Sir, – I much enjoyed Diarmaid Ferriter's whimsical review of a recent collection of essays on TCD in the 1990s ("Trinity Tales: dripping with privileged nostalgia", Arts & Books, January 7th). Moreover, like most academics I am sufficiently vain to feel gratified that at least some former students remember my name – and to find myself picked out in a review.
I don’t know which student attributed the quoted statement to me in October 1991 (when the Soviet Union still existed), but I wonder about the accuracy of his or her memory [“I have news for you all – there will be no course this term because there is no Soviet Union”].
In case readers are misled by this excellent rhetorical line, may I state that after the collapse of the Soviet Union (the subject of my studies during an academic career conducted mainly in TCD), the content of my courses changed, but I would not have had the callous irresponsibility to announce casually that I had cancelled a course that students had signed up to.
True, within a couple of years I asked the college authorities to change the title of my personal chair from “Professor of Soviet Government” to “Professor of Comparative Government”, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and its external empire in Eastern Europe.
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But during those years, while struggling to appreciate and explain, through research and publication and other commentary, what we were witnessing, I ploughed on as I always had, trying to help students to understand these momentous events affecting a secretive and controlling system.
Some of them, I believe, gained from the experience. – Yours, etc,
RON HILL,
Ashbourne,
Co Meath.