IT'S TIME TO SCRAP THE MILLENNIUM DON

Dreaming spires? Come off it. More like waking nightmare. Three

Oxford undergraduates — Bijan Omrani, George Baily and Catharine Gulick — issue a challenge to their university NEW Labour and the University of Oxford are frighteningly similar. In communicating with the nation, both use the relentlessly upbeat language of public relations. Our undergraduate prospectus told us that, apart from the tutorial system and the 'world-class teaching and research', we should wish to give ourselves to Oxford on account of the `beauty of its ancient buildings'.

Like New Labour, Oxford is deeply dependent on image for its catch. Tourists and prospective students are fed exactly the same bait to draw them to the city: the image of begowned dons standing in the middle of emerald lawns saying, `and, ninthly. . . . '; of pouting intellectuals laughing to themselves at some private pun in Mid- dle English as they hurry from honey- coloured quad to honey- coloured quad to reach their tutorials at the feet of Gandalf, St Dominic or Yoda; of 200 Bertie Woosters and as many Dukes of Dorset waiting around to see the Encae- nia procession, where the assembled weight of international intelligence will actually bend light.

When a don falls asleep in one's first tuto- rial, therefore, the disil- lusionment is not a little hard to bear. You begin to wonder whether the great men of the university give a hang for 'religious and useful learning' when you hear, after an incandescent sermon on 'The Grace of Humility' from a Jesuit priest, a pro-vice- chancellor and pro-proctors talking about `the difficulty of car-parking in central Oxford'.

A graduate student was asked in her entrance interview why she wished to come to Oxford. Her reply, bubbling with girlish enthusiasm, was cut short by the don rising, crossing the room and producing an enor- mous Havana from a jar. 'Look at this,' he said. 'This is my last cigar.' He paused to light it. 'I'm dying of cancer. I've been told I have two years to live. If I smoke this, it won't be any good for me. But I'm going to do it anyway. I don't care. I've had a crap life. Because I've spent it all in Oxford.' The student came up to read East European studies and has been rewarded with a don who invariably polishes his shoes with a toothbrush while she reads him her essays.

Despite the pledge in Oxford's prospec- tus to provide us with 'world-class teach- ing', we have all encountered similar instances of dons incapable of conducting a tutorial to the promised standard. Most students when they arrive are deeply excit- ed by their first encounter with Socrates or Spinoza. However, any passion they may have had for their subject dies when they discuss it with their tutor, who is usually a grey man, living in a grey office, wearing a grey jacket and grey trousers, surrounded by grey books, a grey carpet and a grey por- trait of himself lit by sun filtered through grey curtains; a man who will speak in a grey voice at ten words a minute, and whose idea of animation is to speak 11 words a minute. In the Senior Common Rooms of Oxford it is the culture that dons and lecturers are under no obligation to inspire their stu- dents. A former Lincoln tutor told us that dons could not be expected to be excited about their subjects for the benefit of their students, because this would tire them out. A senior theologian at Christ Church has said, 'Of course undergraduate lectures are boring.'

Many lecturers are as dire as the tutors. They fail to convey information properly. Some lecturers address students as if they were children; others as if they, the students, were themselves emeri- tus professors; yet others as if the students were not human. Many lectur- ers are distant, hunched, fungal figures quietly reading out their 30- year-old notes, maybe once a term mumbling, `I suppose I could have brought a visual aid at this point, but I seem to have forgotten the book. , Often, lectur- ers are bored with hav- ing to relate the same material to an audience on an annual cycle, but instead of suppressing this familiarity graceful- ly, they make a point of childishly conveying their ennui and their wish to be elsewhere. One gets a sense of the lecturer being grotesquely disengaged from his subject. Richard Swinburne, of Oriel, was once asked after a lecture he gave to the Philos- ophy Society, 'What do you believe?' to which the reply came, 'Well, of course, it's all a game. . . . What I actually believe is irrelevant.' Perhaps if Cranmer had said the same thing to his interrogators, he would not have been burnt round the cor- ner from where Swinburne was speaking.

We cannot understand why we are com- pelled to pay thousands of pounds in uni- versity and college fees for what are essentially defective goods. Oxford claims in its prospectus to provide an 'intellectual community'. The most eminent interna- tional minds would be bursting to exchange their ideas with undeserving undergradu- ates. In fact, it's nothing like that. A don's seniority is inversely proportional to the amount of contact he has with undergradu- ates. A friend of ours was told by an emi- nence rise: 'I can't possibly take on any more students now I'm a half-professor. My work requirement is six hours a week, so, as you can see, I'm dreadfully busy.' Dreadfully busy, indeed: a don can expect to spend two hours a week more than that at high table.

With some honourable exceptions, dons do not like any contact with students. They tend to dine by themselves and can usually be expected to ignore their students when they pass them in the quads. One Brasenose don packs all his tutorials into a single after- noon so that students will not clutter up the rest of his week. Three dons of different col- leges have agreed that Oxford compresses the work of 12 or 13 weeks into eight so that undergraduates will be tout of the way' for the rest of the year.

The prospectus insists that a student `must be ready to risk giving [his] own opinions, as the object of the tutorial method is to develop independent thought', but the contempt of tutors for the original thinking of students is so intense that independent thought is, in practice, discouraged. The philosophy tutor Peter King ordered his students not to be original about Descartes, for they were not quali- fied to be; Nigel Wilson, classics tutor at Lincoln, told us that 'originality is not at a premium'; John Foster, tutor in philosophy at Brasenose, advised one of his students to `be more boring' in his essays. Tutorials are never treated as an interchange of ideas between equals. Dons forget the ideal of Mark Pattinson (rector of Lincoln 1861-84): 'The instructors . . . are them- selves investigators, and invite the pupil to accompany them on their road.' If tutors started to value time spent with 'original' students as a valid research experience in itself, rather than an impediment to their thought, the tutorial system would bear fruit for all, and dons would cease to resent the presence of undergraduates.

Even good dons, who are polymathic and concerned for their students, are prevented from seriously helping them by the sleepy, iron-clad superstructure of the university. One of the bastions of this constrictive scaffold is the weekly essay. Oxford champions the essay as a way of forming original ideas and defending and refining them rigorously in the tutorial. In practice, one week is barely enough for reading the primary texts closely: 'Read two books of The Faerie Queene' 12,000 lines; 'Read books one and seven of A la recherche du temps perdu' — close on a lifetime's work. Most students end up racing to the library at the last minute, picking up three or four pseudo-pithy vol- umes of criticism, and amalgamating them into an essay with which the tutor will be pleased. The only way to produce essays on time is to give the most cursory treatment to huge swathes of art or histo- ry, abandoning any attempt at the more genuine, less superficial scholarship which is the child of silence and slow time. The pressure of essay work prevents the indi- vidual from engaging with his subject: the ideas that once made martyrs here in Oxford now must be kept at arm's length in the word-count marathon. Those who in a pompous, blinkered and complacent manner defend the system as being part of the eternal Oxford way of life forget that essays and exams in their current for- mat were only introduced in the 19th cen- tury, not out of the requirements of study, but to prepare undergraduates for an imminent career in the Civil Service com- piling under time pressure reports for ministers.

Oxford is not the 'multidisciplinary com- munity' it promises to be. If we attempt to introduce Yeats into Catullus, George Her- bert into the Philosophy of Religion, or St John's Gospel into Euripides, the response is always the same: we are being 'irrelevant' and are warned that we 'could not do that in an exam'. A friend of ours was once asked by his don what he had read over the vacation: 'Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov,' he said, to which the don angrily replied, 'But they're not on the syl- labus.' The notion of subject specialisation offers a shelter for dons who basically are not erudite. We could point to an English tutor who knows nothing about Gerard Manley Hopkins. Dons take to heart the first part of Sir James Murray's maxim: UtQWERS11-4- CliPl.L.N CIE

OKFeiRP

Lk

vo, STDE's

`Know everything about something', but conveniently forget the other half 'and something about everything.'

We have tried to open discussions with our tutors, senior tutors, heads of houses, faculty boards, proctors and the vice-chan- cellor himself. However, we have found no truth in the vice-chancellor's claim that Oxford 'ought to be confident enough to be interested in fair criticism' (and we were fair back then). The only time we were not ignored was when one of us was told by Eric Anderson (rector of Lincoln and sometime housemaster of our Prime Minis- ter) that he ought to leave the university.

The only conclusion to come to is that the university views free speech and original thought as some sort of fashion which must be proclaimed, but not observed. In fact, Oxford's thoughtless submission to another social whim, the belief that an arts degree is somehow a measure of suitability for an administrative or City job, is responsible for the introduction and maintenance of the essay- and syllabus-based exam system which is so poisonous to real learning. The university's other illness may be termed the `Oxford cult of fat' — its belief that a large number of essays, articles, books and degrees constitute learning. In essence, Oxford has gone through a 1,000-year cycle, so that we are now back at the stage of monks sitting in scriptoria (or the Bodleian) copying out manuscripts without being allowed to consider the information they encounter. Whoever sequesters him- self to copy out the greatest volume of text is considered the most worthy; his rewards are a red cape and keys to the wine cellar. A former tutor agreed that this was a fair description of the university's present con- dition.

A university is not Xeroxing, whim and wine; it should be as the university prayers state: a community devoted to 'religious and useful' education. Likewise, learning should not be the urge to reel off `-sko verbs in Attic Greek' (a recent D.Phil the- sis of 100,000 words); it should be the per- manent vocation of chasing the shadow of God. Oxford's refusal to sustain this ideal for education is revolting, and destroys its claim to be the highest seat of learning. We now welcome contributions to the discussion, particularly from those involved with the university, although to be honest we don't expect much more than a lot of grey teddies being thrown out of lots of grey cots. The bottom line must be that the best judge of a teacher is the pupil: if we say we are badly taught — that the teacher cannot impart information, inspire us or debate with us — then this is true.

No one in their right mind would wait even five minutes to get into the Millenni- um Dome; what we find more surprising is that people are prepared to wait out five years of secondary education for an encounter with a yet more potent icon of modern, expensive, image-based hypocrisy — the Millennium Don.