by Prof. Rajiva Wijesinha
While on holiday last month I was lent a book by a friend, who had borrowed it in turn from my former Dean, Leslie Mitchell, into whose retirement home he too has now moved. It must have appealed to my Dean, as it did to both of us, because it was about Oxbridge dons in the latter half of the last century. Called Twilight of the Dons, by a man called Colin Kidd, it charts the decline of the prestige of dons over that period, from the high point they commanded just after the Second World War.
This was in part because of the yeoman service they rendered during the war, not only in the field where many of them won decorations but also in administration and, in particular, in intelligence work, notably at Bletchley Park, which worked out German ciphers, contributing to effective countermeasures against German aggression, notably at sea.
With prestige thus gained, dons were a notable feature on the media and developed apace in the post war years, not only delivering lectures but also participating in quiz shows which they dominated. And they were in the forefront of developing other universities as well, the red bricks which started earlier and then the many others set up in this period, sometimes characterised as plate glass.
There were some challenges to this hegemony in the first couple of decades after the war, notably a Kidd notes, by Catholics who wanted greater seriousness – a focus of criticism being the then prevalent language philosophy, which was more concerned with arguments about meaning than the world at large. But for a couple of decades there was nothing really disturbing. But then came the student movements of the late sixties which, if nothing like as dramatic as those in the United States of France, started a decline in confidence.
Before he goes on to these, Kidd has two set pieces about the United States and France though he concentrates on peripheral issues. He looks closely at responses in Britain to the Kenndy assassination, or rather what some dons, particularly the conservative Hugh Trevor Roper, saw as the cover up by the Warren Commission of a deeper conspiracy. He was opposed by his fellow conservative, John Sparrow, Warden of All Souls, and their exchanges could be acerbic.
The next chapter deals with sociology, a suspect subject at Oxbridge, and the responses of dons who found the theorising of Levi-Strauss suspect. Having helped publicise his approach, they soon despaired of his loose methods, and became increasingly critical.
This last fitted in with one of the criticisms of the students, that Oxbridge academia was too clinical, and they wanted subjects, and subject combinations, that related more clearly to the actual world. This went hand in hand with support of Marxist arguments, more precisely Trotskyists radicalism, which fundamentally challenged the elitist consensus of Oxbridge.
Until the shocks of the sixties, Oxbridge had had a laid-back approach to administration, and its finances. It had never thought about the anomaly apparent to students of a college without undergraduates, All Souls, which provided fellowships for many grandees resident in London, who lived a sybaritic existence when they came to Oxford for weekends.
All Souls was one focus of student criticism, and Warden Sparrow deeply upset, not least when there was graffiti on the walls of Balliol, the most radical of the colleges then, with a Marxist master, Christopher Hill. He demanded that the graffiti be cleaned up, and Hill obliged, to the extent only of removing Sparrow’s name, but allowing everything else to remain, which made him more furious.
Ironically, this Marxist approach fitted in with the next great shock that hit the universities, namely the rigid money for value policies of Margaret Thatcher. She had the support of many conservative dons, some of whom Kidd characterises as Tory Marxists, in opposition to the Whig grandees, who had held unchallenged sway earlier. But not a few of the Tories were overwhelmed by her rigidity, which intensified when Oxford denied her an honorary degree. She changed the funding system to create an agency that was supposed to be evenhanded between all the universities, so Oxbridge soon found itself having to compete with institutions it had previously patronised.
There was, however, another reason for the decline in prestige of the dons, which had to do with shifting priorities as new generations came to the fore. The confidence of the generation which thought it had won the war and laid the foundations for modern Britain – William Beveridge, who institutionalised the welfare state, was the Master of University College, my own – gave way to a new generation which, even if many were of the upper class, had to strive to get to the top.
Furthermore, the domination of generations of undergraduates by dons who lived in college, and entertained them, and developed wider interests through conversations over the hospitality they freely extended, passed when more and more dons lived out and had to help in looking after families. Working wives became the norm, unlike in the earlier period when wives simply supported their husbands, contributing to hospitality at home, as was the case with the epitome of supportive tutors, George Cawkwell of Univ.
He does not figure in the book, the only example given of a don who, while a considerable academic, spent much time with and on students being that of Jeremy Catto, of Oriel, whose death a few years back led to outpourings of grief. Before that he had been part of a group of historians, including Leslie Mitchell, who saw themselves as a last post of civilisation, which they celebrated at regular dinners.
But there are many vignettes of dons who were larger-than-life figures in my time, including Trevor Roper, who had a streak of mischief which led to sometimes radical comments, as when ultra-conservative fellows of Peterhouse Cambridge, where had had been elected head, found him wanting, to be described as ‘the power-house of Troglodyte thought’.
Kidd shows how all that had changed, dons in general now being largely parochial figures, concerned with their families more than with their students, and with research that advances their careers than with students to advance not just their careers but the wider thinking that would make their careers productive.
But I suppose, with now two Prime Ministers in a row who did not come from Oxford, the first such lapse since the Second World War, the shades coming down is not surprising.
from The Island https://ift.tt/OdToPsg
