the emperor, putting on a grateful face at the ceremony. But at least it had
put a stop to his victories.
Not that it was more than a temporary solution. Germanicus went off to the eastern frontier in 18 ad. The next year he died
in suspicious circumstances in Antioch. The Roman governor of Syria was tried for his murder. Gossip on the street was that
he had been poisoned at Tiberius’ orders.
Whatever the awkwardness of Harry’s current position, this story reminds us that his seniors must be grateful that he didn’t
pull off any really major heroics. Imagine that, armed only with his laptop and Spartan vehicle, he had single-handedly rescued
20 wounded men under Taliban fire. The tabloids would have loved it. But the political problems of what to do with him next
would have been a lot worse.
And who would have played Tiberius?
Comments
This one prompted a lot of comments on the same lines (‘Beard is disgusting ... Hats off to Harry’, ‘Get back to reading your
dusty books on Roman history’, ‘Why don’t you make yourself useful and go and knit something’, ‘Leave Harry alone!!!’, ‘Stick
to making jam Mary’, ‘What is this Beard woman wittering on about?’), but a few took a different, or more reflective, line:
Come on, Mary, be fair. Prince Harry is a young army officer who is obviously perfectly all right and, I suspect, good at
his job when he is given something to do – and lets off steam rather too publicly when idle. In my view we have here a prime
example of the modern hysterical, celebrity-orientated media in full cry.
You may think, as I do, that the fourth (British) Afghan War is a completely unnecessary and all round disastrous affair with
no apparent purpose, as opposed to cooked up excuses, but it does not alter the fact that our troops have been sent there
to fight and are doing so with considerable tactical success. The fact that strategically it can make little difference is
not their fault but that of our abysmal politicians.
RICHARD H
So, according to Professor Beard:
1 Harry should not fight for his country.
2 He should be more patriotic.
3 He should not enjoy his life while here.
I remember studying at Cambridge. This brings it back.
TOM
Well played, Mary. Almost as much bile generated by this piece as by the one featuring Parthenon.
ANTHONY ALCOCK
‘do some knitting’... ‘make some jam’...
I don’t feel that those who respond this way to what they see as Beard’s Nonsense make themselves seem very thoughtful commentators.
(I seem to remember that there were rumours, when men waved banners saying ‘iron my shirt’ at a Hillary Clinton rally, that
the Clinton camp had arranged for this to happen, since they in fact made Clinton look good, in that people are more attractive
when their enemies are clearly idiots.)
Prof. Beard: I don’t think you should retire from the world of public comment for a good long time. But if at some time in
the future you were to turn (NB ‘remote future conditional’) into a Clapped Out Academic with Nothing Left to Say, I suggest
you don’t bother with jam or knitting (unless you really want to) and settle instead for the traditional and gender-neutral
combination of food, novels and gentle alcoholism.
So next time somebody wants to tell the Prof. to shut up, may I suggest a non-sexist cry of ‘Beard, go and have a drink’?
RICHARD
Who says knitting and Classics are incompatible. I always knit my way through department meetings and two of my colleagues
have now joined me – a lifted knitting needle is an excellent way of intervening on a point of order.
I am afraid I do not understand how the bravery of Prince Harry is meant to parallel the career of Germanicus. But I do know
that what he has done requires courage I cannot even conceive of. And not the least impressive thing about him has been the
fact that he and his father on his return both made the point (resolutely under-reported by the press) that if he was a hero
so equally were the other 8000 folk serving Queen and country in the east.
OLIVER NICHOLSON
12 March 2008
When my mother was dying, she made it very clear that she didn’t want anyone wearing her clothes after she was dead. I didn’t
quite understand this at the time. After all, she would happily have given away her internal organs if they hadn’t been past
their sell-by date. And she happily distributed her used clothes during her lifetime. So why not after her death?
I vaguely supposed that it was something to do with the final annihilation that people going through, choosing or rejecting
your clothes would seem to entail. And didn’t give it much more thought.
But last week I came face to face with that sense of annihilation when the vultures (self included) descended to take the
pickings of my old, recently dead, supervisor’s books.
For many academics, books have much the same significance as clothes. They are what you use every day and you have your favourites
as well as your expensive mistakes. Not to mention the carefully mended, the carelessly torn, the messily annotated.
The trouble is what happens to them when you’ve gone to the great library in the sky.
In Cambridge, the labour of disposal often falls to your college – which normally takes its pick for the college library,
then lets the local second-hand bookseller take his pick and make a tidy profit.
John Crook’s college had made a different decision. They announced an afternoon when college and faculty, students and staff,
would be let into his old rooms to buy any book they wanted for a pound, though larger donations were welcome. All profits
were to go to a fund for the college staff. It was a nice idea – designed, I guess, to ensure that the old man’s books went
to those who would use and value them.
In fact it turned into a truly ghastly occasion.
The omens were bad when I walked into the college and met one of my graduate students who said that he’d just bought a copy
of my PhD thesis. Now, it couldn’t have gone to a better home, and I’m truly glad he got it. But I still felt that somehow
it was a personal thing between me and Crook – not something to be flogged for a quid.
It was altogether worse when I got in his rooms. They were emptier than he had left them, but his cap was still there, the
desk in the same place and all the books still on the shelves – or some of them were. For the vultures were already at work,
rifling through them section by section, picking out some, casually rejecting others. A few people had piles numbering what
looked like hundreds of volumes.
Couldn’t they have put the books on tables? Or just somewhere else? It seemed like theft taking them from the shelves where
some of them have spent the last 50 years.
The worst moment was when I heard one student bibliophile loudly bark: ‘Is it a presentation copy?’ I could have thumped the
boy. I wanted to say, ‘That book was given to him by a friend, who wrote in it for him ... and he then used it. It isn’t a
commodity which will enhance your collection because it’s got an author’s signature in it.’ But what was the point? We were
all there sniffing out the bargains, a bit like the first day of the sales.
Mum was right about her clothes, I thought.
17 March 2008
If you have academically élite universities, it’s only predictable – indeed it’s right and proper – that people debate exactly
what qualifications students should have to get into them.
A hundred years ago, the headlines were all about whether ancient Greek should be a necessary qualification to get into Cambridge.
Technically speaking it wasn’t actually a qualification you needed to be admitted in the first place. But, if you wanted an
honours degree, you had to do a preliminary exam in Greek soon after you arrived – which was pretty much the same thing in
practice.
The arguments went as you might expect. The abolitionists claimed that the Greek requirement was preventing highly intelligent
boys (
sic
) from coming to Cambridge, if they weren’t already at a select group of socially élite schools (the access argument). They
also suggested that it was pretty antediluvian requiring a dead language when you could be getting the boys to learn a modern
language, French or German (the utility argument).
On the other side, the retentionists argued that Greek was an essential part of a liberal education, and that it would disappear
from schools unless Cambridge continued to require it. To this the abolitionists retorted that it wasn’t Cambridge’s job to
take responsibility for the school curriculum.
The arguments went on from 1870 to 1919, when in the brave new post-war world the Greek requirement was abolished (and, true
to the retentionists’ fears, the decline of Greek in schools had begun).
A hundred years on and the radical choice of the early twentieth century – namely French and German – are now in their turn
to be toppled. Cambridge is planning no longer to require a modern language from all students across the board.
The arguments are strikingly reminiscent of those on ‘The Greek Question’, and both sides have a point.
On the one hand is the access argument. If only 17% of state schools now require pupils to study a foreign language after
the age of 14, then you’re
de facto
excluding a lot of potential students if you make it a necessary condition for Cambridge entrance. (Or, to put it another
way, you’ll find it hard to make your government access targets ...) This is backed up by the utility argument. Why should
we care if physicists know French, since the language of science is universal English?
On the other side is the argument that an élite university cannot be a monoglot university, and it is to challenge the very
excellence of Cambridge as an institution to suggest that it should be producing graduates who know no language but their
own. (That has been part of UCL’s argument for introducing the requirement that Cambridge now plans to abolish.) And you can
add to that the likely prediction that Cambridge’s decision on this will further weaken the precarious position of modern
languages in schools.
In my position, the safest place to be is on the fence. But deep down, as you’ve probably guessed, I am sure that this proposal
cannot be right. It is the duty of a university such as Cambridge to stand up for the highest academic standards (that’s a
responsibility that being a world-class institution brings). If it believes that modern languages are an essential part of
excellence, then it should be doing everything it can to ensure that all children have access to them (access in the real
sense) – not acceding to short-term quick fixes to meet some cynical government target.
As for the argument that physicists don’t need French ... It may be that the international language of science is English,
but do we really think that we are properly equipping our best scientists to work in the international world of Europe, China,
India, etc., if they don’t even know what it is
like
to learn a language to a decent level of competence? Isn’t ‘networking’ something we are now supposed to train them to do?
I bet that doesn’t all happen in English.
Maybe the idea is that we are going to teach them all a foreign language when they get here. But I doubt it somehow.
Comments
Pour qu’elles comprennent mieux la culture contemporaine, il faudrait plutôt apprendre aux étudiantes de français les éléments
de la physique
...
TIM SLUCKIN
Tim:
Aux étudiantes seulement, ou aussi aux étudiants?
SW FOSKA
