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Karen Hewitt,
teaches literature at Oxford University
Matched only by its great rival, Cambridge, Oxford University is a unique British institution. For centuries the preserve of the country's political and business elite, Oxford combines exceptionally high academic standards with a rarified atmosphere of wealth, privilege and intellectual brilliance.
‘The University and City of Oxford are seated on fine rising ground in the midst of a pleasant and fruitful valley. The city is adorned with so many towers, spires and pinnacles, and the sides of the neighbouring hills so sprinkled with trees and villas that scarce any place equals the prospect’. Thus wrote John Aycliffe at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and the visitor to Oxford who arrives by train today can see the same spires and pinnacles across a fruitful (and frequently flooded) valley.
The city is obviously small. It is possible to walk to the centre from the railway station down the High Street to the eighteenth-century bridge across the small river separating the old city from its newer suburbs in twenty-five minutes. During that walk the visitor passes many beautiful stone buildings – mediaeval, Renaissance, neo-classical – some with shops on the ground floor, others with doorways leading to ancient courtyards.
If the visitor is a stranger, he will probably ask someone to direct him to ‘the University’. To this apparently simple question there seems to be no simple answer. Libraries, lecture rooms, museums, the botanical gardens: they are all parts of the university, but they are not exactly its ‘centre’. But if the visitor asks for a particular college, he will be directed at once to a specific group of buildings. Those doorways and courtyards belong to ‘colleges’ which have an actual, physical existence. The ‘university’ is a more elusive concept.
History and development
Nobody knows exactly when Oxford University ‘began’. We know that lectures were being delivered in Oxford at the very beginning of the 12th century. The students, mostly teenagers, lived wherever they could find lodgings. The learned men who taught them gathered together in small communities, and whenever they could raise the money they built homes for themselves on the monastic pattern. By the 15th century most students were living in colleges alongside their teachers, and so they continue to do today. The oldest college buildings still used as rooms for tutors and students are nearly 700 years old.
The structure of Oxford University (together with Cambridge) is unique in that it preserves the mediaeval university organisation. In contrast, almost all other British universities are similar to Russian ones, with a central administration in the main building, various faculties, and within the faculties, various departments. Professors run the departments, deans rule the faculties, and at the top of the hierarchy is the Vice Chancellor, equivalent to your Rector. He or she has some kind of council to help govern the university.
Oxford and Cambridge, however, are quite different. You must imagine a federation of autonomous republics with a common foreign policy (dealings with the government and other universities) and with a common budget (money from the government and from other national and international sources) and a set of common values (the teaching of undergraduates and graduates and the pursuit of scholarly research), which are at the same time fiercely independent ‘republics’ with their own funds, their own students, their own projects and enthusiasms.
Despite its venerable age, Oxford is emphatically not a museum. Each building is occupied and alive. Even more important, both the University and its colleges are very democratic institutions. Every member of the university is also a member of a college. The 3,200 senior members of the university (that is, those engaged in teaching and research) vote for the Vice Chancellor, who is appointed for four years only and cannot be re-elected; they also vote for the two governing councils, for the faculty committees, the library committees, and the administrators. At the same time, as ‘Fellows’ of their own college, they appoint new fellows, select students from the many who apply to enter the university, organise the finances and take on many practical responsibilities.
Nobody is boss, but almost everybody helps to run the university as well as their own individual departments. And because the tutors do so much individual teaching, they, in general, work far longer hours than most of their colleagues in the rest of Europe, including Russia. No wonder they look exhausted at the end of term, in spite of their comfortable and beautiful surroundings!
Student life
What is it like, being a student at Oxford? Like all British universities, Oxford is a state university, not a private one. Students are selected on the basis of their results in the national examinations or the special Oxford entrance examination. There are many applicants, and nobody can get a place by paying a fee. Successful candidates are admitted to a specified college of the university: that will be their home for the next three years (the normal period for an undergraduate degree), and for longer if they are admitted to study for a postgraduate degree. They will be mostly taught by tutors from their own college.
Teaching is pleasantly informal and personal: a typical undergraduate (apart from those in the natural sciences who spend all day in the laboratories) will spend an hour a week with his or her ‘tutor’, perhaps in the company of one other student. Each of them will have written an essay for the tutor, which serves as the basis for discussion, argument, the exposition of ideas and academic methods. At the end of the hour the students go away with a new essay title and a list of books that might be helpful in preparing for the essay.
Other kinds of teaching such as lectures and seminars are normally optional: popular lecturers can attract audiences from several faculties, while others may find themselves speaking to two or three loyal students or maybe to no-one at all. So, in theory, if you are good at reading, thinking and writing quickly, you can spend five days out of seven being idle: sleeping, taking part in sports, in student clubs, in acting and singing, in arguing, drinking, having parties. In practice, most students at Oxford are enthusiastic about the academic life, and many of the more conscientious ones work for days at each essay, sometimes sitting up through the night with a wet towel round their heads.
At the end of three years, all students face a dreadful ordeal, ‘Finals’, the final examinations. The victims are obliged to dress up for the occasion in black and white, an old-fashioned ritual that may help to calm the nerves. They crowd into the huge, bleak examination building and sit for three hours writing what they hope is beautiful prose on half-remembered or strangely forgotten subjects. In the afternoon they assemble for another three hours of writing. After four or five days of this torture they emerge, blinking, into the sunlight, and stagger off for the biggest party of them all.
Postgraduates (often just called graduates) are mostly busy with research for their theses, and they spend days in their college libraries or in the richly endowed, four-hundred-year-old Bodleian library. The Bodleian is one of our great national libraries, but until recently the cataloguing was somewhat primitive. Little slips of paper with the details of each volume were stuck on to the blank pages of very heavy leatherbound books in (approximate) alphabetical order. Fortunately, eighteenth-century glue was very powerful, and most of these handwritten slips, many of them 300 years old or more, are still safely in place.
Recently they have begun to computerise the catalogue, and though some older senior members are alarmed, postgraduates realise that it should soon be possible to trace the millions of books scattered around the hundred-odd small and large libraries in our decentralised university. Is this progress? Or is it another insidious step to centralisation of the autonomous republics? In principle, in Oxford, everyone is on both sides at once!
Opportunities for study
Many Russians have asked me if they can study at Oxford, so I end this article with some advice and information. If you are an undergraduate, the answer is ‘No’. Many British students with high qualifications compete for limited places, so virtually no foreigners study for a first degree at Oxford, though it is possible to do so at several other British universities.
If you want to spend two or three years doing post-graduate study you have two big problems. First, you have to persuade the college of your choice that you are academically better than many other candidates from all over the world; secondly you have to find fees and living expenses, and the university recommends not less than 12,000 per annum. There are very few scholarships. You should write to the Graduate Admissions Office, University Offices, Wellington Square, Oxford and ask for the Graduate Studies prospectus.
If you are a youngish University lecturer, convinced that libraries and academic contacts at Oxford would be of great use for your research and teaching, and if you can provide good references from Russian (and preferably British) academics, you may get an opportunity to study in Oxford for about a month. Those doing research in the natural sciences should write direct to the relevant faculty at Oxford. Those teaching and researching in the humanities and social sciences should write to The Academic Exchange Officer, Institute of Russian Studies, c/o St. Anthony's College, Oxford.
Your chances of success are small because so many people have the same wish, but surprises do happen. On the 1st of May every year Oxford celebrates its unique spring festival with choirboys singing a Latin hymn from the top of the beautiful tower of Magdalene College at six o'clock in the morning. Thousands of people gather under the tower to hear them sing, some of them having waited for many hours. It is quite magical. And a tiny group of College Fellows stands at the top of the tower with the choirboys in the misty, early morning air, looking over that splendid prospect. This year, a Russian was among them.
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