Universities I have known

There is a species of academic known as the 'gypsy scholar'. He or she is generally a competent teacher, perhaps an adequate researcher, but for reasons of character, personal history or something else the individual is unable to secure a permanent post and thus must move from one temporary job to another. Seldom is this a matter of choice, but it is instead dictated by cruel necessity. In the worst cases the scholar remains in this academic limbo for an entire career, but in any case most of us have had the experience, for there is often a gap between finishing one's studies and finding a suitable place to develop one's career.
As I currently lack continuity of employment I suppose I am close to returning to gypsy scholar status. If that is so, I can only blame myself, for I voluntarily left a comfortable, permanent position as a tenured full professor. It is hard to see any professional justification for this self-inflicted penitence, as I have already done my stint of moving from one university to another, and I have done it in more than one country.
As an unemployed PhD graduate I managed to garner some temporary work in various English universities. One of these was Cambridge. I started on a humble level teaching a short course at Homerton College, a nondescript establishment that trained teachers and was hardly considered authentic by the ancient and famous colleges of the University federation. Later, I gave a lecture at Emanuel, which was very different, especially when they invited me to evening dinner. This took place by candle-light in an oak-panelled hall that was constructed by the Puritan founders in 1584. We sat their in our gowns and ate with silver cutlery that dated from 1747 and is in the national historical register. The college staff served us cutlets of venison and glasses of vintage wine. It was all rather overbearing and, although it was picturesque, it left me feeling lucky that I did not have to socialise in that way every Friday evening.
Next I did some tutoring that was split between two sites: the Geography Department in Downing Street and Fitzwilliam College. The latter, known locally as 'Fitz', was founded in 1860 but housed in a modern version of the old monastic-collegiate arrangement created in 1970 by the architect Denys Lasdun. Though obviously monied, the students were no more brilliant than I had been used to in London (where as fate decreed, I worked in another of Lasdun's buildings, an overbearing pile that the University had insensitively built in place of one of the famous Bloomsbury squares). Yet in the breakfast room there were sketches by Picasso. At lunch there was an entire Stilton, king of cheeses, and the servants were deferential in a manner that made my skin creep.
Waikato was an entirely different kind of university. Situated in verdant countryside next to a small town on North Island, New Zealand, it was a haven of peace and contemplation. The students were a mixture of Kiwis, Aussies, Polynesians, Melanesians and Japanese, but all of them very deferential. Everything, from the buildings to the atmosphere in the common room it radiated conservatism. At this point I began to miss the vitality and confusion of my alma mater, the London School of Economics and Political Science.
For one term, while on sabbatical from the University of Massachusetts, I taught in the Geology Department at the University of Urbino. The town of Urbino, situated deep in the hills of central Italy, is spectacularly picturesque. Its cobbled streets lead to the crest of a hill, upon which is situated a stupendous ducal palace, a sixteenth century fairy castle, packed with art treasures and visited in large numbers by those tourists who venture away from the main cities of Italy. Urbino is a small town and the university is hidden away inside its close-knit urban fabric. But it is a desperately provincial temple of learning. Its horizons extend no further than Ancona and southern Romagna, but a few tens of kilometres away.
When I was there, Carlo Bò was Rector. In Italy the rectors of universities accede to the title of 'Il Magnifico'. Many of them are far from being magnificent, but Carlo Bò at least had the advantage of being very tall and straight-backed. He was also very a well-known intellectual with a long history of participating in the nation's affairs. His university, at the time one of only four private institutions of higher learning in Italy, lacked a place where the academics could congregate and socialise. It was a typical "mordi e fuggi" university ('teach and flee'). Virtually none of the staff deigned to live in Urbino or the surrounding villages--too isolated. Instead, they came from Rome, Bologna, Ferrara and such places, taught, saw their students and rushed back home as soon as possible. But at lunchtime they needed a place to go, and by default it was the Ristorante da Franco, situated off the main square of the small town. Table no. 1 in this establishment was strategically reserved for the Magnificent Rector. On the rare occasions when Carlo Bò graced it with his presence, the academics would all rise and stand to attention as he strode in. The atmosphere was positively surreal and the menu was something I soon got to know by heart (the waiter, however, was Iranian, although Carlo Bò would be served by Franco himself, bowing and scraping his way back to the kitchen and muttering about what an honour it was).
I recall little of my contact with the Bangladesh universities. In one of these institutions, in Dhaka, the fierce tropical heat of summer had caused the brickwork to bloom with a picturesque efflorescence of precipitated salts. The facilities were adequate but rudimentary and the books were all printed on that curious pink paper that abounds in the Indian subcontinent and disintegrates as one turns the pages. The agricultural college at Comilla had this much in common with the institutions in the capital, but at its centre it had a huge lake, which steamed in the heat and wreathed the groves of mango trees with silky mist. There were armed soldiers in the corridors, even in the cafeteria, but whereas in the capital they would have been deployed to quell student riots, which are frequent there, in Comilla they were there to protect the students against the incursions of brigands which lived amid the jack-fruit trees in the surrounding rainforest.
At the University of the South Pacific I was briefly Visiting Professor. It was very difficult to teach the students, a mixture of Indians and Melanesians, about my experience, as this had mostly been garnered almost exactly on the other side of the world--to be precise 177 degrees away. I set myself to study Matanitù, the last of the great tribal chiefs, whose reign ended gradually with the annexation of Fiji to the British Empire in 1870. During the course of my studies I learnt much about Fijian traditions, for the people of the Pacific islands are enamoured of formality and are adept at blending it with ancient beliefs about spirits, ancestors and life-forces. Some of this was acted out in front of me while I was there, as the USP campus hosted a meke-meke, a tribal gathering. As the University was jointly owned by nine island nations (Vanua Atu, Samoa, Western Samoa, etc.) this traditional festival was colourful and varied. Much spear waving and dancing took place, with the men in grass skirts and the women attired in bark-cloth with traditional brown and black designs printed in it.
I visited the University of Kazan' in one of the Russian Republics of what was then the Soviet Union in Autumn when the weather was cold and snow had already fallen. The room in which Lenin had attended lessons was preserved exactly as it had been in his time and one could sit in his usual place--the third row of benches, on the extreme left (prophetically, perhaps?)--and absorb the atmosphere. The University was dusty and overheated, and it had more of an eighteenth-century feeling to it than one connected with October 1917. When I was there it had only two computers, both IBMs, which were jealously guarded in a small room.
I have known many other universities and all of them have had some essential characteristic that made them unique and particular, sometimes in a pleasant manner, sometimes in one that was difficult for an outsider to accept.