UNDERGRADUATE PAGE
Research Student
By RICHARD MAYNE (Trinity College, Cambridge) TOWARDS the end of his third year at the university his friends made shy jokes about his academic achievements and his imagined career as a don. " I suppose you'll be staying up next year to do research? Never mind, we'll come and see you when you get your professorship." Forced to reply, he would laugh and shrug his shoulders, elaborately facetious and matter-of-fact. " I'm afraid that depends on the exam. results. Judging from the amount of work I've done so far, I'll probably be selling nylons in Oxford Street." And the general embarrassment would dissolve into smiles.
No one in Cambridge—not even the intending research student—enjoys thinking about careers. Most people, indeed, regard going-down much as they regard death—an inevitable and unpleasant prospect which it is easier not to regard at all. The future and its worries are crowded to the back of the mind, a private bad dream growing insistent only as time,begins to run out. True, there is the University Appointments Board, which arranges interviews and contact with employers. One is advised to visit it during one's second year. It even arranges lectures on the various professions. Nevertheless, the gap between salaried appointments and one's vague, complex, introspective Cambridge self seems appallingly vast. One knows so little of one's own aptitudes, so little of the realities of business, or industry, or the Civil Service. What is the outside world really like? How can I possibly choose a career, with no notion of what it will entail for me? No Appointments Board could attempt to answer such questions, to talk in such personal language ; and the busy, experienced interviewers must inevitably seem unsympathetic towards one's undergraduate qualms. Forget the future, then, and live in the present ; excuses are simple enough. Living in the present, surely, is one way of preparing for the future: there is the syllabus to be covered, the Tripos to be taken, so much to be done. Attend another lecture, join a new society: take a punt on the river, go to parties, see a few more films. But in one's third year all this camouflage begins to wear th?h. One's last Tripos is approaching: time is at last running out. A new batch of pale young candidates arrives from the schools to take the scholarship examination ; next year one of them may even be living in these rooms. Now, at last, one will have to visit the Appointments Board, fill up forms, attend interviews and think about prospects. It is at this point that the would-be research student begins to feel embarrassed by his friends' enquiries. He. too, has to make his decision, perhaps even more difficult than theirs. Shall he stay up and do research? It is not, he hastens to assure himself, that he is afraid of the world outside. He took jobs in the vacations ; he spent three years in the Army. No, it is simply that he wants to do some real academic work, to be a scholar instead of a half-informed dabbler, writing glib weekly essays and annually outwitting the examiners. He already has in mind several topics which he would like to investigate thoroughly. He is enthusiastic and intelligent. He feels himself fitted for an academic discipline. Much of this he rather stiltedly tells his tutor when he asks leave to stay up a fourth year. Will his scholarship be extended ; what are his chances of a further Government grant? His tutor Is polite, informative, distantly encouraging. If Mr. X is sure that this is what he wishes. . . . Yes, it can probably be arranged. He must apply for registration as.a research student, working for a Ph.D. This entails writing a thesis ; he may also submit a fellowship dissertation to the college. The Government will probably continue its grant. It will be as well to do some work during the long vacation.
Mr. X goes away delighted. He has set the machinery in motion ; he has made a decision about his career. The examina- tion results are satisfactory ; grants. studentships and scholar- ships are arranged ; a supervisor is appointed ; and at last, splendid in his new bachelor's gown, Mr. X comes up for the long-vacation term. The Tripos is behind him: now he can do some real work. Armed with a card-index file and some brand-new notebooks, he plunges headlong into his subject, com- piling a great book-list, taking voluminous notes, checking and counter-checking references, stumbling through manuscripts and works of scholarship in German. Throughout the summer he is carried on, buoyant with his first enthusiasm, working gigantically and indiscriminately.
With the Michaelmas term, at the end of the summer, there comes a change. The research student meets his new supervisor, who is cautious and almost unbearably erudite. He is given new book-lists and new lines of approach, at once more limited and more obscure. He begins to realise the responsibility which his work entails—a continual effort to be strictly accurate and comprehensive, to examine fresh material and reconsider the old. He must, as it were, spin out from himself the whole' of his future, like a spider's web. There is no question now of out- witting the examiners ; there is not even an employer to satisfy. for his supervisor can do little but lay down general principles. In grappling with his material the student must be self-reliant and alone. If ever he suspected his own motives—if ever he envis- aged research as an escape from responsibility—now he is undeceived.
At times he may be tormented with doubts. He may doubt his own capacity for the task. So much has to be mastered in a short three years, so many books and articles and documents to be studied, so much new evidence to be sought, so long and complicated a thesis to be written. The work is slow and monotonous ; sometimes it seems unending, and all he can do is cling doggedly to his impossible hopes. But then, just when he feels that he will never make a scholar, he chances upon some undiscovered document, some new line of investigation. Straight- way all his confidence returns: he smiles with absurd private glee, and fills another fat volume with notes.
It is in such moments of relief, however, or when he is off duty, away from his books and files, that he is attacked by a second and more disturbing set of doubts. At home friends of the family enquire what he is doing nowadays, mildly surprised that he should still be at the university. In the vacations he meets former contemporaries who have gone down, to work in the Bank of England or for firms in the City ; they smile indulgently when he mentions his researches, and go on to talk of office-hours and marriage and flats in town. And when, at the end of the vacation, he returns to libraries and note-taking, the research student feels curiously derelict, marooned in the academic world. For a while he sees himself as a perpetual student, forever bent over his books, forever a bachelor, forever in receipt of some kind of educational charity. His fellow- academics seem like the inhabitants of some modern Laputa, talking busily of theses and doctorates and assistant-lectureships. Altogether, he may roundly declaim, there are far too many research students: it is all a symptom of the crisis in the univer- sity. It ought not to be allowed. But moments of irritation, however exhilarating, seldom last. Before long the research student .is back at his task, with the certainty that it is ultimately worth while. Research, after all, is one of the principal functions of the university. It has its drawbacks, but it has also its thrills and rewards. Not everyone who engages in it is an embryonic Housman or Stubbs: a few. no doubt. are seeking to postpone the day when they will leave Cambridge ; but one does not condemn a church for its Bishop Blougram or an army for its Benedict Arnold. And if at times the life of scholarship seems dull, futile or escapist—if one doubts one's own capacity or suspects one's motives for attempt- ing it—this is merely what one must expect. For like every activity in any sense, creative—even, one might insist. like life itself—academic work requires a preliminary act of faith. Only thus can one meet and resist that most deadly of occupational diseases. la trahison des clercs.
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