The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics and Geniuses - Noel Annan

Скачать книгу

of notes to his colleagues, within the Establishment but always willing to advance unorthodox opinions, a critic of the tutorial which, he thought, was being used for spoon-feeding; yet none was more loyal to Oxford’s rituals or more insistent on a don’s obligations to his pupils. A tutorial should correct ‘points of style, presentation, logic, modes of criticising authorities studied etc.’ His ingenious and quirky mind enlivened the high table at Christ Church.

      I had an excuse for omitting two influential dons, F. R. Leavis and Michael Oakeshott, since I had written at length on each in Our Age. But why omit towering scientists like Florey and Todd? Or one of Oxford’s most revered scholars in classics, John Beazley, who brought order into the study of Attic vases? Or socialist thinkers like G. D. H. Cole or ‘Sage’ Bernal? Or miraculous eccentrics such as the professor of Modern Greek at Oxford, R. M. Dawkins, remembered for his cackle of laughter and keen interest in flagellomania?

      I would have liked to have included more scientists. When I returned to Cambridge after the war one of the scientists who became my special friend was Victor Rothschild. He did research on spermatozoa in the zoology lab, but although a fellow of Trinity he did not teach and left the university to become chief scientific adviser to Royal Dutch Shell. I had made a rule for myself not to write about the living and I therefore did not choose Alan Hodgkin, Nobel Prizeman and Master of Trinity, who died only as this book was ready to go to press. The others were in the molecular biology unit – Max Perutz, Sidney Brenner and Francis Crick, the discoverer, with Jim Watson, of the structure of DNA, all still happily alive. I failed to persuade Francis to allow his name to go forward for a fellowship at King’s. He would not join any society with a chapel: to do so would have been to connive at error; and King’s undeniably had a chapel.

      Universities have endured hard times since government decided to move to mass higher education, none more so than the elite institutions I knew so well in London – University College, Imperial College and the London School of Economics – and the leading civic universities. It is these places, with Oxford and Cambridge, that are the guardians of intellectual life. Over thirty years ago I tried to put into words what such places exist to do. They cannot teach the qualities that people need in politics and business. Nor can they teach culture and wisdom, any more than theologians teach holiness, or philosophers goodness or sociologists a blueprint for the future. They exist to cultivate the intellect. Everything else is secondary. Equality of opportunity to come to the university is secondary. The matters that concern both dons and administrators are secondary. The need to mix classes, nationalities and races together is secondary. The agonies and gaieties of student life are secondary. So are the rules, customs, pay and promotion of the academic staff and their debates on changing the curricula or procuring facilities for research. Even the awakening of a sense of beauty or the life-giving shock of new experience, or the pursuit of goodness itself – all these are secondary to the cultivation, training and exercise of the intellect. Universities should hold up for admiration the intellectual life. The most precious gift they have to offer is to live and work among books or in laboratories and to enable the young to see those rare scholars who have put on one side the world of material success, both in and outside the university, in order to study with single-minded devotion some topic because that above all seems important to them. A university is dead if the dons cannot in some way communicate to the students the struggle – and the disappointments as well as the triumphs in that struggle – to produce out of the chaos of human experience some grain of order won by the intellect. That is the end to which all the arrangements of the university should be directed.

      I still believe that this is the principle that should govern Oxford and Cambridge and our élite universities.

       CHAPTER ONE The Dons Create an Intellectual Aristocracy

      The word ‘don’ carries many meanings, quite a number of them ironical. Some use it loosely to mean anyone who holds a post at a university, but well into the twentieth century it meant something more precise. ‘Don’ did not immediately suggest a creative scholar or a professeur of a particular subject, still less a privatdozent. A don was not expected to be an intellectual nor yet a man with a passion for general ideas. No: essentially he was a teacher and a fellow of an Oxford or Cambridge college; a teacher who stood in a peculiar relation to his pupils in that they came to his rooms individually each week and were taught by him personally. And since these pupils were men of his own college, his first allegiance was not to the university but to his college – to the close-knit society whose members had elected him. To the other fellows he was bound by ties of special loyalty and affection – sometimes, of course, by the no less binding ties of enmity and loathing which led to feuds and vendettas within the society,

      It was only in late Victorian days that election to fellowships and university posts at Oxford and Cambridge began to be made on merit; and even then, merit could be determined by numbers of tests which were by no means all strictly academic. Was he, it could be asked, a good college man, sociable, willing to share in due course in the administration of the college, a potential bursar, tutor or dean? Was he a man of character as well as intellect, for he was educating the next generation who were to be the clergymen, statesmen and gentlemen of England?

      What kind of don did this system of patronage throw up? Writing at the end of the nineteenth century William Tuckwell, a fellow of New College, thought they fell into four categories: cosmopolitan, ornamental, mere – and learned. The cosmopolitan don, intelligent but worldly, would be found in London as often as Oxford, seeing that the political

Скачать книгу