Mary Beard (Much Wenlock, UK, 1955) is aware of all that she has gained from her study of history. "No one in my family had a university degree, it has been my livelihood, it has given me the opportunity to do multiple projects and has paid my mortgage for 40 years," he jokes. As a token of her appreciation, the renowned classics professor at the University of Cambridge --in 2016 she won the Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences-- will create a scholarship of 80,000 pounds (almost 93,000 euros) as a gift for her retirement to cover expenses of residence and maintenance during the four years of the degree of two classics students from this British campus.
The intention of Beard, one of the researchers who has brought the Roman world closer to contemporary society through books such as
SPQR
and television series such as
Meet the Romans
,
Caligula
or
Pompeii
(available on platforms such as YouTube or Filmin), which after more than 40 years dedicated to teaching and research in Cambridge will retire at the end of 2022, is to expand the diversity of students of c, since, in his own words, the faculty continues to be “too white”.
In recent years, Cambridge's department of classical studies has launched initiatives to improve that diversity as a preliminary year to the degree for candidates with little or no knowledge of Latin. "We have made a great effort promoting the idea that it is not necessary to know Latin and Greek before coming to campus, you can learn it here, and these degrees are not just for posh people who have been able to study it for decades," explains Beard on the web from Cambridge.
As in most public universities in the United Kingdom, in Cambridge, the second oldest after Oxford founded in 1209 and from which 92 Nobel laureates have come out, the cost of tuition is 9,250 pounds per year (about 10,700 euros), to which are added another 10,000 (11,600 euros) to cover the costs of the
college -
all students are obliged to reside in one - and the maintenance. The aid from Beard, which students will be able to apply for for the next course that starts in October, will cover the costs of living, 10,000 pounds a year, during the four years of the degree of the two students, who will be required to justify that they come from a family with few economic resources and who belong to an ethnic minority group.
King Felipe presents historian Mary Beard (i) with the 2016 Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences.VINCENT WEST / REUTERS
"There are many ways to study and enjoy the classical world and the past without mastering Latin, but to access a degree in this specialty, having basic notions of Latin and Greek is enriching and allows you to understand the past in a more sophisticated way" , says Beard in statements this newspaper.
Beard, a global celebrity for his defense of the silenced role of women in history in books such as
Women and Power
, for his documentaries on the British channel
BBC
or for his presence on social networks - he has almost 300,000 followers on Twitter -, has declined to name the scholarship after him to bestow that honor on one of his former professors on the faculty, Joyce Reynolds, who at 102 years old "stays very strong." “I have done it to recognize the great work you have done over the years to promote opportunities for women at Cambridge… when I was studying in 1970, only 12% of the students were women,” says Beard.
For this expert in classical Rome, the professional opportunities of young people in this field do not have to be a brake for the new generations. "Classical studies give students intellectual flexibility, promote skills such as eloquence when exposing and fluency in writing, as well as the ability to analyze accurately," he exposes, all of them "highly valued by companies." "Our students at Cambridge have good employment rates," he adds.
In addition, he defends that studying the past is important: “I do not think that the past has simple lessons to teach us, we are not going to find specific answers to our problems, but it helps us to think differently about our own lives and to look differently. our beliefs.
It helps to broaden vision and reflects how in other times and cultures have faced some of the problems that we face now, such as plagues or pandemics ”.
That's another of Beard's strengths, his ability to show that many of the dilemmas we now face were already on the table in classical Rome 2,000 years ago.
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