Education: Beer & Skittles

To savants and laymen alike, Great Britain’s Oxford University is one of the greatest capitals of learning in the English-speaking world. U. S. universities, awed by its 700-year-old cultural traditions, are willing, even eager to acknowledge and ape its preeminence. To such Oxford-worshippers came a shock last week in the form of a book describing life at Oxford as a little learning and a great deal of beer & skittles.

Such a college tale as U. S. tabloids like to print about U. S. universities is Oxford Limited.* Its author who washes the university’s whiskey-spattered linen in public is Oxford Graduate Keith Briant, last year’s editor of The Isis, undergraduate paper. Launderer Briant, rolling up his sleeves, drags forth these soiled garments:

Sex. “A lap behind” the times, Oxonians still have the outlook toward sex of the post-War period, when ”intercourse was fashionable” and not taken seriously. Briant estimates 20% of undergraduettes (Oxonian for coeds) and 30% of undergraduates have sex experiences at the university. A popular sport of undergraduates is to arrange apetting ±party in their digs, lay in a supply of strong drink “to which the girls are not likely to be accustomed.” dim the lights. . . . For “furtive immorality” Muckraker Briant blames the Puritan views of proctors. One signpost of progress: “Homosexuality is no longer a requirement for social success in the university.”

Drinking. To hard-drinking Oxford the new student is quickly introduced in a “Freshmen’s Blind” given by second-year men. Freshman Briant’s experience: “By 11 o’clock the room was a shambles. . . .”

Rowdyism. In an Oxford restaurant, a typical evening’s fun begins with throwing of bread pellets, proceeds to butter pats, poulet en casserole, a huge chunk of smoked salmon, and ends with undergraduates pulling table legs from the tops. “When I was last in one of these restaurants the majority of the women present had enveloped themselves as far as possible in napkins and tablecloths.”

Physical Education. Oxford lacks a gymnasium. Oxonian Briant reproaches Oxford’s chief benefactor, Lord Nuffield, * who gave $10,000,000 for a medical centre last year, for refusing to allocate $500,000 of it for a school of physical education “to minimize the number of those requiring the benefit of medical research.”

Study. Oxford’s famed tutorial system, now assiduously being copied in U. S. universities, permits undergraduates to cut lectures, requires only that they visit their tutors once a week and pass an examination twice a year. Pupils usually read essays on their reading to their tutors. One pupil, Briant relates, passed his essays, with the marginal criticisms of his tutor, along to his successors. Thereafter “the complacent Fellow sat in his armchair, agreeably engrossed in his own problems, while year after year different pupils read him the same essays.” The Briant conclusions: Not more than 20% of Oxford’s students attend the university for “love of learning”; an undergraduate with average common sense can acquire a “pass” degree with two weeks’ work in each eight-weeks’ term.

—Michael Joseph Ltd., London (IDS. 6d.).

On U. S. campuses petting is now described as “pitching woo.”

—Sir William Richard Morris, ist Baron of Nuffield previously made a Doctor of Civil Law, last week awarded his second honorary degree by Oxford, a Master of Arts.