Alma Mater Studiorum

Walking through the streets of Cambridge, through the winding streets lined with great stone buildings with dizzying spires and stained glass windows, and signs like “Corpus Christi College: Closed to All Visitors,” there is obviously a sense of propriety and entitlement. Though the iron gratings and fences are covered with flyers and posters, they are all announcing lofty music concerts and high-powered lectures such as the one I am going to tonight on the Higgs Boson and the Large Hadron Collider.

On the train from King’s Cross in London, a young woman was on her cell phone, talking to someone about how one of her friends would be in Cambridge that afternoon and that she might run into her at the library. There was a pause, as the interlocutor on the other end must have responded, to which she rejoined, slightly louder, “I don’t know, I guess there are some books at Cambridge that Oxford doesn’t have." A wave of smugness filled the air that was palpable, and I heard a few self-assuring chortles from the fellow passengers.

This summer, in a series of random events, I ended up being an “hono(u)rary” player on the Oxford University Water Polo team at a tournament in Antwerp. As a thank you to the team, I took them on a tour of Antwerp. Time and time again, jabs at Cambridge would come up from the players, and then ultimately it came out that the absolute, and I mean absolute, worst insult you could ever levy upon someone from Oxford would be to mistake him or her for someone from Cambridge. The Horror, the Horror…talk of splitting hairs and atoms on a pin head...

So, with my own silent smugness, since I have never been part of Ox-Bridge outside of this honorarium, as I walk through the streets, I think to myself, well, I once taught at L’Università di Bologna, the OLDEST universities in the modern world. Its motto, in fact is Alma Mater Studiorium, which loosely translates as “the mother of all universities.” Established in 1088, it trumps Ox-Bridge by a bit over a century. A few years ago, there was a major, and highly unpopular agreement amongst European universities to be more accommodating to each other’s curricula and encourage more exchange program without losing credit hours, and as it was a conclave of all the Rectors of the major universities in Bologna, it became known as “The Bologna Accord.” So, some people only associate the words Bologna and University in a negative connotation as a result. Hardly what has happened with the names of Oxford and Cambridge.

Moreover, the physical aspects as well could not be more of a dramatic contrast. Whereas Cambridge is a clean, tidy, probably nearly crime-free (aside from intellectual theft (and since I first wrote this post, also bicycle theft)), town, Bologna around the university is gritty, grimy with lots of crime, drugs and no beautiful Backs to walk along admiring the grandiosity of the Colleges, even from their “backsides.” There are very few original Aule Grande left on Bologna’s “campus,” which is a very loose word as there is no central courtyard, or even cluster to distinguish it as a coherent University. Like much of Italy, it is chaos that somehow works.

But, unlike walking down Trumpington Street from my hotel, hitting the staggering Corpus Christi and King’s Colleges, walking down Via Zamboni, one sees an endless array of dreadlocks, tattoos, piercings, dingy and wild student cafes, spilling over with smoking Italian students (and mostly Italian students, unlike the highly international make-up that one sees here), dodging used needles and dog shit, not to mention the dogs making said shit. One of our friends was bitten by such a dog and was very ill for quite some time.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Bologna, for so many reasons and would move back there in a heartbeat, and I believe that I would rather live there again than be here. Not that I actually liked seeing people shoot up heroin next to dumpsters on a regular basis, but for the most part, I loved Bologna. Hard to explain if you have not been there. The rest of Bologna is not like that at all, but rather is a beautiful treasure with the greatest unfinished Cathedral façade in Europe and a wonderful Piazza Magiore, where all of Bologna comes together for various events and music and film and celebrating the city of Bologna.

But, the University is truly a bohemian mecca of sorts, and it is interesting to think of what it would have been like in Medieval times. I think that probably much more like what the Cambridge of today is like. Austere, but also a place where the world came to visit. L’Università di Bologna still commands great respect, and the world still does go there, but on a different scale: in ways, a more “human” one, whereas here, it feels untouchable at times, unless you are a member of the club. But, again, so as not to be hypocritical, I do admit to being able to break out my L’Università di Bologna tie, with its logo and the 1088 date on it, on special occasions, knowing that I did not just merely buy it at a gift shop to say I had “been there.”