Talking to my Tutor

By MALCOLM RUTHERFORD

tr EIREE weeks ago the Spectator printed an 1 editorial headed 'Dealing with Oxbridge.' It wasn't particularly original and the line it took— that Oxford and Cambridge should be gradually turned over entirely to post-graduates—had been put several times before, notably by Mr. Robin Pedley. Indeed, it is even claimed that it was dis- cussed by the Robbins Committee, though from the scant reference to it in the Report it looks as if it was dropped pretty quickly. What, however, is remarkable is that the reaction it produced was almost entirely confined to one sentence, and the kind, of parenthetical sentence at the end of a paragraph usually marked by journalists 'optional cut' at that.

Referring to the argument advanced by Robbins for dismissing the idea (that it would in- terfere with Oxbridge's great and unique tradition of undergraduate teaching) the sentence went: Of the many things peculiar to Oxford and Cam- bridge, tradition of undergraduate teaching is hardly the first that comes to mind.

Of course, the usual complaints were raised that any interference with Word and Cambridge would lead to a lowering of standards, when it is at least arguable that such a reform would send standards shooting up. But led by Miss Iris Mur- doch, every correspondent, published and unpub- lished, but one took this sentence as evidence that the leader-writer must be off his head. All this was the more surprising as practically every letter came from either Oxford or Cambridge. Miss Murdoch, indeed, went so far as to describe the Oxbridge colleges as 'specialised machines de- signed to deal with the problem of undergraduate teaching,' a novel and original definition, even though her use of the word 'machine' must startle most Oxbridge conservatives, and one which would, I think, hardly be accepted by most re- cent Oxbridge graduates .

Now I can see how the idea of the excellence of Oxbridge undergraduate teaching got about. As the solitary defender of the Spectator editorial, Mr. Peter Laslett, pointed out, it springs from an

age when Oxford and Cambridge were our only institutions of higher learning. Yet even then I suspect that first-class teaching was confined to a limited number of students. But further, I can see how the idea is still perpetuated. The impres- sive figures in the Robbins Report of the ratio of students to teachers at first sight seem to sup- port it. Why is it, then, that a number of the new universities are deliberately choosing the seminar rather than the tutorial method of instruction? Is the one-to-one method really the best way of broadening the student's mind? Most relevant of all, how can anyone believe that the Oxbridge of today is really living up to its principle?

It is true that most people go up to Oxbridge pretty well instilled with the idea that this rela- tionship with their tutor is going to be just won- derful, the public school men telling each other who tutored their fathers and the grammar school boys full of stories about matey tutors getting drunk with their pupils. There are periodic com- plaints in the undergraduate press about lack of contact, of course, but on the whole the myth is sustained with every piece of tutor's sarcasm or minor eccentricity quoted as evidence of academic wisdom. Yet my own first tutorial with my college tutor went something like this.

It was the beginning of my third term, For the first two I had been farmed out to another col- lege, not because this was the way to provide specialist teaching but because, it was said, an administrative blunder had admitted twice as many students to the English school as there should have been. I had been asked quite simply to compare Pope and Dryden as satirists; there was no suggested reading, no guidance, and I reached the conclusion I would have reached at school, and had, that while both were accom- plished poets the strength of Pope's feeling gave his poetry a power quite beyond that of Dryden's. After I finished reading there was a long silence followed by a snort ; 'Wm, Pope was malicious . . . you can't admit malice to English poetry.' I tried to explain. 'If you think like that you can

The Bogey Man

get out,' and my tutor went back to opening his Unending supply of letters. (For a man so appar- ently indolent I never could understand how he found patience to write the letters that brought such a mountain of replies.) Minutes later he looked up with apparent surprise and saw me still sitting on the edge of his settee. He muttered something about Swift for next week; and it was over. The silences had strung it out to about twenty minutes.

And so it went on, through 'do something on Wordsworth,' have a look at Arnold,'I don't believe in teaching Shakespeare, you can do that yourself.' Occasionally there was a note of pathos: `I can't begin re-reading Tom Jones at my age.' Don't go on about Paradise Regained: I can't change my ideas now.' I like to think it was as trying for him as it was for me, because every now and then he would give up the struggle and farm me out to somebody else.

All this is very much a personal experience, and clearly the faults of approach were very much on my side too. But I do not think it is unique. And it was not until my third year that I discovered that tutorials could be supplemented by seminars. These were open to all colleges, though mainly taken over by St. Hilda's, and the students read papers on such esoteric subjects as Matthew Prior. They were, however, rather against the College tradition and not encouraged, as was the practice of going out to tutors for special subjects.

If the Spectator editorial had been based purely on such personal experiences as my own, the wrath of the correspondents would have been understandable. But do the Spectator's correspon- dents not read the universities' own publications, the Cambridge Review, for instance, which almost every week contains complaints about the situation of the post-graduates forced to spend hours teaching subjects not necessarily their own?

Do they not know there is strong feeling in the Oxbridge citadel itself that college teaching should give way to faculty teaching, and that the dons leaving Oxbridge for the new universities are not all taking the tutorial system with them?

So amid the blur of trees and talk and personal episodes better forgotten that is the memory of

Oxford, I do not think the tradition of under- graduate teaching looms very large. Or if it does, it is worth remembering that tradition is often synonymous with myth.