Our teachers in Cambridge

Judging from my own experience, academics in Czech universities are often deliberately informal and maintain the image of intellectuals who don’t care about appearance. You can easily mistake a philosopher for a homeless person. On the other hand, in Cambridge, academics wear suits and always make sure that their appearance is elegant and reserved. The reasons for this are clearly historical. In our country, critical thinking has always had strong rebellious and anti-mainstream connotations. Philosophy, for example, used to be done in dissidents’ flats full of bugs; in contrast, in England it has been a hobby of many top politicians from Harold Wilson to David Cameron. This heritage still lives on today.

In Cambridge, there are academics from all over the world. This is something we are especially aware of due to regular ‘supervisions’, during which we are being taught individually by professors so we get a chance to get to know them quite well. One of my friends had a particularly memorable experience of this sort a few days ago when his supervisor accidentally sent him a romantic e-mail that was addressed to his wife. My friend first did not understand what was going on, so, in spite of his surprise, he simply replied to the e-mail. Some supervisors like telling us stories from their lives, facts about their children, partners and so on. No wonder that there are a lot of rumours about them going around among students.

My opinion is that the quality of supervisors and their age are inversely proportional. Young supervisors have not achieved that much yet, so they do not seek to assert authority all the time and treat students pretty much as equal. They also have much more flexible views,  so they often present the material more or less as a debate between conflicting ideas rather than a collection of facts. They also tend to be more interested in our opinion – perhaps partly because they feel that they can benefit from the discussion themselves. Older supervisors are of course much more knowledgeable and given how much hard thinking they have normally put in the topics, they tend to be less interested in the opinions of undergraduates.

We also get a lot of interesting international comparison here. For example, out of the statistics teachers we have had so far, one of them was American and the other one English. They had a lot in common – both were dynamic, engaging and possessing a strong sense of humour. But they differed in the kind of humour. I am a big fan of English humour, and this once again gave me a chance to appreciate how specific it is. When an American makes a joke, everyone immediately understands, the punchline is explicit and the speaker makes a pause for laugh. On the contrary, an Englishman never changes the tone of his voice and his jokes are often hard to pinpoint. The audience rarely laughs – the speaker does not expect it anyway, and the jokes make you feel the comedy rather than laugh. I have very similar feelings when I watch British and American TV series. The American sitcoms tell you exactly when to laugh, while the British ones often confuse you and you find it funny more on the inside than outside.

What I like the best about personal supervisors is when they are not overly professional and they teach not in accordance with their obligations but in accordance with their passion for the subject. To give an example, one philosophy academic in our department, who is probably one of the most rational creatures on the planet, has supposedly kept one student at a supervision for six and half hours, just to convince him of the correctness of his logical theory. Similarly, I have recently bumped into one of my friend in the town when he was talking to a lady. It turned out that she was his supervisor who had walked him all the way to town to finish telling him about all the stuff she wanted to go over at the supervision. My personal record is two and half hours – that happened when my supervisor was teaching me about his own area of research.