DECLINE AND FALL
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto says Oxford is failing because her
alumni are mean, she has betrayed her traditions and is unwilling to adopt the best American practices
OXFORD University is failing, and does not care enough to succeed. I take no pleasure in the accusation; I make it out of loyalty and love. Oxford ought to be the university with most to offer its members: the richest, most transforming experiences; the most conducive environment for teaching and learning; the most vibrant cultural life and the most stimulating company, as well as some of the most innovative research and the most challenging scholarship. By tradition, resources and privileges of every kind Oxford is equipped to be the best. Yet in almost everything that matters rivals easily outstrip it.
Forget the new league table of research 'excellence'. It shows that the Oxford Faculty of Modern History — the biggest history department in the world — has been beaten on points by the former Oxford Poly. So what? The evidence of Oxford's crisis lies way beyond the reach of league tables, which are based on manipulable criteria, fallibly judged. They cover Britain, whereas Oxford should be measured against the best of the world. They privilege whatever is easily quantifiable, whereas real excellence is too dynamic to be measured, too soaring for calibration. The tables are important only because, first, it is scandalous for Oxford to be beaten by anybody, on any criteria. Second, most Oxford dons seem to react to the university's failure with depressing complacency. 'What crisis?' says the Senior Common Room. The want of passion and commitment are wormwood in the state. Finally, though tables are rubbish, people believe them. Prophecies of decline become self-fulfilling.
In the league table that matters most for the future — the table of prestige, which can be computed only impressionistically — Oxford is behind at least half-a-dozen institutions in America, has slipped far behind Cambridge, and is threatened by the spectacular improvement of other places in Europe. Most of Oxford's reforms in the last quarter-century or so have been designed to make it more like other universities in Britain — more everyday, more workaday, more representative, more unre markable — whereas Oxford's historic peculiarities are its strength and ought to be nurtured. The best models to learn from are in America — a land of which Oxford, with its vast but underappreciated and underexploited American links, remains surprisingly ignorant. Oxford's top-brass decision-makers have outstanding qualities of civilisation and genius. But they are trapped in a web of committees and administrative structures that no one fully understands. Like other Leviathans, Oxford is uneasily manoeuvrable. Adverse currents of social and economic change have stranded the beast, while its own intractable procedures have been unable to refloat it.
When I was young I thought that there were two ways of running a university: the Oxford way and the wrong way. Then I went to America. I found happy campuses with a can-do attitude, where teachers, researchers and students follow their vocations freely. In Oxford I had assumed that unhappiness was part of the deal. Students and teachers get trapped in grooves that the dead have run out with their fingernails: old courses, imposed on teachers with little knowledge of them and on students with little interest in them. Exciting learning happens when courses are inspired with the oxygen of research, or where enlivening breadth is rewarded: that's the essence of America's lesson. Now I teach mainly in London, where — at least in my own part of the university — that lesson has been learnt. The classroom experience seems livelier and richer, the commonroom atmosphere more purposeful and collegial than in most of Oxford. Increasingly, able school-leavers, who sense the attractions of other universities, find Oxford unmagnetic. Brains drain to where conditions are more propitious or intellect more valued. This is not a matter of emoluments but of proper esteem: in Oxford, bursarial staff have dedicated parking places, but not the Regius Professor of Modern History.
The problems start with admissions, for students are a university's life-blood, which has to be continually transfused. Oxford's struggle to democratise was nobly inspired, but it has been feebly executed. Different colleges have different procedures for different subjects. Tutors take commendable pains, but they never have enough information to go on. The old networks, which used to supply little devils you know, recommended by your own old pupils or by schools with historic college links, can now be used sparingly, if at all. Prevailing selection methods reward swots, not necessarily critical intellects, or enriching all-rounders. Dons are unfairly burdened with responsibility for interviews, and unfairly criticised when they make knife-edge decisions wrongly. The tyranny of 'transparency' warps the process. With honourable exceptions, selectors overemphasise exam results, which are a defence against charges of subjectivity, while interviewers look for commitment rather than creativity, because drop-out rates threaten funding. Again, what is needed is freedom: to make subjective judgments and take risks. Drop-outs, misfits, rebels and wayward geniuses have an invigorating effect, which never registers in tables but enhances fellow-students' lives.
Oxford's educational philosophy seems to have been superannuated by history. Old Oxford was elitist, but teachers and students shared a common culture, and common interests and priorities. Grammar schools educated children in the scholarly, aesthetic and cultural prejudices of dons. Undergraduates and their tutors were poised to be friends when they met. Now the diversity of backgrounds is better, but, in consequence, the old system no longer works. The tutorial is Oxford's hallmark: every undergraduate gets — or, in theory, should get — weekly individual attention from an accomplished scholar, who takes an interest in the young person's work, and criticises, encourages, inspires and guides it. Ideally, if you are an undergraduate willing to get the best out of your tutors, they become your friends. Nowadays, such an ideal is rarely fulfilled. Social and generational gaps yawn in the tutorial, making it tedious and unrewarding. Unlubricated by sherry, which underpaid tutors can no longer afford to splash around, the relationship never takes off. Friendly overtures arc likely to be mistaken for sexual harassment.
Few tutors see much of their students; overwork cuts tutorials down to the bare minimum of allotted time. Many dons remain dedicated to the old school of selflessness, but who can blame others for whom research 'productivity' makes teaching seem an irrelevant chore? The time needed to make tutorials effective is enormous, if all undergraduates are to get the individually tailored courses that they deserve. In any case, because of academic specialisation, the relationship with a single tutor is too rarely sustained. Students spend terms on end with whippersnapper graduates as their tutors, instead of the wise old masters they hoped to meet. This is fine in small doses, as some of the young have a teacher's gift that withers with age. But too often it is a source of disillusionment and a waste of time. Subject tutors, who arrange the distribution of tutorials, are devoted but harassed, because they believe in their undergraduates and feel that they deserve the best but often cannot recruit the best to teach them.
While the tutorial system declines, the curriculum stagnates. The biggest single change in undergraduate studies in my time has been the switch to an atmosphere of nagging and narinying, designed to keep students from fecklessness, checked by frequent exams and cowed by threats of discipline which, in the bad old days of indolence and elitism, only moral turpitude could incur. I suspect that the new rigour is moral supervision in disguise: formal work restrains the excesses of youth. The incidence of addictive behaviour, mental disorder and binge-irresponsibility does not suggest that this strategy works. Students need spare time to contribute to artistic, political and social life, or just to talk to their friends, whose conversation, in a properly selective student body, will be as educational as any lecture. Evidently, telly and the boozer — rather than any more nefarious activities — are the real foes of leisure-time enrichment; but you can't grind these vices out of young lives with the dreary mill of assessment and exams. The best recipe for campus happiness — with consequent dividends in enthusiasm and commitment — is to liberate the curriculum to give students and teachers more choice and more breadth. But Oxford's system is designed for frustration. Faculty by faculty, you can get a majority against almost anything, but a majority in favour of a radically new course requires the kind of struggle — the clerical effort, the lobbying, the endurance of pointless argument — for which most lives seem too short.
The arch problem — the overarching problem — is always money. Centuries of domestic peace and prosperity in Britain created an opportunity, unexcelled anywhere in the world, to build up endowments. Yet historically poor management has left today's Oxford impoverished by American standards, which are what matter if one aims at world-class excellence. Government funding — which looks, on paper, like a huge annual bonus that Oxford's American rivals do not get — has not really helped. The purse-strings get round universities necks but never seem to stretch to the cost of major initiatives. When asked for money, old members' meanness is a European vice, which keeps universities poor: Oxford's constituency — rich and morally indebted, after an education which, for most students, was cheap or free — is disappointingly unproductive. In America benefactors get help from the tax system: this is the acceptable face of economic liberalism. Alumni who pay about £80,000 for a degree course at an ivy-league college go on supporting their universities for the rest of their lives. Oxford, it seems, is, to most British students, barely worth the 13,000 it now costs for three years' tuition. Colleges' most imaginative initiative has been to get students to cold-call old members — an undignified form of prostitution that annoys potential benefactors. Real success begins by welcoming emotional investment. A friend of mine has given £50,000 to his old Oxford college, where his son was refused a place. An American friend has given $10 million to his alma mater, Brown University, where his son turned down the offer of a place (but later enrolled in Brown's graduate school). You can't buy a place at either university, but Brown has a better relationship with alumni because it properly treasures continuity.
Si monamentum requiris, look for evidence of decline at Oxford's new Business School. Enfiefment to a rich benefactor made it impossible to refuse an imperfect deal. Gimcrack standards glare from a trashy building. Cheapskate values subvert salaries too small to recruit all the required staff. Imagine what Oxford could achieve: with long-accumulated riches, books, scientific collections and artistic treasures; the immeasurable magnetism of historic renown and social prestige; the still-enduring fund of talent in teaching, scholarship and research; state-supplemented finance; an environment in Britain that favours selective universities in a way inconceivable elsewhere in Europe; a body of old members of exceptional power and wealth. Compare the present reality: a university where you can hardly hear the wisdom for the whingeing; a crisis of confidence and commitment; a deficit of happiness and enthusiasm; a flight of talent; and the consequence of it all: plunging prestige.
Felipe Ferncindez-Arinesto is a Professorial Fellow of Queen Marv, University of London. He has been a member of the Oxford Modern Histmy Faculty since 1983.
Previous page
