Podium

 

Some lecturers’ podiums are surfboards. Wave after wave of ideas, varying in height, are ridden for an hour that feels like all morning. The taste of the tingle stays with you for years. Some professors’ podiums, podia if you prefer, are jukeboxes, wherefrom the same borrowed tune is played each time annually as in its heyday. Such repetitious resource will inspire young turks in the back row to pen their dunciad ‘Odium of Podium’ (unsigned), little knowing they are on track to join the queue to the podium. Young tutors’ podiums are launching pads, their carefully prepared rockets taking off in showers of self-belief, jargon and nuance. Or runways, where the newest moda is on show and it’s hard to say which designs will survive the next change in the brainstorm weather. Some podiums are drunken boats, other podiums sink without trace. These memories of university came to mind after reading a sentence from Xènius: ‘The problem with professors is neither the system nor their ideas nor their temperaments; it is the podium.’ Xènius is the penname of Eugenio d’Ors y Rovira (1884-1954), being quoted here admiringly by his fellow Catalan author Josep Pla i Casadevall (1897-1981) in Pla’s diary ‘Quadern Gris’, ‘The Gray Notebook’, entry for 19 January 1919. Pla, at the ripe old age of 21, complains that he has learnt nothing at university and can only recall two lectures of any value. Like d’Ors, he sees the podium as the obstacle rather than the bridge to learning, a bulwark to impede progress, not protect it. The podium, as its name suggests, is where professors and possible professors get a toehold. I sometimes think of friends and acquaintances who pursued academic life and how they got a foot in the door using a podium. Like everyone, I learnt sooner or later that university was often less about learning than departmental politics, the podium acting as springboard for some careers, a gallows for others. It was no different at the University of Barcelona one hundred years ago. Sometimes I meet an old acquaintance from the professoriat, as Plat calls it, and am amused more than dismayed at how some of them now talk through their podium, as others talk through their hat. They engage in shop, which is a particular dialect of Podium, a language of terms that occasionally approaches poetry. Like Pla, I conclude by asking myself, “is there anything else like it in this life?” I enjoy recalling addresses I heard from the podium at university. Some of the ideas were entirely new and mysterious to me, what was their source? We all have favourite lectures from those times, valuing them for their moment in time, even if now we would completely rewrite them and copy the rewrites into diaries, like d’Ors or Pla, or share online.

Image: ‘The Gray Notebook’ by Josep Pla, translated from the Catalan and published by New York Review of Books in 2013; resting on a page of photographs of park bench mosaics in Güell Park (1900-1914) in Barcelona designed by Antoni Gaudí.