British lecturers don a new image

Press, 29 January 1986, Page 18

British lecturers don a new image

By

JUDITH JUDD,

London ‘Observer*

education correspondent

The image of the typical British don is bumbling, unprepossessing and probably subversive. His American counterpart is handsome, dynamic and heroic — his status bolstered by a series of glamorous film and television roles. Now British dons are trying to brush up their image and catch up with their transatlantic colleagues. Bashful academics are being coaxed from their studies into the glare of the TV lights to persuade the public that they are witty, wise, and worth spending money on. A vice-chancellors’ advisory committee under Professor John Roberts, the only vice-chancellor to star in his own TV show (8.8.C.’s "Triumph of the West”), has produced a report telling universities to promote^.themsar/es more vigorously. T® vicechancellors are also advertising

for a public relations officer (salary $70,000 a year). The Idea is to combat Government plans to reduce spending on higher education but, according to a professor at East Anglia, universities face an uphill task. Professor Richard Sheppard, a German specialist, says his informal study of the image of British academics in television and films shows how low they have sunk in public esteem compared with colleagues abroard. In American films and programmes, he says, academics are either young and good looking (Clint Eastwood as a mountaineering macho art history pro-

lessor in “The Eiger Sanction”) or white-haired and patrician (Professor Shorofsky in the 8.8. C. series “Fame”). In Britain the picture is quite different According to Sheppard, the British lecturer in B.B.C’s “Edge of Darkness" managed to combine all the common prejudices against academics by being lecherous, unshaven, subversive, left-wing, and outstandingly ugly. “Late Starter,” a 8.8. C. series about a retired professor, last year, painted a portrait of a man so helpless he could not even pull a pint The classic case, says Shep-/ pard, is that of Michael Caine

who acted a lantern-jawed American professor battling heroically in “The Swarm,” and then had to put on two stone for his part as a less prepossessing academic in the British film “Educating Rita.” Another case in point is Indiana Jones, the magnetic and powerful professor of archaeology played by Harrison Ford in “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Even if American academics

are crotchety (Henry Fonda in “On Golden Pond”) they are redeemed by being witty and knowledgeable whereas their British counterparts are often just plan lunatic (Benny Hill in “The Italian Job”). “You could say the last time a British professor got a good write-up was Professor Higgins in *My Fair Lady’,’’says Sheppar# Books, he finds, are no better.

Ever since Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim cocked a snook at academe and headed for the business world, the dons of fiction have fared badly. There was, for example, Malcolm Bradbury’s obnoxious and adulterous History Man and David Lodge’s wide-eyed provincjal academic in “Changing Places.” When Jeffrey Archer made a don the hero of his “Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less,” he also made him an American, a suitable Thatcherite snub to British academics.

Sheppard believes the image of academic! in films and books is a reflection of the views of the

man in the street. American academics have a higher status because universities are an accepted way of moving up in society and because they are thought to provide the "culture” Americans so admire.

“In this country everybody knows the way up is not necessarily through universities. British universities have also become detached from people,” says Sheppard. Sheppard’s view is personal but it is shared by a growing number of university dons. The Roberts report on public relations contains paper by Mr Jocelyn Stevens, rector of the

Royal College of Art and former managing director of Express Newspapers, describing the vicechancellor’s committee as “the dog which does not bark.” Mr Alex Currie, a member of the vice-chancellors’ public relations committee and secretary of Edinburgh University, says that times have changed since Victorian days when degree ceremonies rated three or four pages of newsprint written by forelocktouching journalists. Now universities need to explain what they are doing and show that public money Is well spent. The student troubles of the 1960 s have made them more vulnerable. Mr Currie draws a distinction between England and Scotland where dons still tend to be highly respected. “Scotland Is a more olflfashioned society,3£he says.