Not Akademia, But Academia Nonetheless

Usually if people pay attention to what I'm saying at 930pm on a Friday, it's because they've been drinking. Last Friday was an exception. At least, I hope it was. Because if it wasn't, then I spent a couple of hours giving a guest lecture to a class of drunk graduate students.

Not that it would bother me terribly if that was the case. I was there just so I could say that I once taught at a university. Whether anyone actually learned anything was really quite incidental.

Earlier this week I'd had an encounter with a rather more accomplished set of teachers. The Singapore National Museum had an exhibition of Greek sculptures on loan from the Louvre, including portraits of Aristotle, Plato and Socrates.

Two and half thousand years ago Aristotle lectured on philosophy as he walked through the gardens of his school, the Lyceum. His students followed him as he walked, which is why they were called the peripatetics. I, of course, could not take that sort of risk. If I tried to deliver a traveling talk through the walkways of Nanyang Technological University, I'm certain the class would melt away in search of more pleasant occupations. So I did my rambling verbally instead, within the confines of a rather stark and antiseptic classroom.

Instead of Aristotle, I took inspiration from Plato. That was partly because Plato was rather less choleric looking than Aristotle. (Either that or his sculptor was more adept at flattery. Plato is the one on the right below.)


But more importantly, Plato had a healthy respect for both abstract and applied science. He advocated the study of number theory by philosophers, and of arithmetic by businessmen and military commanders who "must learn the art of numbers or he will not know how to array his troops". So after my professor friend had talked through the theory of evaluating marketing campaigns, I described some real world examples from my professional expreience.

Plato himself was a student of Socrates, who had a rather fun approach to teaching philosphy. He would discourse in a symposium. Our modern-day symposia are drab affairs in stuffy conference rooms with uncomfortable chairs and bad coffee. But in ancient Greece a symposium was a drinking party. Gentlemen of leisure and refinement would gather in a room, stretch out on couches, and talk long into the night on love, ethics and the nature of truth.

Since then standards for drinking party conversation have fallen a little. Last night, for instance, I was at a St. Patrick's Day celebration where the talk centered on rugby, cellphones, and the excellentness of the meat pies. And that was before someone hooked up the karaoke microphone.

Plato's school was at Akademia, a sacred grove dedicated to Athena. She is one of the most interesting characters in any mythology. I find it fascinating that she is the goddess of both wisdom and of victory in war. That seems like an odd combination at first. But it does make sense because in pretty much every instance where she favours someone in a battle, she does so by showing them how to win against great odds through the use of stratagems and ruses. The most famous example is the wooden horse that she told the Greeks to build so that they could defeat Troy.

I've had a soft spot for Athena since I was an undergraduate student. Back then the odds of me ever graduating were very grim. I decided I needed a patron deity, and I picked Athena. I figured that if she could get Odysseus out of the pickle he'd landed in by upsetting the sea-god Poseidon, then extracting me from the academic quicksand I was thrashing in would be a piece of cake. I loved driving my friends crazy by insisting on pouring libations to her in every party. "The first drink belongs to Athena", I'd proclaim and pour a little on the floor. We were all penniless students, and the look of horror on my friends' faces at this wasteage was priceless.

It worked. I did eventually graduate by the skin of my teeth. And if any of my professors in college knew that I had been turned loose on a class of graduate students, they would certainly keel over in shock.

I guess the moral of this story is that you should never depend on a university to educate you - you never know what half-baked idiot they might set to take your classes! It's much wiser to place your fate in the hands of a Greek goddess. ;-)