Moscow university in the 1820s, a place of dissent and a reputed ‘hot-bed of depravity’. The Tsar appoints Prince Golitsyn Director to impose order. Herzen writes: ‘Golitsyn was an astonishing person. It was a long time before he could accustom himself to the irregularity of there being no lecture when a professor was ill; he thought that the next on the list ought to take his place, so that Father Ternovsky sometimes had to lecture in the clinic on women’s diseases and Richter, the gynaecologist, to discourse on the Immaculate Conception.’
Which no doubt improved classes no end. The university also had its own prison for recalitrant students. Models for us to emulate, surely.