Bollocks to Babel

IN A LONG CAREER OF UNIVERSITY TEACHING (1968-2014) many of the most interesting and satisfying moments involved overseas students. There was the robust Finnish girl bursting into my room demanding clarification of what I had said about rowing in my book on amateurism. There was also the Greek girl who read voraciously and questioned relentlessly and the quiet Italian adolescent with a slightly aristocratic demeanour (echoes of Lampedusa) whose sceptical questioning of orthodoxy was regarded by all present as always worth a hearing.

And generically, for someone teaching courses on the politics of sport and the politics of the environment, there was the usefulness of the student who would interject, “we’d look at this problem completely differently in Norway (or wherever)”. Overseas students, more than domestic ones, offered that elusive symbiosis of teaching and research, providing a range of answers to Kipling’s rhetorical question, “What should they know