Education: Yank at Oxford

The attack appeared first in the Oxford undergraduates’ own weekly magazine Isis. Then the London Daily Mail picked it up and splashed it into headlines. All in all, it struck proper Oxonians as one of the cheekiest essays in years. As might have been expected, the author was an American—a second-year Rhodes scholar at Magdalen named Eugene Burdick, ex-U.S.

Navy and Stanford University. Burdick felt disillusioned about Oxford and had decided to say why in print.

He conceded that, academically, Oxford was topnotch and that things like “Magdalen Deer Park on a medium cloudy day” were pretty fine. But as for everything else, mourned Burdick: “Youf writers have lifted the illusion so high, and war, proximity, and perhaps even the dollar shortage have forced reality so low.”

No Wit, No Sparkle. Burdick had expected that debates at the Oxford Union would be brilliant occasions in which “wildly precocious youths, their eyes firmly fixed on the main chance in Parliament, debate with cruelly deflating epigrams and puncture windy arguments with sly thrusts.” The union would be a “symbol of English upper-class intellectual ability; disenchanted, shrewd, sophisticated, always witty.” Actually, he decided, the union was full of stuttering youths, “red-faced with effort … It is not witty. It does not sparkle.”

Burdick had looked vainly for the early ’20s Oxford of Novelist Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited’) where the “subtly homosexual youth . . . carries his teddy bear about St. John’s Quad . . . boys roar out into the country in Bentley roadsters, and over Cointreau and plovers’ eggs have some dazzling conversations “about God and Truth.” But, said Burdick, “Times have changed since Waugh was here. The Oxford homosexual today has neither wittiness nor creative eccentricity to recommend him . . Parties revolve around gin and orange which is, beyond question, one of the most barbaric drinks that any people ever accepted voluntarily. Things boil along to the accompaniment of some old Louis Armstrong records and a lot of very uninformed talk about jazz . . .”

Nothing to Do. “Around midnight, everyone crashes out into the street and runs through the fog and rain looking for something to do. There is nothing to do and the gin wears off and the thing ends in a steamy fish-and-chip shop or over a plate of spaghetti on toast.”

Worst of all, Burdick thought, was what he called “cultural passivity.” In England, he found, there was none of “the rise and fall, the massive brooding anxiety, the creative stabbing of self-doubt, the tortures of ethnic inadequacy that one finds to a marked degree in America and Asia . . .” He doubted very much whether England “could today produce a Shakespeare,” but thought America or Asia might.

Burdick wanted it understood that his criticisms had nothing to do with the way he had been treated at Oxford. “The anti-Americanism of Oxford is complex and subtle, [but] the sting [has been] taken out of it by the fact that it is fashionable to have an American friend. Perhaps it is for the same reason that the courts used to find the muscular slow-witted barbarian from Asia a curiosity and a comfort to have about. The role is somewhat uncertain, but it is interesting/’

Burdick’s pronouncement had had one instant effect. Other Oxonians, including a batch of other Rhodes scholars, dashed to their desks to compose retorts for the next week’s issue of I sis. It looked as though the year was off to a splendid start, with enough to sparkle and stutter about all through Michaelmas term.