Neville Morley's Blog, page 21

Blogs of the Year 2021

Are blogs still dying? Doing my best to separate this question from my feelings about this blog, which is definitely somewhat sickly – further discussion of this when I do my own review of the year – I tend to conclude: answer hazy, try again later. There have been some really excellent posts this year, and sone exciting new voices and ideas, and I honestly haven’t a clue whether they are getting the readership they deserve. It was a little disconcerting, for example, when someone I know on Facebook mentioned that yesterday their blog – albeit a time-limited project where the last post appeared in the first half of the year – got no visitors at all (suddenly my statistics look better than I thought…). I had a vague idea that in current circumstances we would all be looking more to this sort of short-form, informal, immediate commentary, both as readers and writers. But then I did think that, even if I couldn’t manage sustained writing at the moment, I would at least be able to keep up the blog posts, and look where that ended up. Indeed, looking back through this list, I’m struck by how much my reading clearly fell off at various points, and how much I fall back on certain writers time and again…

Anyway, the point of this post is not to moan, but to celebrate, and to remind myself – and whatever readers I have left – of some brilliant stuff they may have forgotten or missed.

January

Sententiae Antiquae on Eric Adler’s new book on the humanities: https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2021/01/11/save-the-humanities-with-this-one-simple-trick/amp/#click=https://t.co/9nJgPcLKzV

Josephine Grahl’s new year’s garden resolutions: https://belledelondres.wordpress.com/2021/01/12/new-years-gardening-resolutions-2020/ (and subsequent posts, especially

“Who are the marks in this grift?” Max Planudes on the college (university) crisis: https://planudes.medium.com/a-college-crisis-858df8798fc7

Caught up with this a month late – when the author died; Ed Rooksby on Long COVID: https://edrooksby.wordpress.com/2021/01/09/nine-months-in-the-long-limbo-of-long-covid/

February

Deborah Cameron on the Handforth Parish Council meeting and men talking over women: https://debuk.wordpress.com/2021/02/06/you-have-no-authority-here/?fbclid=IwAR0f6vqVfgjokfHsdaXAIQ_bDVVC6yHkWg7qEbtnEC1zUKXhJgw4Q_mLp7Y

Maria Farrell at Crooked Timber on the first year of the pandemic: https://crookedtimber.org/2021/02/18/the-last-time-i/#more-48477

March

Deborah Cameron (again), predictably brilliant on the linguistic aspects of Sarah Everard’s murder and its aftermath: https://debuk.wordpress.com/2021/03/14/when-words-fail-us/?fbclid=IwAR39qfa7v7N11CdeZN58yct_ipFs4NyMRWTTlWNwR1mgTKbdb9N83fuPTQo

Brett Scott deconstructs a BitCoin advert: https://t.co/rwEvnfmxlm?amp=1

April

John Holbo at Crooked Timber on Seuss and Nietzsche – and of course his ongoing project of On Beyond Zarathustra (https://www.onbeyondzarathustra.com): https://crookedtimber.org/2021/04/14/zarathustra-columnar-emersonian-or-divine-hanswurst/

Jonathan W. Wilson on Cornel West’s odd and potentially counterproductive defence of the Classics Department at Howard University: https://bluebook.life/2021/04/21/testing-the-west-at-howard-university-thoughts-on-a-very-strange-op-ed/

Liz Gloyn’s reflections on pandemic teaching: https://lizgloyn.wordpress.com/2021/04/24/reflections-on-a-year-of-pandemic-teaching/

May

Foluke Ifejola on racial (in)justice in higher education: https://folukeafrica.com/racial-injustice-in-higher-education-a-tri-temporal-failure/

Katherine Harloe on education and her mother: http://blogs.reading.ac.uk/gender-history-cluster/2021/05/13/on-education/

Katherine Blouin on academic annual reports from the plague year: https://isisnaucratis.medium.com/stay-alive-what-academic-annual-reports-don-t-say-7ef9b31bbc3

June

Max Planudes on institutional affiliation: https://planudes.medium.com/the-prestige-economy-of-university-affiliation-4ac366c96c55

Nadhira Hill, Notes from the Apotheke on sacrifices in classical studies: http://notesfromtheapotheke.com/5-things-to-sacrifice-in-classics/

July

Dan Nexon at The Duck of Minerva of the development of politics blogging: https://www.duckofminerva.com/2021/07/the-vision-thing-more-on-the-new-duck.html

Deborah Cameron on names, initials and citation practices: https://debuk.wordpress.com/2021/07/13/women-of-letters/

Liz Gloyn’s Office Mental Health first aid kit for personal tutors: https://lizgloyn.wordpress.com/2021/07/22/some-suggestions-for-an-office-mental-health-first-aid-kit/

August

L.D.Burnett on the endorphin rush of throwing things away: https://loradawnburnett.medium.com/into-the-dumpster-it-goes-6f1452498a74

Spencer McDaniel on the ‘discovery’ of remains of the Trojan Horse: https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2021/08/11/no-archaeologists-have-not-found-the-trojan-horse/

September

Will Pooley gets an AI to write his blog post: https://williamgpooley.wordpress.com/2021/09/13/i-aint-worried-about-human-redundancy-just-yet/

Robert Ziomkowski on the new Latin translation of The Hobbit: https://medium.com/in-medias-res/would-tolkien-approve-of-the-hobbit-in-latin-1b51089ee301

Deborah Cameron (having a particularly outstanding year) on the naming of dogs: https://debuk.wordpress.com/2021/09/23/the-naming-of-dogs/?fbclid=IwAR0rvDtXWblbuP15024W6D4JJeXuF3hfHjXTsea0z6OA-J6zoRqj0temANo

Rebecca Futo Kennedy on why she is not a humanist: https://rfkclassics.blogspot.com/2021/09/i-am-not-humanist.html?fbclid=IwAR3NicAUnXXPiWJJpia1CMQFMs2RQIx3ADyZUoM9PBN_BlShbHoLVgM6dsw

October

Eric Schliesser’s latest report on his Long COVID (with helpful links to earlier posts): “I suddenly realized that I was disassociating from the ambitions that had characterized my professional identity.” https://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2021/10/covid-diaries-stagnation.html

Dimitri Nakassis on drawing a line around Greece and Rome: https://englianos.wordpress.com/2021/10/12/double-tap/

November

Alexandra Sills (@BelovedOfOizys) on studying under pandemic conditions: https://ancientalexandra.wixsite.com/domus/post/silver-platters-and-students-in-pandemics

Henry Farrell on science fiction and social science: https://crookedtimber.org/2021/11/15/the-future-finds-its-own-use-for-things/

Chris Bertram on the deaths of refugees in the English Channel: https://crookedtimber.org/2021/11/25/people-drown-in-the-channel-fake-tears-and-fingers-in-ears/

December

Vanessa Stovall (@theoctopiehole) on Wayne Shorter and esperanza spalding’s Iphigenia, which I desperately need to see but in the meantime this will do: https://medium.com/corona-borealis/iphigenia-extended-the-revolutionary-indigestion-of-wayne-shorter-esperanza-spaldings-ed2d839f4534

Isabel Ruffell (@iaruffell) on offensiveness in ancient and modern comedy: http://artemisia.scot/blog/2021/12/21/the-death-of-comedy-again/

Everything Changes

If I had the artistic talent, I would actually have a go at drawing the H.M. Bateman-style cartoon: a gathering of sleek, well-fed people in sharp business suits, enjoying lavish corporate hospitality in a shiny modern building, variously shocked, horrified, apoplectic and overcome with laughter at one of their number who is blushing awkwardly in the centre. The title? ‘The Vice Chancellor Who Admitted He Was Not Currently Planning A Gratuitous Institutional Restructuring Strategy In Pursuance aof A Transformative Ten-Year Strategy’.

(Obviously this thought is prompted solely by the University of Sydney’s proposal to abolish arts and social sciences departments, and the various UK universities seizing the opportunities presented by the plague to invest in redundancy payments and consultancy fees, and not at all by any vague rumours about what my own institution may be planning).

Why do they always do this? The official justification is invariably a lot of boilerplate twaddle about adaptation to an ever-changing world with new challenges, needing to change in order to stay the same, embracing the opportunities of global and tech and becoming truly world-leading in international competitiveness metrics, generally with a rather snide paragraph about addressing academic cultures of complacency and change resistance. Yadda yadda. But one can accept the reality of major challenges to universities in the twenty-first century, even if put in rather more down-to-earth terms, and still think that getting everyone to devote limited supplies of time, energy and patience to adapting to new institutional structures which will inevitably require significant modification over a period of years may not be the best way of facing those challenges. Why not get everyone to focus on them, for example, rather than focusing on how their individual working conditions are being turned upside down?

Well, I guess you don’t get very far in VC appointment processes if you suggest that the university in question is basically fine; the core message needs to be that the institution is full of exciting potential but is currently failing to realise it to the full, and anything else indicates a lack of ambition and courage. But it would be nice to imagine that, having made this pitch to the interviewing panel, a newly-appointed VC might take a few months to get to know their domain and then say, You know what? This place is actually working pretty well. We could do better in various areas, so let’s focus a bit more energy there, but otherwise carry on as you are. Good job, everyone.

Yeah, right. Obviously I’m looking at this from the wrong end. What would be the point of a VC who didn’t unleash a massive programme of structural transformation? It’s either than or lots of shiny buildings (or both, admittedly), and the thing about the buildings is that they need to be paid for, whereas apart from the management consultant fees the costs of structural transformation are assumed to be covered by normal operational budgets (or perhaps assumed to be negligible).

Academics are generally pretty good at self-organisation; as seen in the last eighteen months, they get the teaching done, however adverse the circumstances; they get the research written and the grant applications submitted, because it’s what they want to do. Academic administrators likewise; we are all highly practised at keeping the show on the road. To a significant degree you can issue high-level instructions and leave people to get on with it, adapting them to local circumstances; it’s when there’s an insistence on micro-management and uniformity for its own sake that the problems turn up.

This doesn’t mean that the VC role is actually just reduced to shaking a lot of hands and delivery the same terrible speech multiple times at graduation. There are hard decisions to be made all the time, that need someone to make them – but they are mundane, keeping the show on the road so everyone else can get on with their thing decisions. They are not glamorous. They are not “this is why I deserve my high six-figure salary” decisions.

And, insofar as the modern VC thinks of her/himself as the CEO of a dynamic business, there is a distinct lack of the sorts of KPIs that most CEOs appeal to as justifications for salary and bonuses. No share price. No market share. No profits. No meaningful measure of productivity, and giving every academic an annually-increasing quota of first-class degrees to award led to such terrible publicity. Holding VCs responsible for changes in league table position would be grossly unfair, as clearly they’re skewed and almost random unless you go up. To much of the university’s business depends on people over whom you have relatively little control. But you do have control over the structures within which they work…

One optimistically imagines that VCs genuinely believe they will be making a contribution to the success of the whole university by messing about with things which they have the power to mess with, rather than these endless reorganisations being merely a solipsistic struggle to prove and justify their existence. Who would thank or praise or reward a VC who just kept the show on the road for a decade? Well, most of the staff, but they don’t count.

Only Human

This blog remains, if not in full hibernation, then certainly in a deep torpor; reducing all but essential functions until the warm weather returns, or the rains come and The valley is green again, or whatever other metaphor one chooses for the idea that, some day, I will once again have the sort of levels of energy and mental agility that will allow me to complete all my teaching, teaching prep and essential emails in less than the full working week, thus making space for research, writing and even blogging. Could be worse; there are lots of people having a much harder time of it, and this gas actually freed me of the addiction to checking my viewing stats daily and getting depressed about them. Now I can get depressed about thr decline of this blog without needing to look at then!

But essential functions do continue, and one of them is the way this blog has become a handy means of recording things that might become useful at some point in the future. (I also have some things in Notes, where I had at one pointed envisaged a lengthier post; maybe some day…). Firstly, a couple of new entries for the catalogue of war memorials with Pericles/Thucydides quotes, as someone posted on the Twitter that they’d visited the American Cemetery and Memorial at Margraten, near Maastricht, where they saw (on the west side of the tower of the chapel) an inscription described as “a free translation of Pericles’ oration as recorded by Thucydides”: “Each for his own memorial earned praise that will never die and with it the grandest of all sepulchres, not that in which his mortal bones are laid but a home in the minds of men.”

A quick google confirmed that it’s the version of the funeral oration by Alfred Zimmern, originally published in The Greek Commonwealth. Interesting, and maybe a little unfair, that it’s described as ‘free’ (including in the official guide, which presumably the Tweeter was simply quoting) – no more so than other versions, I would have said, so I almost wonder if someone wrote this just because it’s not the rendition in the Landmark Thucydides. Also interesting that this is a WWII memorial, whereas most Thucydides citations in this context date from the 1920s – but of course that’s partly because many WWII commemorations were simply added to existing memorials.

The same quick google pointed me towards another example of the Zimmern quote being used, on the wooden memorial board from Blackpool Grammar School (link to war memorials register), dedicated in 1924, and THAT introduced me to the search facility in the Imperial War Museum’s database of war memorials. Searching for ‘Thucydides’ doesn’t produce a very long list, but only one of them was already on my list; I can now add Prestwick St Nicholas Golf Club, Barry Memorial Hall (on the plaque erected in 1982 to commemorate its 50th anniversary) and the Airborne Forces Memorial in Aldershot, dedicated in 1990. And, rather wonderfully, a memorial (no date in the database; I’m going to have to visit…) to those who died on the royalist side, and only the royalist side, at the Battle of Newbury, which includes the Thucydides in Greek…

And, secondly, I need to make a note to write to Ole Gunnar Solskjær – once a suitable eriod has elapsed – to ask whether he was consciously channelling Thucydides when, having been asked if he could explain the persistent Groundhog Day rendencies of his team, he responded that “They’re only human.” Kata to anthropinon; present events tend to resemble those of the past, because of the human thing. This includes the belief that simply changing the manager will sort everything out – just like imagining that at some point I will suddenly have time and energy again…

Update: see rabbit hole, jump down rabbit hole… The Newbury memorial, generally known as the Falkland Memorial after Viscount Falkland, the most prominent casualty of the battle, is really odd and fascinating. It was erected in 1878 – so, the 235th anniversary of 1643, which isn’t the most obvious one to celebrate – after Newbury Council was persuaded to take on the project by one Walter Money, FSA, a local historian who later wrote various books about the history of Newbury and is commemorated himself by a blue plaque in the town, naming him as the Father if Newbury History. It was unveiled by Lord Carnavon, descendant of Viscount Falkland. What is remarkable is the main inscription, on the north side, besides Thucydides in Greek (described by one website as “illegible”, which I guess is just because it’s in Greek, but I will need to check) on the west side, Livy IX.1 in Latin on the east, a rather gnomic remark by Burke about the value reasons for shedding the blood of man:

IN MEMORY OF THOSE/ WHO, ON THE 20TH SEPTEMBER, 1643/ FELL FIGHTING IN THE ARMY OF KING CHARLES I,/ ON THE FIELD OF NEWBURY, AND ESPECIALLY/ LUCIUS CARY, VISCOUNT FALKLAND/ WHO DIED HERE IN THE 34TH YEAR OF HIS AGE./ THIS MONUMENT IS SET UP BY THOSE TO WHOM/ THE MAJESTY OF THE CROWN AND/ THE LIBERTIES OF THIER COUNTRY ARE DEAR.

That is… somewhat polemical. The dead on the Parliamentary side don’t merit any sort of commemoration at all? Presumably Burke’s list of acceptable grounds for bloodshed don’t include setting limits on arbitrary royal power. My knowledge of 19th-century British history is not such that I can immediately think of a reason why relitigating thr English Civil War would be a thing – assuming that there’s no direct connection to the premier of HMS Pinafore. Was this just Money’s personal obsession, and he was also one of those people who celebrate the feast of Charles King and Martyr? But how did he get the council to go along with it..?

Head Hunters

I have been head-hunted! Not, alas, for a lucratively-endowed chair in Thucydides Studies at the new University of Austin, despite all my best efforts to promote this icon of neocon power politics and the innate cultural superiority of paunchy middle-aged white men. No, it’s for an academic leadership position – which would involve dealing with a lovely group of colleagues (just in case whoever put my name forward reads this and makes the deductive leap), but would also involve trying to manage modern historians and archaeologists as well. You know that simile about herding cats? Okay, you know what simile cats use for the same phenomenon..?

I used to get these sort of approaches quite regularly, when I was a Faculty Education Director, for positions like PVC for UG Studies – and it was obvious that the headhunters had simply trawled university web pages for people with relevant job titles. This feels different, as I don’t think there’s anything at all on my current webpage that would suggest aptitude for, let alone desire for, such a role. I mean, I imagine I could make a reasonable go of it, being possessed of a range of bureaucratic skills and a ruthless approach to chairing meetings, but I’m not sure it would be a good idea for anyone involved. Don’t make me Management; you wouldn’t like me when I’m Management… And I would miss the teaching too much, and be much too conscientious and thus stressed and miserable, and this is even before one thinks about what humanities departments are likely to be facing over the next few years.

I am also, partly through bitter experience, entirely unconvinced of the merits of parachuting in someone from outside to take on such a role. VCs and PVCs, fine, but at Faculty and School level so much depends on knowing the people and knowing how things work, and that is a huge learning curve for someone who’s new to the whole place (it’s tricky enough making the step up from a department). It’s inevitable that in many cases the parachutee stops trying to make the effort, since they’ve been pitched straight into trying to manage something they don’t know or understand, and thus ends up over-relying on a limited number of people they met early on, on a series of snap character judgements and assumptions, and on insisting that reality be modified to conform to their experience. Better, if anyone wants my ha’pennyworth, to bring someone in as a normal academic, give them a few years to settle in and get to know people, and then press-gang them into leadership.

The nagging thought that I’m trying to fend off with all this banter is of course: what does it say about me, that someone thinks I would ever want to do this? Academic leaders are not head-hunted for their research potential, but at best for their research past; you’ve done enough to build a reputation and be taken seriously when you try to tell other people what to do, but obviously it’s all now a bit moribund or pointless, as why else would you be prepared to abandon it in order to sit in lots of committee meetings instead? I know that head-hunting of research leaders goes on, as I keep getting asked to write letters and reviews to feed into the recruitment process – and, yes, that’s an ego boost; “Dear Professor Morley, please would you provide a comprehensive assessment of how Colleague X is obviously better than you as we’re thinking of offering them a prestigious research position…” But I just get the academic leadership approaches.

On reflection, it is of course perfectly possible that other people are being approached to write comprehensive evaluations of Morley, for the purposes of consideration for a prestigious research position, and are universally responding along the lines of “unfocused, lightweight and past it, but can be counted on to write positive things about colleagues, if you’re short of reviewers, and might be worth considering as a Head of School.”

But enough of such bitter thoughts! Where there’s life, there’s hope. There is still plenty of time to get myself cancelled…

The Horror, The Horror

I’ve been having flashbacks to that time in my previous outfit when I was sent to have a word (with extreme prejudice) with a Faculty Education Director who’d stopped answering emails. Professor Kurtz was a fine academic manager, combining military efficiency with a broad background in the Humanities, the Arts and Sciences. He viewed his career as the dedication of his talents to bringing our values and way of life to those darker, less fortunate people – students. He’d been sent out to survey student ideas about feedback and assessment, after rumours of NSS discontent had reached senior management.

“Your mission makes about as much sense as those idiots who sent you on it,” he snarled at me, his face lit up with the blue light of the online submission system. “Asshole! Schmuck! How long does it take you to figure out that nobody knows what they’re doing here. Except me. Students don’t really care about feedback, just marks. Let’s just give it to them, quick and nasty. It’s all meaningless, arbitrary chaos anyway. You’re not an educator, Morley. You’re a tick-box checker, trained by cynics, running endlessly round their hamster wheel until you drop…”

No, I don’t know why this is the image that came to mind – especially as I was actually the one who carried out that survey, and had to deal with the finding that a substantial majority of students who responded considered that the primary if not the only function of feedback was to explain why they didn’t get a better mark… The reason I’m thinking about this topic at all this week (student exercises not due until next week…) is the mention by a friend on Facebook that a certain university – I’m not sure how official or confidential this is, so I’m not going to name it – is planning to deal with poor NSS scores on feedback, especially on its promptness, by bringing in an external provider to deliver immediate generic feedback on student work.

I mean, what? How can that possibly work, unless they simply plan to run each submission through a spellchecker and comment on the grammar? Even generic feedback, of the “you need to have a much stronger structure and better sign-posting” variety, surely depends on specialist evaluation of the exercise. The only way I can imagine this working is if the academics are required to produce detailed marking plans for each question, listing the key points that need to be included, that can then be farmed out to poorly-paid tickbox monkeys. And of course the reason we don’t generally mark like that in the humanities is that university-level study is supposed to go well beyond the “here are the 20 Key Facts you need to include for this topic” approach. So obviously current practices will need to change to accommodate the new system…

It’s clearly true that many of our students have expectations of the speed with which their work ought to be returned that are completely incompatible with our norms of two to three weeks, presumably because of the way they’re used to things happening at school. To which the obvious responses are (a) poor bloody school teachers, (b) how far does this depend on (i) smaller classes than e.g. my 160-odd Greek History course and (ii) much shorter exercises than 3,000-word essays, and (c) much lower expectations of what the feedback will consist of. Our basic explanation for needing two to three weeks, besides sheer lack of time, is that we are evaluating longer, more complex and varied pieces of work in more depth and detail, providing more or less extensive comments both on the intrinsic qualities and on how the student might improve in future exercises, and you can’t turn that around in a day or so..

But what if a significant number of students really don’t want that sort of lovingly crafted bespoke feedback, but just a mark and a few comments as quickly as possible? That seems counter-productive, from our perspective – how much use can you get from such minimal information? But it does make sense in a world where you need the quick feedback so you can modify your homework exercise the following week, and then over the course of the year, and scores of such exercises, gradually modify your approach on the basis of what seems to do better in terms of marks, even if the written comments are in some cases quite limited. Thinking back, that’s certainly how it was for me.

Now of course university is not that world; indeed, it’s a world where the message from senior management has regularly been that we assess too much. We provide such detailed and copious feedback because assessment exercises are relatively rare, and hence individually quite important for overall results, and so students need lots of advice on how to maximise their performance without being able to follow the incremental, trial and error approach they’ve been used to following. And assessment exercises are relatively rare at least in part because we provide such feedback and so the whole enterprise is time-consuming. And, while our goal is to adjust student expectations about how to think about assessment so they fit with our approach, one feels less than sanguine about the prospects if management decide that the path of least resistance is to adjust out approach to match student expectations. From outsourcing feedback on the basis (presumably) of limited mark schemes, in order to accelerate speed of return of (rubbish) feedback, to the expectation that because assessment is now much quicker and more limited it should be happening much more often, is a relatively small step…

My best results from feedback, with almost total buy-in and enthusiasm from students, come in my final-year modules, where, following the practice of my colleague Rebecca Langlands, assessment comes in two stages: draft, on which they receive detailed feedback, and then revised version (worth a lot more marks). With, as I recall, just one exception – when the student responded to my feedback by submitting something completely new and different (and worse) for the second stage – every student has improved their marks as a result, in some cases to a dramatic degree. I don’t know how far it helps them also recognise the utility of feedback in other tasks; I would hope so.

And of course really I need to be doing this with first-year students, so they understand why feedback matters and learn how to make use of it at an early stage – but then we’re talking about 160 students rather than 12, and it is significantly more work than just marking a one-off essay. Reduce my teaching load so that this would be feasible, and I’ll do it; give me a decent number of teaching assistants, and I’ll train and monitor them; but in current circumstances…

Actually, I shouldn’t say this, but threaten to outsource the feedback process and I might do it anyway out of sheer bloody-minded fury.

Rough Trade

I have another piece in my very small collection of Thucydideana! Like the last one (discussed here) it’s a collectible card, but it’s a good deal less impressive all round – monochrome printing on a thin brown card, with an abstract design on one side and a drawing of a distinctly bad-tempered bust of Thucydides on the other.

It’s clearly a card designed for collecting; there are several hundred of similar design, showing different historical figures (and a small number of other things, as I’llndiscuss below) available from the same seller on eBay, who has clearly acquired a set or two and is selling them off card by card (there are significant numbers of duplicates, but that could equally well indicate several collections and a single collection that retained all the duplicates in the hope of trading them for missing ones). And there’s the negative argument that there is no company name here, so it’s not a cigarette card or chocolate card or other form of advertising.

What was ‘The Daily Historic’? I have no idea – it is a very unhelpful phrase to try Googling, and it’s not mentioned in any of the websites about collectable cards that I’ve consulted. This may be a very small, local operation, which has perhaps survived just as a single collection – or, they’re just not very popular or interesting, given the lack of colour and low production values. In the absence of any information, I’m reduced to trying to infer things from the subjects of the cards – and this is rather puzzling, so if anyone out there does have relevant information I’d be delighted to hear it.

‘The Daily Historic’ was indisputably American. Among the several hundred cards there is a decent number of figures from ancient history and literature (more Greek than Roman, by my estimate – and very little from any other ancient culture) and European history, literature and philosophy, but then an overwhelming number from 18th- and especially 19th-century US history, most of them people of whom I have never heard: Rufus Blodgett, Jones Very, Lyman Abbott, Professor S. Stone Wiggins, Johnston Blakeley, Rufus Choate, Hamilton Fish. (I’m very keen to know if these are actually household names in the US today and I’m just being parochial). There are some odd omissions – no Washington or Franklin or Grant or Lee or Lincoln (though there is a John Wilkes Booth) – But my guess is that these readily found buyers as soon as they came on the market, rather than never having been included. There are probably fewer people out there collecting Bjornstjorne Bjornson memorabilia…

There are three other kinds of subject: a small number of cars (1922 Star station wagon, 1926 Bugatti, 1941 Lincoln Continental), a series on bull-fighting (!) offering a mixture of dramatic scenes (‘A Powerful Bull’, ‘A Triumphant Afternoon’) and depictions of specific moves/techniques, and a series of sportsmen, primarily from American Football and baseball, some from the early 20th century but others whose careers ran into the 1970s and early 1980s.

On the face of it, that suggests a terminus post quem for the whole set. But, if so, there is an astonishing lack of 20th-century figures, compared with the hordes of 19th-century ones. All the ones I can see, apart from the sportsmen, come from the early decades of the century: David Loyd (sic) George, Cecil Rhodes, Arthur Quiller-Crouch, Queen Wilhelmina, Sir Archibald Geikie, Archbishop Ireland. Further, Douglas Haig appears as ‘Sir Douglas Haig’ – by implication, post-1909 but pre-1917 – and one card depicts the Duke of Cornwall and York – the title of the future George V before his accession to the throne in 1910. I struggle to imagine why anyone would think Haig was collectable at all, but surely a set of cards produced after 1920 or so would call him either ‘Lord Haig’ or just ‘Douglas Haig’.

It’s much, much easier to understand the choice of subjects as reflecting an early C20 idea of historical noteworthiness; the only alternative that makes sense is that there were also lots of notable later C20 figures, but they have all already been sold. But what about the sportsmen? Well, while the basic design of the cards remains the same, the pictures here are reproductions of photographs, rather than the line drawings of all the historical figures; this suggests that they could be a much later series, even if it retains the gothic script of ‘The Daily Hostoric’ at the top. And it’s worth noting that both the cars and the bull-fighting cards are printed in (crude) colour; again, suggesting that they are later productions.

But on the other hand, that would imply significant continuity, from producing historical character card collections in the 1900s to producing American sportsmen card collections in the 1970s, without the enterprise responsible having left any obvious trace – the eBay selle describes the cards as ‘rare’, and certainly I can’t find anyone else selling them.

So, maybe my Thucydides is indeed rare, or even unique, as well as being in an extremely bad mood.

Appendix: the ancients depicted (not necessarily a complete list, as there are limited to how far I want to work through systematically 50+ screens of 50 cards each) include Aeschylus, Antisthenes, Aristophanes, Alcibiades, Achilles, Agamemnon, Augustus, Apuleius, Euripides, Hippocrates, Homer, Sophocles, Herodotus, Demosthenes, Solon, Sappho, Socrates, Cicero, Marcus Iunius Brutus, Virgil, Seneca, Vespasian, Tiberius Claudius (?), Cleopatra, Vespasian and Caracalla – and, for some unaccountable reason, Bias.

Gone Fishing

Sometimes, however much you need to take the weekend to rest and recuperate, just do a bit of reading or music and spend time with loved ones, there is a task that simply can’t wait. Actually it should have been done last weekend but you were then too tired to do more than a bit of preparatory work, and of course there was no time during the week with all the regular demands of teaching and meetings and seeing students; so, regardless of the consequences for Monday, it’s bye-bye Saturday and much of Sunday…

I’m referring, of course, to the pressing need to press this year’s apple harvest into juice, for cider-making and pasteurising, before it all rots. I’m honestly not sure which leaves me in a more exhausted state the next day, several hours’ of pounding chopped-up apples and turning the press, or trying to write academic stuff when I really just want to sleep. Certainly the deadline for submitting AHRC reviews or that overdue chapter is never so biologically absolute. But I am very conscious of how it can seem like it, that if I don’t get something done NOW then I will become mouldy and bloated and entirely useless.

I’m promoted to think about this theme this morning (the reason I’m bothering to write a blog post is that the WiFi is down on my train) because of a post by a Facebook friend and the subsequent discussion; he was explaining to one of his children why he couldn’t get all the work he needed to do done in Monday to Friday and so had to work weekends as well, and got the response “But they can’t ask you to do more work than you can actually do in the week, can they?” One of the key questions in the comments was how far this is actually all about research, and being a research high-flyer – the familiar “you do it to yourself, you do” of academia – or whether doing the regular termtime teaching and admin stuff, conscientiously but not obsessively so, always in practice exceeds the time allocated to it.

I’m honestly not sure about this issue. On the one hand, I am managing this term to keep most weekends free, except when I suddenly realise that I’m booked into an online conference, while keeping up with teaching and other duties; on the other hand, all three of my current courses are things I’ve taught before so there’s a lot less preparation involved, and I really have no spare time or energy so goodness knows what happens when eighty second-year source analysis exercises turn up for marking; on the third hand, I am very conscious that I’m not fully fit, with lingering effects of plague, so this can’t be taken as typical of my working week in more normal circumstances.

Pacing myself when it comes to the research – a euphemism for “not actually doing much” – is a rational strategy for trying to recover; as I regularly have to remind myself, to give myself permission to take things a bit easier and not feel bad about it. And I am very conscious that this is a privilege, that I can pause my research without major consequences; I’m unlikely to be disciplined for unsatisfactory performance just yet, even if going up a pay grade seems improbable, the next REF is a good few years away so I’m not yet letting the department down, so basically I just have to deal with guilt at letting editors and colleagues and publishers down and with frustration at the fact that I do genuinely want to write at least some of the things I’m supposed to be writing. I do not have to worry that my lack of productivity will prevent me from getting a job or lose me the one I have because of the criteria for progression and promotion.

There is a case, however, made in the Facebook thread mentioned above, that possessing such privilege is not grounds for trying to hide it or refusing to exercise it, but on the contrary for making the most of it, as an example that academia is not an should never be the whole of one’s identity and life. If established professors can’t (or won’t) take weekends off or leave their work email alone for a microsecond, it sets expectations of everyone and so perpetuates an increasingly toxic working culture. I agree, so long as this doesn’t displace work onto more junior colleagues (academic and administrative) – at least in principle, as I am conscious of the hypocrisy involved when actually, left to my own devices and fully healthy, I probably would be working evenings and weekends to try to ‘catch up’ on everything that’s fallen behind in the last few years.

One of my brothers is a GP, as is his wife, and it was striking when we last met that he said he now honestly wasn’t sure, if he had his time over again and knew how things would turn out, that he’d have chosen the medical profession, given current working conditions. I occasionally wonder the same – qualified by the facts that (1) I’d probably have been useless for anything except academia and (2) on the other hand I was lucky to get into it in the first place. When I started, I remember older colleagues complaining about deterioration in the nature of the job, and wondering what they were moaning about; whereas of course the deterioration since I was in my early thirties is unmistakable…

My brother is actually pretty good at managing the work-life balance thing – in order to go off and do things like the Marathon des Sables, a six-day ultramarathon in the Sahara. To be honest it’s hard not to see this as either masochism or as a psychological justification – yes, I’m having time off rather than helping people with their varicose veins and possible plague symptoms, but I am clearly Not Having Fun. In my own, much safer and more boring way, I’m clearly doing the same thing: the apples have to be pressed so I have to take time off to do it, the beans need to be picked and dried, the quinces need to be jellied, and so forth. ‘The articles need to be written’ has, for the moment, not got quite the same leverage.

Doubling Down

If Thucydides was so bloody clever and full of real insight into human nature, the opening of Book 8 – set in the immediate aftermath of the failure of the Sicilian Expedition, ignominious retreat and surrender of the expeditionary force, execution of its commanders etc. – would have read more like this:

When the news reached Athens, for a long time they refused to believe that their forces had been so utterly destroyed, and would not accept even the unambiguous reports brought back by those who had actually witnessed the events. When these become too numerous to ignore, they declared that these were signs of a period of transition that would lay the foundations for a still more glorious victory in due course, while others insisted that the expedition had now been completed and so it was time to discuss other things. They did not blame their leaders or the others who had persuaded them to the original course of action, because the provocative behaviour of the Syracusans in defeating their army simply reinforced the case for having attacked them in the first place. And when they could not see an adequate number of ships in the docks, adequate funds job the treasury or an adequate supply of grain in the markets, they denounced as the consequence of Spartan overreach when Athens’ hands had been tied by the treaty it had been compelled to sign of its own volition…

Concepts, Methodologies and Theories

I am celebrating – very quietly, as I very much doubt that any fees were paid to the original publishers – the appearance of the Iranian translation of my old Theories, Models and Concepts book; partly, it is nice that anyone still thinks it might be useful, and mostly I just find the script so beautiful even if I can’t understand a word of it. Apparently my name gets transliterated as Noobil, which I rather like… I did write a short preface for the translation, reflecting on the writing of the original, and since I imagine that few of the small number of people who might be interested in this will actually be able to read Farsi, it makes sense to reproduce it here…

To a significant degree, the modern social sciences emerged out of the study of the ancient past. The pioneering economic, social and cultural theorists of the 18th and 19th centuries like Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim or Max Weber were of course familiar with the societies and culture of classical antiquity, and to a lesser extent those of the Near East, as part of their school and university education, and so it was natural that they drew on them as a source of evidence and examples. But this engagement with ancient history was more than just coincidence or convenience. Ancient societies were fascinating because they were complex and sophisticated, the producers of ideas and cultural artefacts that were still admired and imitated in the present, and yet in many ways they were utterly different and alien. They represented a crucial test case, and challenge, for any theories based on the study of European modernity that claimed to be universal; and they provided an illuminating point of contrast with the developing modern society that was the main focus of interest for these thinkers. 

It was only when the social sciences abandoned their interest in historical comparison in favour of abstract theories with claims to normative status (classical economics is the most obvious example) that ancient history faded from view. But it is tempting to suggest that ancient historians should also share the blame for this estrangement, since with rare exceptions they showed little interest in maintaining a dialogue with social science; they insisted on prioritising language skills above all else, and frequently dismissed any mode of argument beyond the citation of ancient literary texts. Of course this attitude was never universal – we might think of figures like M.I. Rostovtzeff, Jane Harrison or M.I. Finley, who drew on the ideas of other disciplines to develop new interpretations – but ‘normal ancient history’, to echo the theory of scientific progress of Thomas Kuhn, was resolutely untheoretical, or even anti-theoretical. This was still more the case when it came to the teaching of students. Until about twenty years ago, if you learnt any kind of general principles of historical analysis, rather than just accumulating factual information, it focused on discussion of ancient sources, without any concern for problems of interpretation. The idea that there might be ways of studying the past that questioned the priority of literary evidence, or even ignored it altogether, was a heresy that one encountered only at graduate level. 

One significant factor was the separation of ‘ancient history’ – the study of the classical Greeks and Romans – from the rest of ‘history’ in many universities, certainly in the United Kingdom up to the 1980s. While the social sciences had largely turned away from history at the beginning of the twentieth century, the separation was not absolute, and from the 1930s some historians (most notably the Annales school in France) sought to narrow the gap and adopt a more social-scientific approach to the study of the past. One reason why I ended up with a slightly different perspective to the dominant mode of ancient history was that I had started my undergraduate studies on a History programme, which included a course on General Historical Problems that introduced me to a selection of other ways of ‘doing history’. It was rather haphazard in its coverage, and a lot of it has made sense to me only in retrospect – partly, if I’m quite honest, because at the time I was focused as much on playing in bands and writing journalistic essays as I was on my actual studies. But studying this course established in me a basic assumption that one should always ask about a historian’s approach and concepts, rather than just reading their conclusions; and, with a couple of key examples – above all the micro-history of Carlo Ginzburg and the panoramic longue durée of Fernand Braudel – it demonstrated that one might achieve a radically different and exciting perspective on the past simply by thinking about it differently. 

This stayed with me after I switched to ancient history and then embarked on doctoral research. At that level of study there was far more explicit discussion of theory and methodology, not least because of the past influence of M.I. Finley and the present influence of figures like Keith Hopkins, Paul Cartledge and Anthony Snodgrass; but it was obvious from the scholarship I was reading that an anti-theoretical, positivist attitude persisted among many respected and important ancient historians, let alone their students. The reason seemed obvious: if students do not study ‘how to do history’, but simply accumulate information and learn about literary sources, then inevitably most of them will develop intellectual habits unconsciously through imitation, and if the historians they imitate are mostly untheoretical positivists, that’s what they’ll become. True, those students who went on to further study would encounter more debates and uncertainty, especially around these theoretical and methodological issues – but that’s too late for the majority of students who leave university after their first degree. If we were honest, we’d have to admit that we’d failed to teach or encourage those students to be properly critical, or to reflect enough on how we interpret the past. 

So, when I continued my career path into the lower ranks of university teachers, I looked for opportunities to change things. This was actually easier than I’d expected; most departments had some sort of Introduction to Ancient History course, that no one really wanted to teach so they were happy for me to take it on, and I could then quietly subvert it for my own purposes. Generations of students have endured my lectures on historical theory and methodology (it was a good year if one or two students in a group actually enjoyed them) – a significant proportion of whom commented in later years, mostly to other people, that now they could see the point of those classes, and realised how useful they were. This book emerged directly from that project; partly for the convenience of being able to give students something to read that was directly relevant to the course, partly because it was the book I wish I’d been able to read when I was a student, and partly with the polemical hope that it might enable me to influence the teaching of ancient history in other universities, if just one student were to pick it up and start questioning the way the subject was being researched and taught. 

Did it make any difference? I have absolutely no idea, beyond the fact that I do occasionally meet someone who had read the book and found it useful. It is certainly the case that ancient history as a discipline seems much more open to discussing theoretical and methodological issues, and to adopting ideas and concepts from different social sciences – there are some who are still resolutely untheoretical, but they are now definitely in the minority. True, this is all at the level of research and publication, rather than offering proof that students are learning about the subject differently – but something must be shifting, if more of their teachers are open to theoretical debates and are conveying this in their teaching. At any rate it means that a new version of this book could discuss a much wider range of examples, and focus on ancient historians using different theories and approaches to study the ancient past, rather than just discussing theories and approaches that could be used if someone chose to adopt them. 

Looking back over the book, I think most of it remains relevant. True, historians have largely stopped arguing about class and status as means of interpreting ancient societies (the focus is almost universally on different conceptions of ‘identity’, emphasising subjective experience rather than objective structures). Many of those studying the ancient economy desperately want to believe that the debate has moved beyond the division between ‘primitivism’ and ‘modernism’ that I sketch in this book; to be honest I think that’s wishful thinking, or an attempt at side-stepping the problem of whether the structures of the ancient economy were radically different from the modern by talking about ‘performance’ instead. But in both cases I think the discussion here still works as an introduction to the underlying issues, a guide to the context within which current historical debates are being conducted, even if some of the protagonists don’t actually recognise this – even if the details of the debates have moved on in the last fifteen years (as one would hope!). Similarly, research activity in environmental ancient history has dramatically expanded, with many exciting collaborative projects between historians and scientists – but since much of this work focuses on gathering more detailed information about ancient climate or plague, rather than developing new theories of how environmental change interacts with historical processes, I think my chapter on Braudel and on ecology still offers a useful introduction to new, longer-term ways of thinking about history. 

Probably the most striking change since I wrote the book has been the questioning of the identity and existence of the entire discipline. I could take it for granted – as in my title – that everyone knew what ‘ancient history’ meant; it was simply a question of whether it should be seen as a sub-discipline of ‘Classics’ (focusing on Greek and Latin language and literature) or of History. Today, we recognise the presumption, and colonialist legacy, of assuming that Greek and Roman societies constitute the only things worth studying in the classical Mediterranean, let alone that they alone define ‘ancient’ history. Some people now argue for adopting a more accurate, less imperialist label: Ancient Mediterranean Studies, for example, or Ancient Greek and Roman History. Others push for a more inclusive discipline, expanding to include Near Eastern societies if not in fact classical India, China and Africa as well. Of course we can’t expect that every scholar will need to have a command of all these languages and traditions – rather, the future of research can only be collaborative. 

It is a great privilege for me to have this opportunity to speak to Iranian students, despite not speaking a word of your language; and it’s also rather terrifying, as I have to admit to ignorance. While my perspective on the discipline of ancient history and its methods was, in its day, relatively radical, my knowledge base is thoroughly traditional; my default, my safe haven, is Roman Italy or classical Athens. I have for more than twenty years taken great pleasure in including an overview of Sassanid Persia and the rise of Islam in my lectures on Europe in late antiquity, and insisting on the role of the early Near Eastern societies in the rise of classical Greece – but I wouldn’t for a moment attempt to research those fields. 

Other than the fact that I unselfconsciously use ‘ancient history’ just to mean Greece and Rome, I don’t think there is anything in the book that could not apply equally to the study of Near Eastern societies (or indeed any other premodern society). Indeed, I think it might be even more relevant. There is a risk, at least from my perspective, that this new recognition that ancient historians cannot ignore the Near East and the rest of Eurasia leads to an assumption that naïve old-fashioned methods may be sufficient, to accumulate knowledge so that at a later date we can start evaluating it properly. On the contrary, the best way for Near Eastern studies to take its rightful place as an equal partner in the scholarly enterprise is for it to be theoretically and methodologically sophisticated from the beginning, free from the parochialism – and the fetishization of a limited number of high-culture texts and authors – of conventional ‘ancient history’. The shift in our perspective on the past – Europe is, for many purposes, merely the western edge of Eurasian history, rather than the centre of everything – needs to be accompanied with a shift in the institutional structures of ancient studies, rather than allowing the old imperialist intellectual powers to continue to dominate. 

It is possible that the one thing more insulting than a European implying that classical European civilisation is the entirety of ‘ancient history’ is that same European laying down the law about how someone else’s subject should be studied – but if I wasn’t inclined to gratuitous polemic, I would never have written this book in the first place. My aim is not to tell you how to interpret the past – but to tell you that you do need to think about this, rather than taking traditional methods or the approaches of your teachers entirely for granted. I’m reminded of an aspect of globalisation theory (another recent set of ideas that, if I wrote this book today, I’d need to discuss): the suggestion that cultural change in the modern interconnected world is not about homogenisation but reflexivity, reflecting on one’s inherited ideas and practices in the knowledge that there are alternatives, and developing a hybrid from the different possibilities. So, western ancient historians increasingly recognise that, whatever the traditions and assumptions of their discipline, they cannot continue to privilege Greece and Rome, and that they need to pay attention to the arguments of specialists in other fields rather than simply imposing their own practices and understanding. Students of, say, Persian History today do not face a binary choice between accepting Western methods (after all, which one?) wholesale or rejecting them outright, but rather must recognise that theory and methodology are something you have to think about, developing your own approach from the many possibilities available, and being prepared to justify and defend it. This book is intended to provoke you into developing your own approach to the study of the past. 

Weaponised Parochialism

This week I shall mostly be suffering from a filthy cold just when I wanted to be finishing my teaching prep for next week and getting various other things out of the way before term starts. Just after I’d returned from a refreshing break, too… But if I was going to have to come down with something, I suppose it’s better this week than next. And I’m taking the optimistic view that underlying the current floods of snot and phlegm I am actually in a better place, mentally speaking, than I have been for a while, because despite the thickness of my head I have actually come up with an Idea this morning, or if not an idea then a pithy phrase that encapsulates a particular kind of contemporary political discourse. Googling suggests that no one has previously proposed this characterisation, so I might at some point develop it further, but for the moment I just wanted to scribble it down for the record…

Parochialism is of course nothing new; indeed, there’s a plausible case to be constructed that it might be a human constant, from classical Greek ideas about the appropriate size for a sustainable political community to modern studies about the number of people one can on average sustain as a genuine friendship network. Of course we all have a tendency to fall back on familiarity, to take for granted and generalise from our own experience, to assume the truth of our inherited/acquired view of the world. This can overlap with or lead into narrow ideas of self-interest and favouring one’s own (e.g. the phenomenon of NIMBYism), but parochialism is primarily about perspective, that then motivates actions, rather than actions.

Politics, from regional to international level, always involves attempts at overcoming different sorts of parochialism, or reaching compromise positions, in the interests of a wider agenda and a greater good (“the greater good”). It does seem that this has been more of an issue in recent years, especially at the international level [note: nationalism and parochialism not identical, but nationalism can be thoroughly parochial in relation to the ‘imagined community’ of the nation; this needs further thought]. Brexit is the obvious example, with all its ridiculous talk of world-beating jams, now shading into culture-war stuff about the need for quotas of properly British tv programmes and the ludicrous defences of the British Empire as a cuddly, not-at-all racist paragon of progressive liberalism. But we can see similarly parochial thinking in different areas of a more fragmented Europe, and in the USA, and probably elsewhere.

Now, one might see this as a kind of rebalancing, as different versions of anti-parochial thought have lost credibility or effectiveness (most recently, globalisation and liberal interventionism). But what I want to suggest is that this is something more than an inchoate, instinctive parochialism reasserting its importance – and something more than conventional nationalism. We have in recent years seen a concerted movement to represent parochialism in normative terms, insisting on the moral superiority of the ‘people from somewhere’ and their worldview, in opposition to the (by definition, non- or anti-parochial) rootless cosmopolitans. Affinity ‘with one’s own kind’ is presented not just as an empirical finding but as a natural tendency that it is foolish and destructive to try to resist.

It’s the unmistakably racist element of this that made me think of it as ‘weaponised parochialism’; it takes a human tendency towards default parochialism and seeks to turn it into a political tool, to oppose movements towards racial justice and a more tolerant society, to demonise migrants and refugees, to undermine the sorts of international coordination necessary to respond to a problem like climate crisis. It summons up nostalgic images of community – even when it purports to be objective social science – in order to characterise them as being undermined and threatened by malevolent forces, not of globalised capitalism (where a case could be made) but of black people, foreigners, Muslims, trendy TV executives, woke academics, drugged-up students and the like.

None of these observations is new, and there’s little sign of these tools of populist politics losing their effectiveness any time soon. But perhaps, by naming the phenomenon as a whole rather than simply reacting to the ridiculousness of every individual pronouncement or website (which does serve their purposes; they only do it to annoy, because they want a culture war) we can better grasp the situation.