Mary Beard is one of the great figures amongst Cambridge’s distinguished academics, and with an expansive media career too. In May, she enthralled an an audience at Selwyn with an account of her life and how her views have evolved. We collected some of those thoughts from that session.

.…on the University of Cambridge

I’ve had a wonderful time here. I’ve achieved everything I wanted to, but the best way I can describe it, and I think this is more accurate than the rather overused term “imposter syndrome”, is that it’s felt like spending 40 years in a very nice hotel. The service has been excellent, the room has been lovely, and over time I’ve even been upgraded to the penthouse suite. It’s been fantastic. But at the end of the day, it’s still a hotel. It’s not quite where I feel I truly belong.There’s a part of me that feels a little regretful, not because I’ve lacked support; Cambridge is, in fact, very good at supporting people, but because something about the place still feels a bit apart. And oddly enough, I’m grateful for that. I can’t imagine anything worse than a Cambridge in which everyone feels completely at home. That would be a kind of horror.In a sense, Cambridge University is none of us. I think we’re all just passing through. For me, I honestly can’t imagine how things could have gone better. When I first came to Cambridge just to see whether I could summon the courage to apply, it was absolutely terrifying. I was the first in my family to go to university, and it was all completely new. But the feeling that stays with me is the realisation that almost everyone else feels that way too. We tend to assume others feel perfectly at home, but they usually don’t. I’ve said it myself that people come to formal halls and don’t know which knife and fork to use, or there are simply too many glasses. I remember once, at high table in another college, I must have been around 40, and my host remarked, after dinner, “You’ve put your claret in your port glass.” And I thought, “Right, now you’ve revealed yourself — you’re the sort of insider I have no wish to be.” But the real secret is: you’re never the only one who feels unsure. We all do. 

.…on liberals being ‘tone deaf’

One of the worst moments of the previous Trump campaign was when Hillary Clinton, whom I admire despite her faults, referred to Trump supporters as ‘deplorables’. That was a real misstep.It’s part of what I meant when I said the liberal order was falling apart. We failed to critique ourselves. We let pass things that many voters found irritating, or even ridiculous, without question. Speaking as someone firmly embedded in the liberal camp, I can say that we got complacent. We used words like ‘woke’ with uncritical self-satisfaction and assumed we were on the right side of history. I include myself in this critique. We didn’t ask: “Hang on, what are we missing here? What are we failing to see?” Brexit was another case in point. I remember sitting around the dinner table saying, “Wouldn’t it be dreadful to leave the EU? Isn’t the Eurostar wonderful? You can get from central London to central Paris in just a few hours!" But where I come from, in Shropshire, most people have never even been to Paris. Talking like that was deeply out of touch. We were, frankly, tone deaf.

.…on civilised dialogues. 

What concerns me most—and perhaps this is a particularly academic response — is the coarsening of political language. That’s what I find deeply troubling in the current political climate, particularly in the United States, though not exclusively. The simplification of debate, the reduction of complex ideas to crude binaries like “he’s a nice man” or “he’s a nasty man”, has consequences for all of us. And I don’t know how we reverse that. How do we reintroduce nuance, responsibility, and respect into public discourse once it has been eroded? What worries me is that we may be losing not just the rhetoric of respectful disagreement, but the very capacity for it. And if that happens, I fear we’ll have lost more than we could ever gain

.…on the ‘cancel culture’ of recent years

I did take some nasty hits. Interestingly, a lot of those came from the political left rather than the right. And that was especially hurtful, because I felt: “Hang on, I’m on your side!”I remember thinking, “If I’m the enemy, then we’re in serious trouble — there are people out there far worse than me.” Sometimes, all it took was saying something mildly off-message, and suddenly I was being treated like a traitor. But we ought to be able to disagree. We ought to be able to critique one another. The idea that we all have to sign up to one monolithic cultural viewpoint is stifling, and it ignores the fact that these issues are complex and often contradictory.I’ve been around long enough to see this play out repeatedly. I once visited a secondary school where students were discussing free speech. They were quite anxious, even outraged by certain topics, but also hesitant — they were afraid to say the ‘wrong’ thing in front of their peers. At one point, we asked how long they thought free speech had been a debated issue. They assumed it started with social media. They thought Twitter invented free speech problems. They were astonished when we introduced them to figures like Giordano Bruno — or even Socrates. When we explained how Socrates was sentenced to death in Athens partly for corrupting the youth and challenging accepted beliefs, the discussion really deepened. They felt free to debate that because Socrates, of course, won’t cancel you — he’s already been cancelled. He’s dead. But say something controversial about Taylor Swift, and suddenly it’s a different story! That, for me, is a key reason why studying Classics matters. It gives us a space where we can talk about difficult things and think freely

.…on feminism

I was brought up with the basic principles of feminism: equal rights for women in terms of pay, opportunity and representation. It was the classic mid-20th century model — focused less on identity politics and more on practical issues like access to childcare, fair wages and maternity leave. And I had a very supportive father who believed in all of that. For me, those principles have always felt completely self-evident. Yes, we can argue about the margins, but the core ideas are just obviously fair and true. I can’t imagine seeing the world any other way. But I also think feminism isn’t just about fairness for women— it’s about fairness for everyone. If we, as a culture, fail to take advantage of the full talent pool available to us, we’re all diminished. So this isn’t — at its heart — a sectional issue. It’s something that affects us all, whether we’re talking about gender, race, class or any other form of inequality.