It's a Don's Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

cleverer.
     After all, geniuses come from posh homes as well as poor ones.
    So we do our best. We get trained how to interview more fairly (no knife and fork tests or class-specific questioning). We
     visit schools to encourage the best to apply (and not to be put off by what they read in the paper). And we get all the data
     that we can. Despite some recent fuss about such an initiative at Oxford, for years we have been given ‘adjusted A level scores’
     (which take account of their school’s overall performance) for all our candidates. But frankly we are not helped by the fact
     that school references are now open to the applicant, so we get a lot less straight talking from head teachers than we used
     to.
    The bottom line is that it is politically naïve (as well as unfair) for a government to underfund the state education system
     and to take little effective action on social justice, and then to blame ‘leading universities’ for not righting the wrongs
     they have perpetuated.

Keeping sex out of scholarship
    1 August 2006
    Sometimes I feel that people read what I write in a surprisingly perverse way. To put that more kindly, there is an odd mismatch
     in journalism (even the most cerebral literary kind of journalism) between the attention given to the writing and the attention
     given to the reading. I slave for hours trying to capture exactly the right nuance – then someone takes the TLS on the train or to the loo, gives it five minutes and goes away with a very odd impression of what I was trying to say.
    Not that I blame the reader. After all, I probably give much the same 5-minute treatment to what other people write. And you
     might argue that it is the writer’s job to make their point clear to all-comers. All the same, when someone completely misrepresents
     you, it is peculiarly irritating.
    Last week, the Independent newspaper published a ‘question and answer’ article with the excellent Mary Warnock. One question was: ‘Professor Mary Beard
     has suggested that Eduard Fraenkel’s status as a classical scholar is diminished by his inappropriate conduct towards women
     in his Oxford classes ... As a former student of Fraenkel’s, do you agree?’
    Warnock’s reply: ‘I think, alas, Professor Beard is talking nonsense.’
    I would have been tempted to agree with Warnock myself, if that had been even remotely what I wrote.
    What the questioner (whom I shall not name and shame) was referring to was a review I wrote in the TLS of a new Dictionary of British Classicists . In this I pointed out that it was very odd that the entry on Fraenkel (Professor of Latin in Oxford from 1935–53) made no
     mention of his notorious ‘wandering hand’ – clearly documented by ( inter alias ) Warnock herself in her autobiography.
    I did not for a minute suggest that this diminished his status as a classicist. Classical scholars come equipped with all
     manner of sexual virtues and vices. And, by and large (there are, of course, some limitations), sex can be separated from
     scholarship. In fact I stuck my neck out to say that most women over their mid-40s (e.g. me) were likely to feel ambivalent
     about Fraenkel’s behaviour. One can’t help deploring the abuse of male power. But one also – honestly – can’t help feeling
     a bit nostalgic for that, now outlawed, erotic dimension to (adult) pedagogy.
    What I objected to was the bowdlerisation of the biographical tradition. When it is relatively widely known how Fraenkel spent
     his evenings with his female students, why does that have to be blotted out from the authorised version of his life? Why bother
     with the pretence that he was devoted solely to his wife? Or why not, at least, be prepared to see that devotion as part of
     a more complicated set of relationships? Don’t we need to remember our intellectual giants warts and all?
    That is not the same thing at all as questioning his scholarly status.
    It could, of course, be worse. The status of