ust over forty years ago, in 1980, I found myself by chance teaching for a semester at Columbia University, armed with the grandiose title of Visiting Associate Professor of European History, provided with a free apartment and paid a salary not far short of what I earned in a whole year as a lowly lecturer in the UK. I’d never been to the US and knew nothing about Columbia or indeed any other American university. The faculty mostly seemed rather elderly to me, and so far as I could tell they lived upstate and only came in to New York City once a week to dispense their wisdom ex cathedra in very lofty and very lengthy lectures, which were later explicated for students by a phalanx of teaching assistants. Most of the professors evidently thought I was a grad student, and in any case it was the grad students on whom I quickly came to rely for my social life.
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