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Thursday 16 March 2023

Academics

Working in a university is a privilege. You get to meet and mix with some of the cleverest people, especially if you do research and give talks at conferences. You can find yourself sitting along the dinner table from an academic celebrity. The most impressive person I encountered under such circumstances was Jerome Bruner. To adapt a saying of my mother's, he had more wisdom in his little finger than I have in my whole body.

But those you actually work with can be just as impressive. Professor Alan (A.D.B.) Clarke of Hull University was one of those people who seemed to look deep inside you and know everything about you in just a few seconds. He had helped uncover the academic fraud of Sir Cyril Burt, upon which the British system of selective secondary educacion was based, with children selected for grammar school by intelligence testing at the age of eleven. I sat in Alan Clarke's 'Life-Span Human Development' tutorials for a year, absorbing every word. "Koluchova," he would say (she conducted one of the first scientific studies of children brought up in extreme isolation), "she stayed with us when she visited the U.K.". He seemed personally to know everyone who was anyone in psychology. We were awestruck. It showed me the power of personal anecdote.

Others I worked with more closely. Frank, with whom I shared an office for two years, was one of the cleverest people I have known. He had a degree and Ph.D. from Oxford University, and had seemed destined for a high-flying academic career until he had some kind of breakdown. He switched to university computer centre management, but another breakdown put him in a mental hospital. There, he met his wife, another patient. He was Jewish and she Catholic, and they had eight or nine children by the time I knew him. Long-term medication had left him with a permanent tremor and a staccato node of delivery that gave an air of affable authority. One day, instead of turning up for work in his usual casual attire, he appeared in a suit with his hair slicked down. I heard the students laughing in his lecture next door. "I must apologise for my appearance today," he had told them, "but I had to take my children to the nit doctors." (laughter). "And the reason why my hair is so neatly flattened is that I had to have the treatment as well." (Louder laughter, prolonged).  

Noel, another I worked with, knew everything. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? "The egg he would say," without hesitation, and explain it scientifically. How long is a piece of string? "Forty-two and a half inches" was his answer, "because that is the amount needed to hold up a navvy's trousers". I once saw one of his lectures: "Today's topic is Ethics," he began. "No, that's not a county in the South-East of England, it's a system of behaviour." The students sat blank-faced. I swear some of them wrote the whole thing down word for word, and will reproduce it in an exam answer.

Trevor was another who amused me. We were discussing the art of marking. "I can mark anything at all," he said, and looked around the room. "I could mark that filing cabinet if I had to," he pointed, "it's a B-minus." I knew exactly what he meant and had to agree. B-minus it was.

Just a few of the characters that come to mind. They are all dead now.

26 comments:

  1. Oh Tasker. That last line....

    Still, it is a sweet reminiscence of people who left a mark on your own life.

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    1. Some were a very long time ago. It would be unfair to write about the still-living. There are more true characters there.

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  2. They all sound like entertaining people to be around! LOL @ Noel's bad pun about Ethics/Essex.

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    1. He could say the most hilarious things in an incredibly deadpan way, and the more unthinking students would feed it back to him in exams.

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  3. Meeting clever people can still be done with the internet, though the Ted talks don't always hold out much. I am always glad when people put their essays and articles in PDF form. As for those lecturers not being here anymore, they have left their mark on the world I think.

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    1. It's a level higher when you can talk to them socially and they engage and ask you questions back, not just about the specialist topic but to chat about common things. Sometimes you cannot quite believe who you have been talking with

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  4. ‘I always enjoy your blog. I have particularly enjoyed the three most recent. i loved hearing about Doreen what a hopeful story. The blog about the English course got me thinking of all the books I have not read. I left school at 15 and into the work force. Many years later my sister in law told me I could enrol as a mature student at university and drove me to the uni—back then I did not drive and in between my son going to school and coming home for lunch got me enrolled inyo uni and into a course. It changed my life.

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    1. What a wonderfully supportive family. There are all kinds of opportunities these says, although I sometimes think they are decreasing againt. Thanks for appreciating the blog.

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  5. Do you mean to say that when I passed the 11 plus it was all a con?? Darn. Oh well, I always knew that I was never going to be one of the intelligent ones, and I was proved right!

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    1. If you passed it was most definitely not a con, but for many who didn't it was. More than half of those who now go to UK universities would have failed eleven plus. Look up Cyril Burt to know more.

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  6. Although I have never been to uni (I don't even have my country's equivalent of your A-levels), among my friends, acquaintances and co-workers are many who have studied. Some of them are highly intelligent and witty, some are just highly intelligent and not witty at all.
    I also know people who have not studied but are very knowledgeable and have a knack for transmitting their knowledge in a way that makes it enjoyable to learn. That, for me, is art.

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    1. Was talking just the other day with someone who is in an environmental pressure group which uses retired professors for advice. She thinks some of them aren't very bright. Qualifications are not everything.

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  7. I wonder how Professor Dunham was/is remembered? Humble, observant, diligent and kindly are words that spring to mind. Would you agree? Perhaps you could add one or two terms of your own. Self-analysis is, I understand, all the rage these days.

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  8. I love characters. They make the world go round don't they?

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    1. I tend to be drawn to the eccentric - perhaps that's why I like blogger!

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  9. I had the honor of taking my granddaughter to the nit picker. In this country you need only be dedicated to finding and terminating them, no degree required.

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    1. It was the way that Frank said things that made him so amusing. The word "nit" is so unexpected in a lecture about computing.

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  10. Many years ago I had the distinction of having as my physical chemistry tutor someone who had known most of the famous names in theoretical physics in the early 20th century - pride of place on his mantle piece was a late 1920s photo taken at a summer school he had attended, with Einstein, Heisenberg, Dirac, Bohr and many more famous names present.

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    1. That truly was awash with eminence. I bet he remembered that all his life. When you get to second-remove contact you find all kinds of surprises. One colleague I had spent a couple of years working with Linus Pauling.

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  11. Not being academically minded (wishing does not make it so no matter how hard you wish) I know little of what you mention here, but I do know the length of a piece of string is twice as long as half its length.

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    1. There's real insight - something academics don't necessarily have.

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  12. I'll have to pass along that "ethics" joke to the teacher of ethics and philosophy at our school! (It's perfectly ethical for me to borrow it, right?!)

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    1. I'm sure Noel would have been pleased to know it was appreciated.

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  13. You've bumped up against some of the great intellects, to be sure. And, yes, a personal anecdote goes a long way.

    Your post reminds me of a prof I once had when a student in the German Grad. Dept. at San Francisco State University. I can no longer remember his name, sadly, but he was so well-rounded, academically, that he really left an impression. He seemed to be able to tie various bits of seemingly disparate chunks of European history together without a hitch. I recall we had to read Faust in the original, among other texts, in his class. Not only fluent in German, aber klar!, but also in French and Italian as well. Already toward retirement age in the 1990s, I expect he is no longer with us either.

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    1. The most intelligent don't push it in your face. The ones who have to prove something are probably not as able as they might like. I think of Stephen Hawkin's comment about being more intelligent than us as we are than snails (although he was talking about AI).

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