AND ANOTHER THING
Is the home of lost causes planning another self-inflicted wound?
PAUL JOHNSON
Iintended to write this week about Trevor Nunn's thumping revival of Anything Goes at the National, and the curious case of Cole Porter, in particular his 'missing years' when he was in the French Foreign Legion, 1917-19. Odd for a queer to join the Legion, you might think; but, on reflection, not so odd. Indeed it used to have tin bataillon des pecks. Miss Triplet, who plays the Aimee Semple McPherson part that Porter wrote for the unsurpassable Ethel Mennan, is a sensation, and I would like to eat her for breakfast. However, Cole will have to wait, for more important news requires comment. The death of Roy Jenkins was not in itself a critical event, for Roy had a good run for his money and he died on a high: to produce two big, well-received books around the age of 80 is a notable achievement. Even more impressive is the cunning with which he did this, using the researches of old Matthew to produce Gladstone, and of Martin Gilbert to turn a rechauffe. Churchill into a 500,000-copy bestseller. Roy was worldly-wise as well as just plain worldly. He once told me, 'You can judge the spread of a man's influence not only by the number but the provenance of his honorary degrees.' He said, '[think I am the only person who has got the double double,' by which he meant `FIDs' (his term) from both Oxford and Cambridge and Yale and Harvard. He also observed complacently, 'I have them from all five continents.' I preferred the less ceremonious approach of the late Freddie Ayer, who used his HDs as a parchment wallpaper in the hall of his London house, a new idea in elitist decor that I pass on to The Spectator's more celebrated readers.
Roy, of course, ruined the country because he began the process of encouraging criminals which has now led both the Lord Chancellor and the Lord Chief Justice (the two best-protected persons in the country, after the Queen) to encourage young men to take up burglary as a career. However, I was fond of Roy, for two reasons. First, unlike virtually all politicians, he did not talk politics all the time and preferred to keep his evenings for more agreeable activities. Second, he didn't at all mind being laughed at, even on touchy points like, for instance, the way in which his Welsh origins, otherwise totally suppressed, slyly poked through in his inability to pronounce the word 'situation'. I shall miss him, especially his presence at memorial services, which he attended assiduously, whether or not he knew the dear departed, provided that he was eminent enough. Roy firmly and as of right took his place in the middle of the first pew on the left. Asked whom Roy represented, I always replied, 'Civilisation.'
But enough of old Roy. RIP — he will meet a lot of grand people where he is going. The real question is: who ought to get his job at Oxford? Many ridiculous names have been suggested; the Eurofanatics, for instance, divided between Shirley Williams, Chris Patten and Tarzan. I can't think who would be worst. My hope is that Oxford will take this business seriously and that its alumni will prevent the dons from making idiots of themselves, as they did when they refused Lady Thatcher an honorary degree.
Oxford has a recurrent habit of allowing its prejudices (I will not dignify them with the term beliefs) to damage its real interests. In the 16th century it missed the Reformation bus completely so that Queen Elizabeth's government, from first to last, was essentially a Cambridge one, from which that guileful university profited hugely. Oxford's chancellor, Robert. Earl of Leicester, did his best to offset this idiocy and successfully stage-managed a spectacular royal visit in 1566 (he made its proctors go to Cambridge to learn how to do it), but after his death the dons went their own foolish way. In the 18th century Oxford also missed the bus with the Whigs, thanks to the fanatical tradition of hotheads like Sacheverell. This was despite a timely and magisterial warning from the great Joseph Addison, a distinguished fellow of my old college, Magdalen, who then went on to pursue a public career, ending as secretary of state, and in doing so (as he boasted) 'brought Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables and in Coffee-Houses'. In his periodical The Freeholder, 13 April 1716, Addison solemnly told the Oxford dons:
When men of learning are activated thus by a Knowledge of the World as well as of Books, and show that their Studies naturally inspire them with a Love to their King and Country, they give a Reputation to Literature, and convince the world of its usefulness. But when Arts and Sciences are so perverted as to dispose Men to act in Contradiction to the rest of the Community, and to set up for a kind of Republick among themselves, they draw upon them the Indignation of the Wise. and the Contempt of the Ignorant.
Oxford ignored this advice, and sank into the impotent sloth so rightly denounced by Edward Gibbon in his autobiography (1795).
Today, Oxford faces an uncertain and even desperate future. Bullied and underfunded by our philistine, class-warring and venomously know-nothing government, it is in real danger of slipping from its pre-eminent status and becoming a second-class university. A growing number of its more perceptive supporters believe it has no long-term future except as an independent university, freed from its state shackles, when it would not be forced to take ignorant louts and couch-potato Traceys from state sinks in preference to clever products of first-class public schools. Others feel that it would do better to fight for its future within the system. Either strategy will require a chancellor who is used to the inside track both in Whitehall and Westminster, and in the United States, and who does not carry any partypolitical baggage and the enemies whom that entails. Both strategies will also require money in quantities which Oxford and its individual colleges have not yet begun to contemplate.
I am not sanguine that Oxford will take sensible decisions either on this particular appointment or on a general strategy for survival. It is still crammed with left-wing ideological dons who have learnt nothing from the lessons of the terrible 20th century and forgotten nothing from the cosy collectivism of their youth. They despise the wealth-creating process as immoral and try to persuade their pupils to have nothing to do with it. This feeling emerged strongly in the blind opposition to the enlargement of the business faculty, made possible by a f20-million gift from a Middle Eastern benefactor who, pace his Oxford critics, is neither an arms dealer nor a slave-trader nor even an oil tycoon but a highly successful global investor. Despite the academic flatearthers, the expansion went ahead.
But this is only the beginning. It is the Luddite mentality that must change. Have these anti-business dons, who are always whining about their low salaries, ever paused to reflect why, for instance, Harvard can command the best academic talent in the world? One reason is that Harvard has more capital, generating a larger income, than all the rest of the Ivy League colleges put together. And why is this? Because Harvard, long before the others, saw the wisdom of teaching business skills in the grand manner. The Harvard Business School was a pioneer, and an enormously successful one. Its graduates have made countless billions, and a healthy proportion of this wealth has been dutifully bequeathed to the Alma Mater. Oxford alumni should ponder this point and indicate, by their choice of new chancellor, that they know in what direction he should lead.
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