(This is taken from a lovely post written by a friend studying in Cambridge. I am jealous in ways that I can’t put into words.)
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After that we had History with Professor Murphy. He is bluntly opinionated, but I like him. We are going to be discussing- and by discussing I mean we sit and listen to him as he asks us questions we don’t know the answers to- the history of 20th Century Britain as an unstoppable, unparalleled world power and it’s slow 100+ year decline. Yesterday’s introduction was basically not about the course, but about what to do in Cambridge, and then was followed with a straight up bashing of Americans in general. He did this in a way, however, that was diplomatic and spit out hard facts. I wasn’t offended as much as I was shocked that I couldn’t rebuttal his statements. The World, as a whole, he said, does not like America, and he made direct parallels to Victorian Britain and present day America. He talked about it’s feudalistic approach to life, liberals, republicans, “wasps” and Obama. also called religion of any sort ludicrous and the cause of wars and of patriarchal societies. When we first met him at the Sunday night orientation, he guessed what each of our heritages were, and for the most part, he was right. He didn’t guess the Bohemian in me though. He guessed German. At any rate, his class, as he said, is structured to “make you think” rather than just memorizing facts that we’ll forget in a month anyways. The man is brilliant. I don’t agree with everything he says, but I don’t think he wants me to. He says what he does to make us do exactly what he said he wanted us to do; and that is think. for ourselves. That being said, I have every confidence that he believes absolutely everything he says to us wholeheartedly and that he and I are very different people. But I like him, and am excited to see what challenges his class will bring.
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My annoyance with Professor Murphy lingers to this day, and I got back to the states over a year ago. If you are anything like our class (C-82, represent) you will probably progress from respect -> quizzical curiosity -> general annoyance, with a dash of amusement.
He may be smart, but he’s not as smart as he believes he is. When our class was studying for our final together, we started cross-checking his notes with the Internet, and found out some of his facts were inaccurate, and some of them were just incorrect. I believe he generally knows what he’s talking about in a lot of areas, but a lot of the time I feel like he is just saying things because we are “stupid americans who don’t know any better” and he thinks he can get away with it.
He is, however, a great resource for information on what to do around England. Listen to him, and use his resources to go to Cambridge football games on the cheap.
The moral of the story is, don’t let the man get to you, because he will do his best to make you feel stupid, and it’s really not as bad as he makes it out to be.
