Shared Treasures

I have in the past allowed myself some discouraging remarks about the state of higher education in Britain, because it had seemed to me that in recent years the Brits have taken up some of the worst features of our American system at the expense of the better ones. Accordingly, I feel honor bound to report on evidence of a very different kind: the highly enjoyable and exhilarating weekend Joan and I just spent in Oxford, our shared alma mater. In an earlier posting I reported on one of the university’s American reunions. In this one I touch on our experience of one of its “Oxford Thinking” week-ends. Putting this in our parochial terms, such a weekend is more substantial than a “Princeton Today” program, but less grand than a Princeton Alumni Day.

The great battle in Oxford is, and for some time will continue to be, the jockeying between the individual, autonomous colleges and the growing power and ambitions of a central university administration. The joke current in my undergraduate days half a century ago involved the American tourist who arrives in town and baffles a man he meets in the street by asking him, “Which way is the University?” The “University” being a merely platonic concept, it was as though he were asking directions to the Sorry State of Affairs, or to see a printed list of No Uncertain Terms. The weight of tradition and academic conservatism, complicated by ancient legal arrangements hardly imaginable in America, bolster the college-centered vision. Common sense, the realities of modernity, and the palpable need for the effective deployment of limited resources suggest that the more “centralized” vision must certainly win out. These Alumni Weekends give incidental evidence that it is winning.

In this regard it was significant that the only venue really convenient for an event of this sort—the Said Business School next to the railroad station—is among the newest, least traditionally “Oxonian”, and most architecturally nondescript sites in Oxford. There simply isn’t anywhere else one could run five or six concurrent lectures for fifty or more people—a requirement it met to perfection. The thoughtfully chosen theme of the week-end was “Shared Treasures.” This phrase drew explicit attention to the breath-taking interior re-designing of the University's Ashmolean Museum, fairly recently completed, but in a larger sense it reminded us all of the extent to which our ancient university in its ancient city is among the great shared treasures of the world’s cultural patrimony.

The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford: the old and the new

The principal “shared treasures” were intellectual: a dazzling array of lectures by several of Oxford’s most celebrated scholars, among which we had to make difficult choices. To report at length would protract this post unduly, but my own top three—out of a sumptuous menu--were Hermione Lee’s panel on biography, a lecture by Emma Smith on the history of the Bodleian’s copy of the Shakespeare First Folio, and an absolutely bravura and apparently off the cuff talk about the English Reformation by religious historian Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch. That’s one erudite cuff, let me tell you.

The trip to Oxford had a double purpose, only part of which I have described. The occasion gave us the opportunity to stay with old and dear friends, Margaret and Derek Davies. Margaret had been among our cohort studying English before she married the young law don of Saint Catherine’s College. For many decades they lived on a marvelous large property on Boar’s Hill. They have now retired to a smaller version of it at the base of the hill, in the village of Cumnor. There is a special quality to ancient friendships even as there is to ancient universities, and we much enjoyed their mellow hospitality. On Sunday morning we went along to the parish church, Saint Michael’s, where a large and voluble congregation was, by chance, celebrating their patronal festival (Michaelmas being September 29—i.e, today). The priest apologized for the fact that he could not actually document earlier celebrations in the spot much further back than seven hundred years, even though Anglo-Saxons were probably worshipping there well before the year 1000.

The parish church of Saint Michael the Archangel: Cumnor, Oxon.

For us the Eucharist is the greatest of shared treasures, and to partake in a place it has been shared for a millennium was most pleasing. But there was another treasure yet to come. We spent Sunday night in a London hotel near Saint Pancras Station, whence the Eurostar for Paris leaves. That meant we were also near the British Museum, and that we would to able to spend part of a morning there. With limited time, we decided to focus on a single goal—the hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold, the largest ever found, recently uncovered in Staffordshire. Well, it had been there, briefly, one of the guards explained. A pity…but we had just missed it. It had now been returned to its proper and permanent home in the Midlands. “But,” he added when he noted the disappointment on our faces, “just over there is the Fishpool.”

For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also (Luke 12:34)

He was pointing toward Room 40, one of the “new” medieval galleries opened only last year and as yet unseen by me. More specifically he was pointing toward the first large case you see as you enter the room. In it, lavishly scattered like the petals from golden roses, are 1237 bright shining coins of the fifteenth century. This is the Fishpool Hoard, and I choose my flowery image with intention. It is quite possible that these gold coins, together with a few exquisite pieces of jewelry, were hastily buried by defeated Lancastrians on the run following one of the skirmishes of the Wars of the Roses—the Battle of Hexham, in 1464. The excitement of my own “discovery” of them can hardly have been less intense than that of the workmen who dug them up on a Nottinghamshire building site forty-five years ago. I have spent my professional life trying to uncover and share the intellectual treasures of the past. This golden hoard was thus the perfect terminal punctuation for our weekend of Shared Treasures. I made a feint at reading on the train back to Paris, but mainly I was daydreaming.

One treasure (the recent Anglo-Saxon hoard) went unshared--until I can get to the Midlands

Oxford Reunion

Jesus College, Oxford: my old room was on the ground floor in the corner

This weekend past Joan and I attended a “North American Oxford Reunion” at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York. It is not without its irony that I have in fact become pretty enthusiastic reunioneer, since I spent the first three decades of my professional career making light of the annual Princeton class reunions. The Princeton reunions, which take place just before Commencement each year, are famous for their exuberance, and especially for the wackiness of the “P-rade”, the hours-long parade of the costumed alumni in their chronological phalanxes.

For many years we lived at the very edge of the campus, in a vast Victorian house that had belonged to the Class of 1914. One eminence of that class was Allen Dulles, an early head of the CIA, and legend has it that during reunions he would erect a temporary radio tower in the back yard of 39 University Place to facilitate the execution of his spooky duties. By the time we moved in, the classmates were nearly sixty years out and too thin on the ground to make use of the house; but its sprawling basement was full of poignant memorials. They included a half dozen maple wood tables of a rathskeller sort, and a luxurious twenty-foot mahogany bar with brass railing. There was one very moving trophy: a huge photograph, probably five feet across, of the youthful class gathered before Nassau Hall in June, 1914. How many of them would be claimed by the great slaughter announced by the guns of August only two months later?

The world of Princeton reunions seemed fascinating to me, but also anthropologically distanced. In fact, I thought it was fairly ridiculous. Then two things happened. I became active in APGA (the Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni), and for the Centenary of the Graduate School in 2000-2001 the graduate alumni themselves started getting serious about participating in the P-rade. Shortly thereafter (2004) I attended the fiftieth reunion of my high school class in Mount Pleasant, Texas, and then (2008) my fiftieth class reunion at Sewanee. Both of these were terrific events, and I emerged from them a convert. Thus “fools who came to scoff, remain’d to pray,” as Goldsmith says in a slightly different context.

The venue for the reunion: the Waldorf Astoria

The Oxford North American Reunion is a very classy affair, and it is appropriately located in the Waldorf Astoria in New York. For me this has a private significance. My parents, neither of whom ever saw New York, were nonetheless sufficiently aware of its fabled luxuries that they regularly referred to the outdoor privy as “the Waldorf”.

The Waldorf, Baxter County, Arkansas

We ourselves are now half a century away from our undergraduate days in Oxford and could hardly expect to run into many—or any—of our contemporaries. But we did have a chance to meet and talk at some length with the “new” heads of our two colleges. The current principal of Jesus College is Lord Krebs, an eminent civil servant, and about as cool and unhaughty a peer as one is likely ever to encounter. Joan’s college, St. Anne’s, an all-girls band in her day, is now headed by one of Britain’s great journalism experts, Tim Gardam.

The British universities have been going through a bad patch. So far as the two ancient universities go—I mean of course Oxford and Cambridge—there has been a particularly bruising confrontation of ancient evolution and contemporary fiscal challenge. There is unquestionably a process of “Americanization” going on, but I had just about concluded that the Brits seemed to be adopting all the worst aspects of the American academic model and none of our best ones. If such things interest you, you will probably want to search out the recent essay in the New York Review of Books by my colleague and friend Anthony Grafton. It’s entitled “Britain: The Disgrace of the Universities.” In this context the reunion proved very reassuring. The Oxford presented by the reunion struck me as confident and energetic, its spiritual eye fixed on the challenges of the future rather than the hoary comforts of the past.

Perhaps as many as a third of the Oxford faculty and administrators whose names had been printed in the program were unable to travel, victims of the abrasive clouds of Icelandic volcanic ash. This meant that those who had escaped in time had to do double duty. One such was the new Vice-Chancellor, Andrew Hamilton. He pretty well typifies the new Oxford outlook. He is a distinguished chemist, British born, but with a rich experience in North American institutions, most recently as provost of Yale. He was very impressive, though in one respect rather annoying to a Princetonian. I heard him in two venues, and in both he did go on and on about how Oxford had just successfully lured Andrew Wiles, who may be the most famous of living mathematicians, back to his native England. This would be Sir Andrew John Wiles, KBE, FRS, the guy who solved Fermat's last theorem. The annoying part, of course, is that the place he lured him from is Princeton. Yes, I know, this guy proved Fermat’s last theorem. But remember—mathematicians are over the hill by age twenty-three.

The new V-C against the Dreaming Spires