Portraits and Miniatures(87)

Our traditional role as a repository and guardian of humanistic learning set in an almost unique framework of man-made beauty remains intact. The Bodleian Library, judged by a mix of the three criteria of range of contents, interest of buildings and intensity of use, has no earthly rival. Together with its outstation, Gibbs’s domed Radcliffe Camera, which is the centrepiece of the Oxford skyline, the Sheldonian Theatre, which was Wren’s first architectural design, the Theatre’s near contemporary the Old Ashmo-lean, the Clarendon Building which Hawksmoor did fifty years afterwards, and the late mediaeval Divinity School, it constitutes the most remarkable group of university buildings in the world (the glory of Cambridge is almost all in the individual colleges), and is less spoilt than it was a generation ago because of the substantial exclusion of motor cars from Radcliffe Square.

To set out this list of unmatched physical assets (buttressed of course by all the individual quality of the colleges) sometimes arouses in my mind the fear that we might cease to live up to them and become a British version of a Hofburg without the Habsburgs. That has certainly not happened up to the present. The fame of Oxford alumni has survived at least as well as the fabric of its buildings. In the past hundred years out of a total of twenty-one home Prime Ministers, eleven (from Gladstone to Mrs Thatcher) have been Oxonians, as well as a clutch of overseas ones, including Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, and the last two Australians (the second surprisingly buttressed in that almost aggressively independent country by a third of his Cabinet), as well as the King of Norway and the President of the Federal Republic of Germany. There is as yet no American President, but with five current US Senators, including one or two who are distinctly papabile, there is always hope.1

Nor, strong though is Oxford’s tradition as a nursery of government, need those who dislike politicians feel oppressively isolated at a reassembly of their university. Amongst my electing body of Convocation I could feel as at home in my rather undeserved capacity of President of the Royal Society of Literature as in that of a former government minister. Even with Evelyn Waugh (for my money the greatest English novelist of the mid-twentieth century) several decades dead, the current Oxonian literary roll of Graham Greene, Anthony Powell, Iris Murdoch, Kingsley Amis, William Golding and Vidia Naipaul is not bad.

Alumni are of course necessarily products of the past, and the more distinguished they are, unless athletes, mathematicians or pop singers, the more likely is that past to be fairly remote. What shape is the university in today? Is it a substantially different place from that which most Rhodes scholars, whether of the 1930s, 1950s, 1970s or intervening decades, have known? In so far as it is, are the changes for good or ill? And if for good, how is this reconcilable with the fact that Oxford has suddenly had to throw itself much more than ever before upon the generosity of its old members and others who are well disposed?

Compared with the time that I and others up to fifteen years younger were undergraduates, there are three major changes. First, Oxford in the post-war decades created a major new scientific university, alongside yet integrated with the traditional university. Before World War II, while Oxford was a more successful seminary for the young who wished to become famous, Cambridge undoubtedly conducted more vigorous probes on and beyond the frontier of knowledge. That latter difference is no longer so.

Second, there has been the injection of over 3000 graduate students into the Oxford firmament. In my days the University was made up of undergraduates and dons. When they ceased to be undergraduates a small number of the academically inclined became fellows, a handful at All Souls, rather more of their own colleges, a few elsewhere. The rest went away from Oxford to make their way in the world. To become a graduate student was almost unheard of. Now a D. Phil. is virtually a sine qua non for an academic job, and many who are not academically directed take this or a lesser second degree while they are thinking what else to do.

This change has brought at least one substantial benefit to Oxford. It has made it a more international university. Graduate students are frequently not indigenous plants. When I addressed the Christ Church graduate common-room last term I discovered that only a small minority had been undergraduates at the House. Some were from elsewhere in Oxford, a sizeable group were from Cambridge, and a bigger one from overseas, including a number of the 770 Americans currently enrolled in the university.

Nevertheless, Oxford, so far as its student body is concerned, remains predominantly an undergraduate university. One of the things it does best is instil into the young during a first degree course a critical articulateness that makes them outstandingly employable inside or outside the disciplines they have been taught.