The Record 2009 - Keble College - University of Oxford

Keble College: The Record 2009
subjected inevitably affect their respective intellectual positions
and general orientation. At the undergraduate level there was,
among the American students, a quality of unregimented
eagerness that I found immensely attractive; and it dismayed
me to re-encounter some of these people, two or three years
into a doctoral dissertation, seriously afflicted with tunnel
vision and with their early eagerness supplanted by a cynical
competitiveness and a premature pessimism concerning
things of the mind generally and professional opportunities in
particular; a malaise to which British doctoral candidates are by
no means immune. This state of affairs is not new to the twentyfirst
century, and Milton’s words from the tractate Of Education
retain their original point and weight: [ John Milton, Complete
Prose Works, ed. Don M Wolfe, 8 vols in 10 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1953–82), vol. 2, p. 375.]
So that they having but newly left those Grammatick
flats & shallows where they stuck unreasonably to learn
a few words with lamentable construction, and now on
the sudden transported under another climat to be tost
and turmoild with their unballasted wits in fadomless
and unquiet deeps of controversie, do for the most part
grow into hatred and contempt of Learning, mockt
and deluded all this while with ragged notions and
babblements, while they expected worthy and delightfull
knowledge.
Since I helped to found a research institute it may be said, fairly,
that I am scarcely in a position to complain of the deadening
effects of doctoral work. Embedded in my perplexity is a not
untypical instance of the consequences of Original Sin whereby,
to quote the old Biblical scholar J I Mombert [William Tyndale’s
Five Books of Moses called The Pentateuch (London: Samuel Bagster
& Sons, 1884), p. vii.], there is an ‘imperfection which marks
all human effort, especially where it aims to avoid it’. Ideally
regarded, doctoral studies ought to contribute toward what
Ruskin and others called ‘intrinsic value’; and even now, in a
minority of cases, they may; but many people, I would argue,
are not suited intellectually or temperamentally to pursue
matters with the necessary breadth as well as rigorous attention
at so early an age. I certainly wasn’t and, at the present time,
would be denied entry to an academic career. It was my good
fortune, in 1954, to be in possession of an Oxford First which
still, though barely, gave one an entrée to university teaching.
Despite my degree I see now that, though I was less ignorant at
graduation than I had been at matriculation, I was nonetheless
almost wholly unprepared for the demands of scholarly and
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