The need for a more secure grasp of Scottish history was never better illustrated than in Edinburgh University’s attempt to communicate with parents of students. A newsletter says that the university owes its foundation charter to “King James I (son of Mary Queen of Scots and later to become James VI of England and Wales)”.
Titles are clearly not the university’s strong point. Among famous graduates, David Hume is wrongly given a knighthood and Malcolm Rifkind is deprived of his. “Lord” David Steel would be so called only if he were the son of a peer. There is a pedantic effort at distinguishing “alumni” from “alumnae”, “even if in Latin there is not one word for both”, which, customary use of gender endings apart, there is.
The examiners’ mark can only be gamma with a touch of delta.
