Bill and Friends Excellent Adventure
Bill and Friends Excellent Adventure Rhodes Scholars may know a lot. But they didn't learn it at Oxford arrival of a whole slew of Oxonians at 1600 e of Pennsylvania Avenue have only...
...ard "Oxford...
...Securing a spot at Oxford, in a system that allows barely 2 percent of teenagers to get a university education, is most of the battle...
...Nine to eleven, hang around and play guitar...
...The important achievement for those who land one of these free rides is the scholarship itself, and neither the Rhodes Trust nor the administrators of the Marshall Scholarship get particularly anguished about their wards kicking back and enjoying the scenery once they've arrived...
...Mayonnaise and punts and cider cups all day long...
...Wanting to excel, striving for high marks on collections, even heady discussions are subtly tsk-tsked as indecorous...
...But our national crush ). If on Oxford has less to do with its alumni than pli- with our Bridesheadish image of the place: its ion, aura of tweedy erudition, its dewy green fields, far- gargoyles frowning from the turrets of meago dieval buildings, and all those pipe-smoking tile" lads in white pants and thick sweaters debating ;red the merits of Gibbon and Eliot...
...The rare over-eager types and those interested in a career in academia are inclined to work hard, but otherwise there's little reason to break a sweat, at least until final exams come along...
...In sum, the essays are not graded, lectures are optional, and there's no exam to sweat at the end of term...
...In a letter to a friend while an undergraduate, Waugh summed up the situation succinctly: "Life here is very beautiful...
...As long as Oxonians don't founder miserably once there, they are well positioned for the plunge back into the real world...
...The British, like many other societies, tend to look at college as a seasoning experience rather than a career-making or breaking one...
...It sounds great, and sometimes it is...
...By the time English students are 15 they are already winnowing down which subjects they will major in for the rest of their years in school, and they are accepted into college to study one subject—and only one subject—as undergrads...
...And though Oxford was the spawning ground for The Wealth of Nations, it apparently has a visceral aversion to free-market forces...
...Developing strategies to keep sleepers awake was generally half the fun of their tutorials, the trick being to keep the guy upright without letting on that you know he's falling asleep...
...Publish an academe-rattling treatise on quantum physics or wile away your days shaving, if you're a British scholar it won't affect your bottom line...
...It is )ber hard to argue with Oxford's beauty, its mysible tique (just ask George Bush), or its track be record in producing scholars, politicians, and d to entertainers of world-class caliber...
...Oxford, for instance, was the center of the known universe for philosophers in the late seventies...
...These chaps were all absolute tabulae rasae when I got ahold of them," says Ryan...
...Bill and Friends Excellent Adventure Rhodes Scholars may know a lot...
...There's nothing like tutorial teaching when both sides take it seriously," says Alan Ryan, a former Oxford don now a professor of politics at Princeton...
...With its star rising as fast as its most famous alum, the time has come for an unsentimental look beyond the myths...
...At the beginning of every sentence, he would state the name of this teacher: "Mr...
...It sounds at first like the perfect antidote to America's overstuffed and impersonal lecture halls: lock yourself in a room with a learned prof and go mano-a-mano for an hour on the topic of the week...
...Heed the words of one of the prime purveyors of Oxford nostalgia, Evelyn Waugh...
...A friend of mine finally dreamed up an ingenious technique...
...My main impression was just how easy it was," said one Rhodes who attended Oxford shortly after Clinton, and "there's a sort of a conspiracy of silence not to reveal this...
...In fact, the hard part for U.S...
...The don felt obliged to politely nod back at every mention of his name, which kept him awake...
...One to twothirty, hang around and play guitar...
...The English school year is divided into three terms of eight weeks with a six-week break between terms and a 16-week summer vacation...
...I've heard about Brits who put this time to productive use—but I can't say I" ever met one...
...The very sight of the word printed ;tic: or sound of it spoken, is fraught with most acfertual magic," says Max Beerbohm's narrator in Zuleika Dobson, and you can't blame him...
...Those not addled by tedium have a blast...
...Four to five-thirty, exercise...
...But they didn't learn it at Oxford arrival of a whole slew of Oxonians at 1600 e of Pennsylvania Avenue have only increased the e of cachet and glamour of the gothic spires...
...This prepares the British student to be indifferent to just about anything other than having a good time...
...Serious discussions are not encouraged...
...One group of U.S...
...If you're feeling particularly lethargic, near-by bookstores offer plenty for the student in need of a quick precis that can be easily paraphrased into an original essay...
...Dining hall talk was not supposed to be about Plato," says one Rhodes Scholar, there in the eighties...
...For Americans, vacs were travel time, a chance to explore Europe, the Middle East or—like Clinton—Russia...
...Every Oxford student has at least one good variation on the distracted don theme...
...The session begins with the reading of an essay you have written, leaving the bulk of the time for chin-stroking and discussion...
...Smith...
...Irony is an almost mandatory part of the British education," says Simon Schama, a former Oxford don, now teaching at Harvard...
...Lots of the American students—most of whom had been hyper-industrious undergraduates—had a hard time adjusting to Oxford's too-clever-to-care chic and devised ways to study on the sly...
...students is figuring out how to spend the day...
...This was a special challenge with the most narcoleptically inclined of them, a nearly retired politics don who could scarcely keep his eyes open in classes after 3 p.m...
...A New York Times Magazine profile explained that for Weld, Oxford was "lager and chocolates, poker games and parties without end, 10 sets of tennis every afternoon, played on grass courts so no one ever got tired...
...ri to The school has also produced its share of sors American luminaries...
...Bill Bradley got a third and has joked ever since that he received "the third highest" mark at Oxford...
...For them, the main challenge is finding ways to stay amused...
...The academe becomes something like a salad bar where you can only help yourself to the beans—which tends to make you very cynical about beans and sick of salad bars in general...
...Oxford, af• to ter all, gave us Adam Smith, Shelley, Samuel aint Johnson, Oscar Wilde, Graham Greene, peni'so- cillin, and one third of Monty Python...
...Oxford places the emphasis on fluency and glibness...
...There are college-wide tests at the start of each term called "collections," but they're primarily used to signal looming disasters...
...British students believe there are no answers to anything...
...Lots of Rhodes and Marshalls don't even bother getting degrees at Oxford (Clinton didn't), and many others scrape by with what are called "thirds," degrees that in this country roughly translate into two years of straight "D"s...
...That's when school is in session...
...dons who slinked under a rug, skimmed the newspaper, or—my personal favorite—sat and shaved with an electric razor while students read out their essays...
...For all their travails, Britain's teachers are paid sums that would make their U.S...
...Nigellian tables Oxford's dons, by contrast, are overworked...
...Some Oxford alums get downright soggy recalling individual tutorials...
...The drawback is, they're bored...
...Aside from winning a promotion to a professorship— awarded by the university biannually, two dozen or so at a time—living another year is the only way to get a raise...
...The standard rap against American education is that it's superficial and next to the British system, it's guilty as charged...
...But as the ferret story makes clear, without a committed teacher this system is a hopeless disaster...
...fluctuating between a soft and loud voice was another...
...But like a lot ally of crushes, this one is partially founded on misconceptions...
...If they don't, then it's the idlest and least efficient system there is...
...It's also got a name that can't be beat, a credential that looks swell on the r?sum...
...George Will may remember his time at Magdalene College, as he did in a 1991 column, for fervid discussions about Stigler and the virtues of the Chicago school of economics...
...There's almost no irony in American education...
...Don yawn The heart of the Oxford education—for British undergraduates and for the many American grad students who do two-year versions of undergrad degrees —is the tutorial system...
...Oxford alums knew immediately that the university's leisurely schedule, not communist skulduggery, was behind the incoming president's 1969 trip to Moscow...
...But I also learned what my friend Tracy already knew: To the extent that a university's reputation is derived from the quality of education it provides, Oxford is overrated...
...Hard work is not only unnecessary, it's essentially frowned upon...
...At Balliol, the college that I attended, this ethic was semi-officially codified as "effortless superiority...
...So do the Americans...
...Eleven to three in the morning, television...
...My favorite was "the last train to Vladivostok," which was somehow woven into a number of essays, apparently without eliciting any comment...
...And not the eager consumers, in this country and others, of its Jeremy Irons elegance...
...And while the American system tries to keep minds focused by grading constantly, Oxford's students are not evaluated with a mark that matters until two weeks before they leave the place for good...
...Not the students...
...So if Oxford is overrated, who cares...
...Typically they have 15 hours of tutorials a week, plus lectures to prepare and deliver, plus a wide range of administrative duties that includes everything from screening next year's incoming class to running the college's investment portfolio...
...Now, Oxford is no different than other schools around the world in being rife with undergrads who'd rather cavort than dissect Hegel, but the British system seems to encourage would-be scholars to choose the bars over the books...
...But they're not...
...Most common, not surprisingly, are dons who snooze...
...Two-thirty to four, nap...
...equivalents blush...
...Old World gravitas is what we want from Oxford and it's got that in spades...
...Ostensibly they are off devouring books and scribbling essays the rest of their time...
...Now that the likes of Simon Blackburn, Colin McGinn, Steven Lukes, John McDowell, and others have departed for the United States and elsewhere, the philosophy department is unremarkable...
...Eight to nine, do some work...
...Post-graduate stints at Oxford say, were the favored path of success for upstart ling politicos and the overly ambitious long before Her Clinton ever set foot on British soil, and long . So before the two Supreme Court justices and five ;ert- senators now toiling in Washington got their dn't Oxford sheepskins...
...You'd be amazed at how easy it is to cobble together a couple of pertinent facts, cull insights from secondary sources and wing the transition sentences once you get to class...
...But while the smattering approach to the curriculum may not lend itself to penetrating thought, it has the advantage of keeping the enthusiasm level high...
...The "vacs" as they are known, are intended as reading periods to bone up on the last term's work and prepare for what's ahead...
...At the end of the hour, your don offers up a new subject, a list of books to pore over, and sends you off to write another cogent synthesis of another topic...
...And most Americans studying there couldn't care less...
...One loses all ambition to be an intellectual...
...In fact, the more you know about their schedules, the harder it is to begrudge them their naps...
...From Lt to the regents and dons of the university you told could almost hear the happy tinkling of sherry fes- glasses toasting a new generation of the best Land and the brightest in the White House: econommch is advisors Robert Reich, Ira Magaziner, and ring Saul Benjamin, and young turks George out Stephanapolous, Bill Halter, Atul Gawande, the and Bruce Reed...
...As I discovered during my z,.ry, own two years there in '88 and '89, our hoary lent vision of Oxford contains some kernels of truth...
...students in the late eighties was so bored that they decided to keep their watches—and their lives—set to American time for one entire term...
...One Marshall scholar I knew at Oxford described his daily regimen this way: "Wake up at noon...
...If you end up with a high mark at the end of your years, fine, but wanting to do well and applying yourself is deemed off-putting...
...But before Clinton wannabes decide they need that Oxford experience, they should know what they are getting into...
...They blackened their windows with curtains and towels and were essentially nocturnal for eight solid weeks, eating dinner right around breakfast time and getting to sleep by noon...
...That's eight weeks on, six off, eight on, six off, another eight on and then it's summertime...
...At one point I was teaching 12 tutorials a week and lecturing and reading papers...
...Noon to one, lunch...
...The difference is vast...
...But neither was foolproof...
...Reading at twice the ordinary decibel level was one strategy...
...Americans on scholarships tend to be monumental slouches for different reasons...
...Since the eighties, Oxford has been losing heavy-weight scholars at a dizzying rate and many of its departments can boast only negligible fractions of the talent they used to have...
...Pint of lager, please...
...For scholars who would rather be trailblazing in their fields, listening closely to the 400th student effort to define negative and positive liberty isn't easy...
...To some extent, the quality of the Oxford education doesn't matter...
...It all adds up to a hell of a lot of hours...
...Six to eight, dinner...
...Ryan learned this firsthand when he arrived at Oxford's New College and found that one of his colleagues had been marching off to a bar with students after listening to their essays and nodding vague, unhelpful approvals...
...Smith, Hume's analysis of the problem of causation raises some baffling questions...
...But Massachusetts Governor William Weld's rendering of life at Oxford sounds more like the norm to me...
...Senior lecturers who have put in a few decades of service can now expect to pull in roughly $45,000, exactly half of the published average salary of a Princeton professor...
...During term, students have just two one-hour tutorials a week to attend and there are no mandatory lectures...
...Government-imposed penury and the school's devotion to an inflexible pay scale have had an inevitable effect...
...The more mischievous of the undergrads at Balliol knew this and made a game of deciding over breakfast which totally inappropriate phrase they would all try to slip by their dons that week...
...But more than ever, a two itin- or three year jaunt to the Mother Country is the -acy confirmed ticket to punch now that the univer:ous sity has finally sent an entire crew to the varsiI he ty team...
...Their advantage is that they get to dig deeper in a narrow field and develop an expertise...
...For one thing, students don't actually hand in their essays, they just read them out...
...With a dedicated don and a curious student, it's hard to conceive of a more intense learning experience...
...Most of the time, Oxford's students are on vacation...
...And have a good time they do...
...American students believe there's an answer to everything...
...You can trace this culture of cool detachment to the British secondary schooling system...
...It also adds up to a great deal of brain-glazing repetition...
...I didn't hope to do any work on my own during the term," says Amartya Sen, a renowned economist who used to teach at Oxford and was lured away by Harvard five years ago...
Vol. 24 • December 1992 • No. 12
