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if one could say the
existing
grace in English with a straight face. Maybe not, I thought – but at least it has the virtue of hoary tradition.)

    The debate got more complicated than this. Did the undergraduates want a
secular
grace or a
multi-faith
grace? If secular, then whom were they
thanking
in the new version? If it was simply a multi-faith version, then couldn’t we just remove the ‘Jesum Christum’ bit. (Presumably Jews and Muslims and almost every faith could tolerate a ‘deum omnipotentem’.)
    After the meeting, we wondered if we shouldn’t actually be thanking the cooks (or, to put it more crudely, those arguably exploited by us to bring us our nice food). But how would that go into Latin? ‘Servi oppressi’, suggested the Keeper of Antiquities at the Fitzwilliam (roughly translated as ‘oppressed slaves’). Hardly a tactful way of thanking the staff, piped up the Bursar.
    We then began to wonder if we needed formally to approve any form of grace at all. Maybe anyone who said grace should be able to say whatever form of grace they wanted. A
carte blanche
there, I thought, and suddenly warmed to a task I had previously shunned. And then there was the issue of the history of the existing grace. How long had it been said, and who had devised it? No one knew. (Some later research revealed that it had actually been framed by Jocelyn Toynbee, one of Newnham’s most illustrious fellows ever – and a Catholic.)
    Anyway, after this meeting, we went as usual to dinner. What grace would the Principal say?
    She cleverly avoided the issue. ‘Please be seated’, she invited us.
Comments
    â€²No one knew. Do you mean to tell me that Newnham dons don′t all keep a well-thumbed copy of
The College Graces of Oxford and Cambridge
, by Reginald Adams, by their bedsides? Shocking.
    BEN WHITWORTH
    â€²Everyday story of academic folk′: no. ′Everyday story about Cambridge′: perhaps …
    RICHARD
    Your students
understood
the grace?! Are you sure they′re not winding you up? All credit to your teaching, I′m sure, but at my college it was a point of pride for the academic in question to reel it off as quickly and pompously as possible. We are very fond of the college ducks whom we enticed off Emmanuel, and as our grace starts ′quidquid nobis appositum est′, it′s called the ′quack quack grace′.
    LUCY
    It would make more sense to turn ′gratias agimus′ into a conditional: ′we would be grateful for food …′ This would then involve entering into a new discourse with the Supreme Being.
    ANTHONY ALCOCK
    The Newnham ′Pro cibo′ proposal strikes me as close in general
sentiment to the Selkirk Grace:
Some hae meat and canna eat,/ And some wad eat that want
it;/ But we hae meat, and we can eat,/ Sae let the Lord be
thankit.
    RICHARD BARON
    How about: ′To what we are about to consume we are perfectly entitled′? An honest-to-goodness, graceless grace, that avoids all the inter-faith bother. Would it add any relish to members′ eating, though?
    NEIL JONES

Christianity banned
    15 May 2009
    It was perhaps (as has been pointed out to me) a little beyond propriety to blog about Newnham’s internal discussions on its college grace. But I just couldn’t resist. (‘It is easier for a wise man to stifle a flame within his burning mouth than to keep
bona dicta
to himself’, as the Roman poet Ennius said.) Besides, I thought college came rather well out of it, over all – students taking multiculturalism, multi-faith and the traditions of their institutions seriously, dons taking students’ comments and suggestions seriously, the discussion going at the problem from every angle. Amusing from the outside it might have been, but it was feisty stuff – showcasing argumentative young women at a flourishing single-sex institution, not a load of Laura Ashley-clad wimps.
    I