I was in Oxford at the weekend for a wedding at a College chapel.
There I realised that the University of Oxford's greatest glories are not the Colleges and not the students.
After all, there are lovely old buildings in many towns, and the English school system deprives Oxford - and Cambridge - of most of the brightest young people, who of course do not go to the usual feeder private and selective schools.
Oxford's greatest glories are the collections and facilities: the books in the Bodleian and Blackwells, the works and artefacts in the museums and galleries, the trees and plants in the Botanical Gardens, the laboratories and the deskspace.
These collections and facilities mean that, whatever the intellectual fashion in any discipline, there is sufficient material - and space - for an original and independent thinker to take a different approach.
This real opportunity to be able to formulate a different but well-based view is why there will always be something interesting coming out of the University of Oxford.
Wednesday, 1 October 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
1 comment:
I think you are too hard on the idea that the glory of Oxford is not the students.
It's true that the tragic state of so many of our schools does deny many bright children the chance to go to Oxford. But even so, the quality of minds you can find in a JCR, lunch queue or college bar is a lot higher than you encounter anywhere else in your life.
Other universities, workplaces, the Inns of Court, Parliament House, clubland, Westminster and Whitehall all lack some of that spark.
The facility Oxford offers for independent thought is not just nurtured in the Bod and the tutorial. Such are necessary but not sufficient. You need the students to step up to the opportunity presented.
Whilst 1,000 Oxford students might not be the cleverest of their generation, I really don't think there is any other gathering that contains 1,000 cleverer people. You could assemble such a gathering, but there is no single place where you would find people of that intellectual quality concentrated.
The talent wasted by poor state schools is a national disgrace, but nowhere else seems to do a better job of assembling the best products of an imperfect system and raising them to new heights.
Post a Comment