Tag: Oxford

Doric columns in America

Early in October I made my long awaited trip across the Atlantic. After a year and a half of an international travel ban, international uncertainty, and international levels of mooching about the house, things moved very quickly.
The gears of the US immigration system had finally started turning again and I entered the US under a National Interest Exemption (which was far less glamorous than it sounds). A month later and the floodgates were open to all the suitably vaccinated from the UK/Europe.

Now I’m married and in the process of settling down and making this place my home. It came as something of a relief to discover that while the waiting times have grown on processing paperwork in every other state institution, I was able to get hold of both a library card and marriage license in under a week. It was in the library that I recently discovered the local newspaper, which did not disappoint.

I will miss walking along the bit of the river Thames that passed us by in Oxford. I certainly was not getting the full Magdalen college experience I thought I was signing up for when I took the position. The bicycling between the department and college for lunch, an occasional boozy high table dinner, and department seminars felt like a very brief and distant chapter in my life. I still get chapel updates in my email inbox (and you can watch recordings of Evensong on their Youtube channel).

I’ve taken up the role of a rather callow would-be Tocqueville trying my best to make my observations about this America we’ve all heard so very much about. There is plenty to go at here in New England; there are so many little details that seem to separate the place from anything you might expect to encounter in Europe. There is the huge main road that cuts right through the middle of town that rivals the Champs-Élysées in breadth, but not in French-i-ness. There is the habit of sidewalks to be pulled away, out from beneath your feet, in certain neighborhoods; a feature of what I understand to be a sacred part of each American’s autonomy to decide things for themselves. I stared at one gas-station for a while trying to work out why it seemed so singularly a New England gas-station, and I finally settled on the Doric columns that framed the windows.

While the fall colours blossom in their red, yellows, and gold, the commercial store-fronts and advertisements struck me as strangely washed out. I only half believed my senses until we drove past an Aldi, and its colours leaped out at me as if they had imported high saturation colour along with their own German brand of discount supermarket experience.

I really did feel stuck in Oxford for the past year and a half. There was plenty of mathematics that I managed to get done that I was very pleased with (this paper with Sam, and this more recent article), but it really wasn’t where I wanted to be when the music stopped.

I won’t say that this was a coping mechanism for dealing with the circumstances, but there were times when I was very happy to fall down certain Youtube rabbit holes. Nothing political, extreme, or conspiratorial (although I understand these have been very popular), but certainly nerdy. My personal favorite was discovering the community of youtubers dedicated to the pursuit of constructing elaborately complicated model kits for giant Japanese Gundam battle suits. I’ve never watched the associated anime television series, nor tried constructing any of these kits myself, but giant robots need little explanation. I found something both soothing an compelling about watching these particular videos, on double playback speed (so I didn’t actually have to sit through the full twenty minutes).

There is an almost medical degree of precision committed to these builds, and plenty of nerdy tools and technique brought to bear. You’d think they were putting together a satellite in a clean room. Added to the constructions themselves is the video production itself, with all the camera’s, lenses, microphones, editing, and really every video is the product of two distinct headaches. Thinking about it harshes the mellow though, so I wouldn’t dwell on it.

With the level of unnecessary detail on these model robots, I was reminded of the lavishly illustrated Dorling Kindersley “look inside” books I would get as a Christmas present when I was growing up. These huge hard backed coffee-table-books-for-kids offered interior cross sections of Man-of-Wars, 747s, and the space shuttle. And in one notable series, the interiors of the vehicles from the Star Wars universe. That a fictional universe should be given the same attention as the real one didn’t bother the younger me in the least. For an eight year old the Star Wars universe was a far more immediately accessible and vivid world. To an adult the books look like and elaborate joke, but to a kid they were as serious as Star Wars itself.

I am telling myself that it must be a sign of deep maturity on my part that I look at the two above images and feel more of an urge to read some Patrick O’Brian rather than watch The Mandalorian.

December 4, 2021

Oxford, Hearties, and Clever-Sillys.

I’m now halfway through Michaelmas term (that’s Fall semester to Americans, and Autumn term to almost everyone else in the UK) so I’ve been able to settle into a routine here at Oxford. I’ve been having a whale of a time cycling backwards and forwards across town, while my experience with the university has been wonderful, but also quite obscene.

Most of my academic life these days is spent in the Andrew Wiles building — an ultra modern mathematics facility that is just over five years old now. There is a chapel right outside the main entrance however, so you won’t be forgetting where you are in a hurry. Then for lunch I head over to Magdalen College to eat at high table with the other fellows.

The college is more in line with what you might expect from watching Inspector Morse or Harry Potter. Describing it as a 19th Century Gentleman’s private club only goes so far, because you have to explain that it also has it’s own chapel, and extensive grounds which includes a deer park. All that aside, the most refreshing thing about the college system is that I’m sitting down to eat with other academics in the college, who come from all across the sciences and humanities. The last time I was regularly encountering anyone outside the mathematics department socially was during my undergraduate degree, and I’ve badly missed it.

Between the mathematics building and the college you are caught between two extremes of academic opulence.

After arriving I wanted to read something that would give me a good feel for the history of the place, but at the same time I wasn’t very excited about any of the worthy door-stoppers that I was being pointed towards. I really wanted something salacious. As luck would have it I found just the thing.

Look Back in Laughter: Oxford’s Postwar Golden Age by R.W. Johnson is the 2015 memoir of former Oxford don, Rhodes scholar, and Magdalen College Bursar (at a particularly precarious time in the college’s history). I should say that I mentioned this book with some of my more senior college colleagues, and they assured me that the book was either completely sensationalized or a complete pack of lies.

There are actually several strands going through the memoir. I certainly began to get the immediate feel for the world of dons, the Senior Commonroom, hearties (what Americans would call jocks), and clever-sillys (a certain kind of academic). Johnson arrives at Magdalen as a Rhodes scholar, narrowly escaping trouble in South Africa where he had been involved in anti-apartheid activism, and soon found himself a fellow at the tender age of 25. The decades he spent there covered many seismic shifts: the admission of women into the college, the opening up of Oxford to the wider academic world, and the increasing influence of the PPE course on public policy, politics, and journalism. This last strand is particularly striking; the last insert photos is a group shot of the Lib-Dem/Conservative coalition government, signed by three of Johnson’s former students. Two other ministers were also Magdalen alumni. Johnson also describes how the Economist became increasingly dependent on him to pass on gifted undergraduates for exciting jobs at the magazine (which inevitably led to swift success and promotion). Previous generations of Oxford graduates would have had to slog for years at local newspapers under the barely concealed contempt of their editors.

The idea that many of us may have of Oxbridge as being some engine of meritocracy, excellence, and academic success only arrived in the 20th Century when the “Red dean”, Harry Weldon, decided that they should start admitting students on merit, rather than the pedigree of their boarding school. This was somewhat controversial at the time with many dons (C.S. Lewis is cited) as being unashamed snobs. Indeed, world class academics only began to be hired around this time as well. Johnson goes so far as to describe most of Magdalen’s history as “disgraceful”.

Like just about everyone else, I think, I knew that Magdalen was intellectually extremely distinguished and we all assumed that that his had always been so.
This was in fact quite wrong. Only much later did I learn that for a great deal of its history Magdalen’s dons had been undistinguished and slothful. The college had not long been founded when, in 1520, many of the fellows had to be summoned to answer charges of gambling, hunting, frequenting taverns, misbehaving in Chapel, and the like. But again in 1584 it was reported that all these vices were common, that both President and Bursars were corrupt and that all discipline had broken down, forcing the Visitor, the Bishop of Winchester, to intervene to insist that the founder’s statutes be upheld.
Look Back in Laughter; Chapter 4

The most stunning details come from the chapter covering the three years Johnson spent as Bursar, in which he uncovered extensive financial impropriety, and what I believe can only be accurately described as outright corruption. In short, the college’s once extensive resources were being plundered while the buildings and grounds were being neglected to a dangerous and illegal extent (portions of the college being listed buildings and protected under law). The following passage concerns what happened when he started reviewing the properties that the college was leasing (often at below market rates, and left unreviewed for decades).

Another was someone whom everyone seemed afraid of. I called in Strutt, the Head Porter, and asked him what he know of this case. The man was a major international criminal, he said, specializing in child pornography. Even in Amsterdam he had come across his traces. The police were frightened of him for he was extremely careful and sophisticated in his dealings so nothing could ever be finally be pinned on him and any who approached him would be hounded by the best lawyers money could buy. In addition he had bought several city councilors who could be relied on to make a lot of trouble if their patron was seriously bothered.
From Strutt I got the name of a private detective and asked him to investigate. Rather breathtakingly, he reported soon thereafter that he had broken into the man’s flat, opened his mail and tapped his phone. he had also followed the man round Oxford and said he never took the same road home twice a week. it was the same with all his other dealings — his letters and phone calls were all in code. There were, he said, the marks of a top-class professional criminal with very large assets at risk. Next he traced the man to a large meeting held at a manor house outside Oxford attended by two-dozen men arriving in chauffeured limousines. The detective noted all the number plates but was himself seen while doing so. The meeting immediately broke up. Using his contacts in the police, the detective was able to ascertain that everyone at the meeting hat left the country within 12 hours — a sign that our man was part of a sophisticated international syndicate. At which point I realized that the whole thing was simply beyond me. I was looking at an investigation on which a proper police force might deploy many men for over a year. But the police wouldn’t touch the case and I couldn’t do much with a solitary private detective. I had to let it go.
Look Back in Laughter, RW Johnson, Chapter 12

I don’t think I will think about the difference between an academic and an administrative role in the University quite the same way again.

November 23, 2019