I can present only an experiential argument, but it’s a persuasive experiential argument nonetheless. When I started my BA at York, I loved how expansive and close-knit the community was. In addition to lectures, there was a functioning rural campus with a student-run co-op, a society that ran allotments, and a sort of squashed-together nest of brutalism that encouraged and practically demanded you to engage with the most reprehensible of arseholes. While still extremely immature, I grew up not in the sense that I attended lectures on fashionable critical theory, but that I learned how to cook, that I had enough time and space to volunteer in programmes scattered through the actual city of York. Between all of that, I met friends in pubs, read and wrote a lot, and learnt my alcohol threshold.
This was in such contrast to Oxford, where I did an MSt. I came, excited, and had so many interesting conversations, attended so many fascinating lectures and talks. Maybe it was because I had “done stuff” in the interim, but I felt deeply constrained by the collegiate system, where one’s college often has the stultifying arrogance to proclaim it can organise your whole social life for you, that it can arrange expensive package catering deals for you, that it can be your entire world and your whole extra-curricular life. In contrast to York – where I had enjoyed having an expansive life across a small campus, making stupid decisions like signing up to be a life-drawing model – I felt Oxford as a kind of prison, where I was kept docile and deradicalised by the odd feeling that I was still a boy in school about to be put in detention.
This setting can’t be very conducive to growing up. And then there’s the Bodleian, which technically has every book, but doesn’t let you take them out, and so you’re forced to hobble around different libraries to get what you need. And then there’s the fact that Oxford itself functions as a sort of gated community for the students, while the actual residents of the town are pushed into the suburbs, giving you an entirely constrained world.
I say this not because I have some kind of anti-Oxbridge fury. I feel completely at peace with Oxford’s existence, and do not have any preening desire to blockade it. I say it instead because at other universities there is a tired cliché of ‘Oxbridge rejects’, which needs to be dismantled. Since beginning a PhD at St. Andrews, I have felt so much more positive and expansive than I did at Oxford. Finally, there is one main library where I can actually take out books (because I have the neuroticism to still read physical books), there is a beautiful setting (Oxford’s obvious beauty is obscured by its confusion; a pot-pourri of architecture slobbered together.) Perhaps most importantly, St. Andrews is a ‘traditional’ university that is actually and functionally engaging with the climate crisis. While Oxford colleges lap up donations from climate change deniers and ne’er-do-wells, during matriculation, we are helpfully pointed out where to get a bag of organic produce, where to grow vegetables on campus, how to curb greenhouse emissions. [even if one does not believe in the climate emergency or whatever, this is doubtlessly helpful advice.]
St. Andrews is obviously not perfect, but it shows a ‘traditional’ university can adapt to obvious global concerns, have a bit of a moral compass, and still be as ‘traditional’. I believe, from a couple of seconds of being here, this is why St. Andrews has overtaken Oxford and Cambridge in the Times’ completely arbitrary student survey. And yet one meets countless people in institutions like St. Andrews that seem to be desperate for the traditional Oxbridge experience.
It’s indeed true that such a value is attached merely to the trochees ‘Oxford’ and ‘Cambridge’, and that the production of these syllables can lead various employers to be slightly more positively disposed to you. But this should not be the case, perhaps is somewhat only the case because various colonialists murmured the same syllables in antique dialects to justify their atrocities (I’m aware that lots of good people went to Oxbridge.) Again, I bear no ill will to these two higher education institutions, but I just think the time has come to stop associating them with some kind of mystical wisdom and intelligence. They are just higher education institutions, that’s all.
Squidditas 