What
a difference a month can make! A year ago I was in the greatest pickle of my
working life. Fortunately, the visionary
Head of Classics & Ancient History and the management at Durham, which
still understands the purpose of a
university, embraced my job application and have made me welcome.
The
downward spiral began at the end of 2014, when I was officially invited by the Oxford
Faculty of Classics to apply for their Regius Chair of Greek. I would not have
applied otherwise. Uncivilly, they did not shortlist me. I got over it quickly.
I loved my job at King’s College London.
But
the events of 2020-2021 took my public humiliation to a whole new level. I was
interviewed for the Cambridge Regius Chair of Greek, and told it had been
offered to another candidate. He is brilliant; it was no shame to lose to him. I
got over it quickly. But nobody told me I had been deemed unappointable. This
meant that for more than two months after he turned it down, I was forced to
field endless enquiries from all over the world asking if I ‘had heard anything’.
My 'unappointability' was visible to all. I hit an all-time low.
In
the end I swallowed my pride and asked a friend at Cambridge what was going on.
I did eventually get an apology that I had not been kept informed. When I asked
Cambridge HR on which of the published criteria I had been deemed unappointable,
they said the committee had identified my ‘Research Plans’ as inadequate. This was somewhat mystifying since I had
included in my dossier full details of all my current research grant
applications.
None
of this would have mattered if management at KCL had not decided that the tasks
I had been contracted to perform nearly a decade ago no longer applied, and
that I was now required to do substantial amounts of elementary teaching. I
could no longer travel in term and needed, demeaningly, to tell all the
international institutions I had agreed to lecture to that I could no longer
come because of my many first-year seminars backing up other lecturers’ courses.
I
love teaching and I could have coped with this if it were not for
the coercive tone taken by management. I accessed my inner socialist rebel and
union member. But I was facing being driven out of one university by brutality after being deemed
unappointable at another. I was being pensioned off when I still need income to
educate our children.
The
verb ‘vindicate’ originally meant ‘to proclaim (dicare) authority (vis)'.
I felt I was disrespected by many peers and had lost all authority as a scholar of
Greek. So it is with incredible joy to me that I’ve heard, within four weeks,
three pieces of news that have restored my self-belief. I’ve been elected
Fellow of the British Academy, and won two large research grants, one of which,
on Aristotle’s prose style, pays 70% of my salary for five years as well as
supporting three others. Things can change quickly! Readers, do not give up!
I’m
delighted to have my authority restored and to be giving Durham any benefits
that accrue. I am also pleased that the Aristotelian principle motoring my life—it
doesn’t matter how others judge you if you are true to your own principles and project and never
give up—has been vindicated.
My
mother often told me the story of the King of Scotland called Robert the Bruce
and the spider. Robert’s army kept being defeated by the English. When he was
taking refuge in a cave, he watched a spider fail six times to attach her web
to the cave wall. She succeeded on her
seventh attempt. This inspired Robert to try to expel the English again. He
won. He proclaimed the Scots' authority.
