Education: Oxford v. Cambridge

Norman St. John-Stevas, 22, is no ordinary Briton. He is not merely “Oxford,” nor is he really “Cambridge”; by the end of the year, he will have a bachelor’s degree from both. In the London Spectator last week, he turned his double vision on an ancient riddle: just what are the differences between the two?

Cambridge, he found, “is a matter-of-fact, down-to-earth, sensible university. It is still defiantly progressive and somewhat less defiantly Protestant. Oxford … is very much the city of dreaming spires, the home of lost causes, Catholic and conservative in its deepest roots.

“Eccentricity is frowned on at Cambridge; at Oxford it is a cult. Poetry nourishes at Oxford; philosophy finds its home in Cambridge. Oxford undergraduates have a certain brilliance; their conversation sparkles; they are intimately concerned with their inner reactions and feelings. Cambridge undergraduates are more concerned with their relations with their fellow men; they get on with the job and leave the devils, or the angels, hidden away inside . . .

“Oxford is undoubtedly … the more fashionable university. Rich undergraduates, a rapidly diminishing class, tend to go there . . . Dons mix easily with Cambridge undergraduates; at Oxford they sit in an ivory tower. Port is drunk in Oxford; light table wines and sherry at Cambridge.

“Architecturally, Cambridge is to Oxford what Paris is to Rome. In Cambridge, as in Paris, everything is on show, and the whole is laid out to the best advantage. Oxford, like Rome, abounds in beauty, but it is a hidden beauty that must be sought for. Cambridge is a delightful country town . . . Oxford bears the unmistakable marks of a modern industrial city … Industrialization has forced the university to retreat into itself and so be saved from city inundation. College loyalties are thereby strengthened, but between town and gown there is a severance and a tension that Cambridge has never known.”