Oxford, a town of "dreaming spires," was full of carnations and champagne yesterday. The Oxford students are in the midst of their exams, wearing a white carnation if they have completed their first exam, a pink if beyond their second, and a scarlet if they have finished all their exams. Add to the scarlet carnation a party hat, a bottle of champers, plenty of confetti, a noise maker, and other essentials, including last but foremost friends in the college garden.
The honey-colored stone of the old buildings glows in the sun. Bells in towers are ringing someplace regularly. But the city itself -- even if you take a walking tour from an informed guide -- is "an impenetrable fortress" as one author put it. The university must be experienced by a longer stay and one that is experienced on the inside. Period. If one cannot be a student of Oxford, it will never be the same. A conference, a short course, or some such event will give some vague inkling of the life inside. But it's not a degree from here in any sense. A walking tour -- unequivocally -- will not avail, albeit the facts one learns through such an event might be interesting in themselves. But you will stand out painfully.
For all that has remained the same over the centuries, some aspects of Oxford today have changed very significantly in the last twenty five years since I was first here. All but a few of the cobblestone streets have gone -- paved over. There are no lasting monuments for those who visit, of course. Rather, as appropriate, the colleges remain monuments to the minds not only shaped here but also those minds that influence us -- no matter how distant we may be mentally or physically from Oxford -- those influences coming down to us from social, political, scientific, or educational theories and reforms. I forgot literary. Odd, that, given why I'm here.
It can also be an intensely affected city. In presenting a paper at Hertford College some years back, the company of professors greeted one another in a large common room with wines and bites (the puns here are appropriate: one evening two professors whined at each other until very nearly -- and dead seriously -- came to blows over an insignificant point about Evelyn Waugh in WWII).
But that first evening, a young student approached me, asking in the thickest Oxford accent I'd heard before or since. "So, you're from AYE-oh-wauh, auhn't you?" Yes..., I said. "We're nay-bauhs" he said.
Really? I didn't recall an accent anything like this in the mid-west of America. "Where are you from?" He pours out the word, so thick that it takes me a moment to understand it, "Oh-Mauh-hauh" -- that is, Nebraska. He'd been in Oxford for three years (with mid-year trips back home). I looked at him in disbelief and inquired about his studies, refusing to believe that an American, mid-western dialect could be so thoroughly obliterated in three years. Even Hugh Laurie's accent (he was born and raised in Oxford) was nothing near this absurd noise. Affected or infected?
Overall, education is distinctly and increasingly a business. The spirit of inquiry is very profitable, and colleges built anywhere from the 1100s to 1500s are housed in buildings that want to fall down, as we surely would want to if we were 500 or more years old. The colleges need money, not merely to maintain their old and grand buildings but also to maintain their presence and their image.
So, too, in the states. Image is just about everything, and there the image, including -- if not foremost -- the presence of highly-visible facilities and programs have taken the place of real and patron-funded inquiry, exploration, and learning. At Oxford, one of the more visible elements being used is one (very large) college hall, Christ Church's, for the Harry Potter movies: it features as the dining hall at Hogwarts. One must pay to visit the hall, something true of many colleges that allow groups in.
Commercial Venture: Cashing in on Harry P.
Still, I think there must be something of real inquiry somewhere in Oxford as the spires continue to point upwards.
To see Oxford by guided tour -- as with London or any place else -- is to both aid and defeat learning the city. You stand in a group, which in itself is an eyesore, an embarrassment, and an impediment to people trying to navigate on bikes and afoot around you in the narrow streets and lanes. You LOOK like a tourist, ACT like a tourist (rubber-necking and bobble-heading), and, frankly ARE a tourist, not a student involved in inquiry.
And such a tour costs money, of course, and then...you hear facts, facts, and more facts, which, as my colleague who arranged the fiasco said, "the students will forget right away." It's the detachment from the meaning of the place; it doesn't speak to experience. As a tourist anywhere, you merely gaze upon facades. "Better a day in thy courts than a thousand outside." Tours are largely useless.
The spirit of exploration and guided inquiry is that mode of learning by which which we discover, but more: it is that mode by which what we have learned enters our beings. It's not the mere facts we seek in inquiry; it's a change of being that comes through seeing the world through others' vision -- even if we see only imaginatively and temporarily. And we remember such inquiry as experiential. Learning by experience is largely undermined by guided tours, and the spirit breaks by interminable rote and by standing on pavements for what was it...? Over two hours.
That is not to aspire.
Punting in the Cherwell
But punting is. For one, it is thoroughly English. Never doubt it. Punting is in large part inspiring, and some who aspire to punt merely pole themselves in a circle, hitting other boats and causing chaos that an education in physics should be able to resolve. Punting is a course in physics itself, a course that many do not pass. But if you can pole the boat along and steer it well, it's a quiet delight amidst ducks, geese, brightly-beaked little black fowl, and swans. The ducks, with their young, are a delight, with the yellow, popcorn-brood bobbing along, coming right up to the boats for tidbits -- or is it for champagne?
Yes, after all, one must admit what one learns here, painful realization though it may be. The ducks follow the punts for one thing only: the drink. The students have enabled the ducks far too long (centuries, in fact), so that it is now a genetic disposition in them: a punt and a pint. Oxford has recently opened a REHAB facility for ducks, who, by the way, are quite good punters in their own right (if sober), albeit most of the time they're not able to quite stand up at the stern without falling in.
One Specimen: He Left Aflac for Oxford
We would not be ducking education by drink, punt, or guided tour. We'd rather be exploring and inquiring.
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