Aspects of Modern Oxford, by a mere don
A. D. Godley, 1894
Kids Today Want Trophies For Everything
“The undergraduate who has made a speech at the Union, or a century for his college second eleven, wants a printed certificate of his glorious achievements.”
On Absenteeism
“You announced yourself as too ill to go to a lecture, and then rode with the Bicester or played cricket to your heart’s content.”
On Coddling Students
“There are still the old problems to be faced–the difficulty of adapting old rules to new conditions–the danger on the one hand of treating boys too much like men, and on the other of treating men too much like boys. Hence college authorities generally fall back on some system of more or less ingenious compromise–a course which is no doubt prudent in the long run, and shows a laudable desire for the attainment of the Aristotelian ‘mean,’ but which, like most compromises, manages to secure the disapproval alike of all shades of outside opinion. We live with the fear of the evening papers before our eyes, and an erring undergraduate who has been sent down may quite possibly be avenged by a newspaper column reflecting on college discipline in general, and the dons who sent him down in particular. Every day martinets tell us that the University is going to the dogs from excess of leniency; while critics of the ‘Boys-will-be-boys’ school point out the extreme danger of sitting permanently on the safety valve, and dancing on the edge of an active volcano.”
The Party Scene
“Mr. Shenstone found, at Pembroke College, both sober men ‘who amused themselves in the evening with reading Greek and drinking water.’”
On Narcissism
“Now every one is anxious to see his own name and his friend’s name in print.”
Kids Are Different Today
“Even the Freshman, that delightful creation of a bygone age, is not by any means what he was. He is still young, but no longer innocent; the bloom is off his credulity; you cannot play practical jokes upon him any more.”
“If, however, the undergraduate occasionally displays the virtues of maturer age, there are certain indications that he is less of a grown-up person than he was in the brave days of old.”
“There is a naïveté and directness about undergraduate error which is the easy prey of any satirist; and curiously enough the public, and even that large class which sends its sons to the Universities, apparently likes to pretend a belief that youth is really brought up in an atmosphere of open and unchecked deviation from the paths of discipline and morality.”
“Perhaps the female mind is piqued by a subdued flavour of impropriety, dating from a period when colleges were not what they are; or more probably they find it gratifying to the self-respect of a superior sex to observe and to pity the notoriously ineffectual attempts of mere bachelors to render existence bearable.”
???
“At Commemoration a general sense of lobster salad pervades the atmosphere.”
Proctorising
“They are temporarily happy if they can see a Proctor in his robes of office, and rise to the enthusiasm of ‘never having had such a delightful day’ if the Proctor happens to ‘proctorise’ an undergraduate within the ken of their vision.”
In My Day We Had A Little Something Called A Work Ethic
“He is obliged to attend lectures, at least occasionally. His tutors compel him to attempt to pass his University examination at a definite date; and then–adding insult to injury–actually reproach him or even send him down for his ill success, just as if he had not always demonstrated to them by repeated statements and constant proofs of incapacity that he had not the smallest intention of getting through! Small wonder, perhaps, that on returning from a highly unsatisfactory interview with the University examiners to a yet more exasperating colloquy with the authorities of his college, he should wish that fate had not matched him with the ‘cosmic process’ of the nineteenth century; and that it had been his happier lot to come up to Oxford in the days when examinations were not, and his remote ancestors got their degrees without any vain display of mere intellectual proficiency.”
Beer And Skittles
“Even then the powers that be had decreed that life should not be completely beer, nor altogether skittles.”
“Sorry I Won’t Be In Class Tomorrow”
“Post arrives: chiefly bills and circulars: several notes from undergraduates. ‘Dear Sir,–May I go to London for the day in order to keep an important engagement.’ Dentist, I suppose. ‘Dear Mr. —-,–I am sorry that I was absent from your valuable lecture yesterday, as I was not aware you would do so.’ ‘Dear Sir,–I shall be much obliged if I may have leave off my lecture this morning, as I wish to go out hunting.’ Candid, at any rate. ‘Mr. —- presents his compliments to Mr. —- and regrets that he is compelled to be absent from his Latin Prose lecture, because I cannot come.’ Simple and convincing.”
I Guess I’m The Only One Who Cares About Dressing Appropriately These Days
“Undergraduates throw bread about. No one in evening dress but myself.”
An Eternal Truth
“Eleven: no more men, thank goodness.”
As a graduate of a school in Maine that loved lobster at big events, this makes sense to me.
“At Commemoration a general sense of lobster salad pervades the atmosphere.”
oh shit, fellow Bowdoin grad in the house? Commencement was all about the lobster. And the blueberry cake. Mmmm.
I mean, at least neither of us went to Bates, but nope, I’m a Colby grad.
Close enough for me. NESCAC in the house, party people. ::does keg stand supported by five guys in Nantucket reds::
I WENT TO BATES SO YOU’D BETTER BA… oh wait I transferred after freshman year because I hated it so much. Righteo. Carry on.
haha I was waiting for someone to defend Bates, it was just too easy I couldn’t resist. In all seriousness, I have nothing against Bates or Bowdoin that doesn’t also apply to Colby. I would’ve been fine at either if I’d applied/ gotten in to either.
My dad’s financial adviser was intent on me going to Colby – I think he conducted applicant interviews – and all these years later he still grumps at me for not going.
I never really liked lobster, though, so what could I do?
For some insane reason, Colby flew the students up for the minority scholarship to campus on Valentine’s Weekend. (Protip: Valentine’s is in goddamned February and Colby is goddamned Maine.) Add that to the fact that we lacked keycards to get into any buildings and there was a nationwide snowstorm and we all almost died.
I was accepted to Colby and elected to go, honestly, anywhere else.
Proving that you’re a smart (and hopefully warm) soul.
What’s so bad about Bates? They sent me like a pound of recruitment materials and I’m still curious.
Colby, Bates and Bowdoin are similar schools and are rivals, so I was making an inside joke to a fellow CBB alum. I have nothing against Bates.
Huzzah for Colby! A nor’easter struck my commencement lobster bake, but we hunkered down in our LLBean gear and stuck it out.
Not a grad, but I taught there for two years. LOBSTAH!!!!
But was lobster still poor food in 1894?
I went to Boston University and our dining halls had an annual lobster night where there would be hundreds and hundreds of lobsters.
Those Ungrateful Kids Are Always Asking For More Money, and they’ve been doing it literally since the Middle Ages.
Little did they know the invention of Skittlebrau would mean days of beer and Skittles…forever.
I’m anxiously awaiting the Days of Wine and Roses sequel, Days of Beer and Skittles.
Apparently around the turn of the century red ties where the go to gay code for Oxford* students and sadly this was not true during my brief college experience.
* Princeton adopted this around the same time cause of course they would.
(Obligatory Gay Nineties joke)
Undergraduates throw bread about.
this is actually a football game tradition at my school, so, you know.
I’m just tickled by the image of undergraduates throwing bread about while one lone person stands there in evening dress.
Like, a super-disapproving David Niven type.
I think this may be a scene at the Drones Club in several P.G. Wodehouse novels.
I was just coming here to say “CATSMEAT POTTER-PIRBRIGHT, IS THAT YOU?”
My school had a tortilla throwing thing that happened at football games. I don’t know why, bc I never went to a game
I ran Bay to Breakers in San Francisco many years ago, and that was a thing people did before crossing the start line (which took AGES).
They also do this at Bloomsday in Spokane.
“Undergraduates throw bread about”
I just had a flashback to my boarding school roommate throwing a moldy loaf of bread out the window at the end of one semester and getting yelled at by an RA for it. Then she had to go outside and dispose of it properly.
(I also realize that referencing boarding school makes me sound obnoxious and rich but I’m neither, promise)
Actually, on the West Coast we have so little experience with actual boarding schools that to me, referencing boarding school immediately makes me assume you are/were some kind of mysterious orphan, possibly with an aptitude for magic.
I acknowledge fiction may not have served me well as a measuring stick.
A Little Princess/Harry Potter crossover?
I WOULD READ THAT SO HARD!!!!
The next time I call in to work I think I will use “I am compelled to be absent from work today because I cannot come” and see what happens.
no no no, you’ve got to use the third person at the beginning and THEN the first person! Otherwise it just doesn’t sound official enough.
This is an excellent point.
“Meg regrets that she is compelled to be absent from work today because I cannot come” has a much fancier ring to it.
Our family absence excuse note read “Mat was absent from school for the (time period) on account of adverse weather conditions at sea.”
Now I want to go to a Trump rally and start conversations with people by saying things like, “This country used to be great, but now things are just total lobster salad” or “I’m not sexist, but a Hillary White House would be altogether skittles!”
And then I will have many angry new friends that I’m afraid of…
As a recent Oxford grad the digs about missing lectures landed uncomfortably close to the bone …
If you’re not a science student, the lectures are totally optional! We’re just meant to take in knowledge from tutorials and the libraries. At least, that was how I understood it.
(current freshman in college here)
I do not understand why people dont go to class
I wanna get my money’s worth!
Good girl
Personally, it was always a combination of perceiving getting the degree as what tuition was for, so if skipping didn’t affect my grades I didn’t care, and oversleeping because of the stress of my grades actually being bad. Even though being in class is totally more fun than doing pointless crap online, really. It required getting up and showering, so I was against it.
But you’re just a baby frosh! Don’t become like me! Don’t even read that! I admire your motivation!
I didn’t read it! I remain stalwart!
While doing my MLIS I took a cataloguing class in which the prof did nothing but read to us from the AACR2. There was zero value in going to class when I could get the same quality and amount of instruction by staying home and just reading it myself.
Yep; I have never felt like skipping classes when the lectures are thoughtful and relevant. I often feel like skipping classes where the professor reads directly from a bunch of slides that mostly contain verbatim quotes from the textbook chapter we were required to read in advance ourselves.
Nothing drives me to insanity more quickly than having to sit and listen to someone reading off of PowerPoint slides. (I used to work in a federal office, and 90% of our meetings were like this).
I had a MLS professor do this. She would go on tangents that were useful so I didn’t skip the classes, but it was still frustrating.
I feel your pain and I got my MLIS 30 years ago.
You win today. This is something, as a college prof, that drives me BONKERS. You are getting into monstruous debt for this! Your parents worried about saving for this! At least turn up, bonehead!
Squee
I like it when professors like me.
My school has flat-rate tuition, for which my 18-credits-per-semester-taking ass is permanently grateful, but like. If your yearly tuition is $25K, you’re taking 15 credit hours a semester, and every semester is 16 weeks, then you’re taking 30 credits for 32 weeks total. That’s 960 hours of class. 25000/960 = $26 per hour-long class, and that’s with reasonable tuition.
Most of my class skipping occurred the semester where I scheduled myself 8 and 9 am classes every day, completely ignoring both how my internal clock worked at the time and the idea that signing up for the hardest classes your major offers all at once is a Bad Idea (I was exhausted, in short) but it was ABSOLUTELY reflected in my grades and I mostly learned my lesson. THAT BEING SAID, there is a joy to be found in what my roommate called the “mental health skip”- where you wake up for class, see that it’s raining/snowing/not looking great and just…stay in bed. This should obviously only be used ~once a semester but it’s probably the only time in your life that you can get away with doing this, and I miss it.
(apparently I have a lot to say on this subject)
Hell, I do a mental health skip every now and again at my job. Sometimes it is what must be done.
I do too and I’m the professor.
Every first year is required to take an 8:30 class once a week this semester and I am NOT a morning person.
My mental health skip is usually my lady problems skip, for when you wake up and your ute is just not being nice. The only exception is my birthday, when we were watching a movie in Intro to Queer Studies and I wanted to celebrate being a rebellious 18 yr old.
If you were an 1894 male undergraduate at Oxford, your parents would be paying. And it wouldn’t matter what kind of grades you got, because you’d just spend the rest of your life grouse-shooting and having assignations in country houses. (Well, before being killed in the Great War).
The bit about students grumbling about having the misfortune to be at Oxford in the 19th century and to actually have to take exams makes me wish they could see what it was like in the 21st century – no coasting just because you’re rich and posh! Do your work or get sent down/rusticated.
I didn’t really have any reason for it, it just kind of happened. Such is life.
I mean, for me it was crippling depression making it basically impossible for me to function or do any schoolwork, followed by a metric ton of anxiety about having to face the professor without any of the reading or homework done, and then be publicly shamed in front of my peers when I really, really didn’t want anyone to know how bad a state I was in. It was easier to avoid everything, at least up until the point when the Dean was making emergency calls to my dorm room and putting me on medical leave.
these turn-of-the-century Oxford guys, though, it literally didn’t matter if they went to class or not! their parents had the money for it and they probably got their degrees either way! they still ran the country even if they did drop out, or they went and died in the Boer War or something!
There’s a reason a Third is known as a gentleman’s degree.
I went to a small(er) college so attendance was actually necessary for our grades, especially in classes for your major. However, I would occasionally skip classes for 1) mental health days 2) working on projects for other classes. Sometimes there were just not enough hours in the day to care about certain classes, like the Enviro Science class that showed us the film 2012. (I am unfortunately not kidding).
For me it was the first time in my life that I could skip class without having to worry about the school calling my parents…and my tuition was covered. Call it a minor teenage rebellion. I also skipped classes to finish papers from other classes. Smart! (No, definitely not smart. Do not recommend this method.)
Or if you use this method, do not tell the professor of the class you skipped that you were doing work for that other class. We will not be impressed.
I had two professors who were married this semester. I think one would tell the other if I did that. Not smart.
Man…..kids these days…
You were me in 1986. There is no other explanation.
I loved and/or was terrified by all my classes so much that I didn’t miss a class until senior year, and then only because I was too sick to sit upright.
My rule is, if you can walk with your spine at an obtuse angle, you can go to class
There are times I am at a right angle and Im like sorry but nope.
Sometimes there’s something more important going on, like reading Shakespeare with a friend in a daisy-spangled field at the top of a hill where you take turns doing the different parts in different voices. But in ten minutes your Grammar For Teachers class starts. Should you go? No. Field Shakespeare is more important. You already have perfect grammar and you’re not planning to become a teacher.
Or, like, you’re sick.
Does Field Shakespeare turn gradually to Field Longing Glances and Furtive Touches? Because that’s where it’s going in my head.
In some fields it does, no doubt! In mine it led to the sisterhood of daisy chains, which is no less noble. Just like a painting of an idyllic party without any men playing music at the women. (Come to think of it, I did a painting of that field for a landscape assignment, but I didn’t put any people in it.)
Field Shakespeare sounds AMAZING and (course squeeing ahead) I get to take Acting II next semester and that’s when we learn Shakespeare and how to play male roles and ugggh my school is so great
Now that sounds like a don’t-miss class! I loved college. I’m glad you’re loving it too.
Actually I rarely skipped classes, because I didn’t learn nearly as well from copying a friend’s notes. I only remember a couple of instances of copying someone’s notes, and one of them was when we studied Wallace Stevens and/or William Carlos Williams in American Lit. I STILL get those two mixed up because of missing that day. (But the friend who let me copy his notes asked me to a dance by hiding a personal message in his notes for me to find, which was cute.)
And after the dance, which was forgettable and awkward, we got together with some other friends and read/acted ‘The Importance of Being Earnest,’ which was great! I had (and still have) awesome friends.
I cannot wait to take my school’s field Shakespeare class, in which we live in the woods for a month and presumably speak only in iambic pentameter. It is an English major requirement and I could not imagine a better one.
You get to a point somewhere in your 2nd/3rd/final year where the work load gets insane and you realize that your time is better spend in the library working on your thesis or other stupidly large assignment than going to a class to listen to someone read off a set of slides that you can get online anyway.
College was a completely pragmatic exercise for me, I was literally there for the piece of paper so I could get a job; I quickly started skipping any classes that we just rote learning, because I could do that on my own anyway. See also seminar’s, most of them were total wank* and I’d rather be sleeping off my hangover or holed up in the library working on things that would directly affect my grade.
*Do not follow any of my advice. Keep your joy of learning alive and attempt to avoid the cynicism about education that has infected the rest of us.
A couple of reasons:
1) I figured I got my money’s worth by getting the diploma (which is all employers look at anyhow) and by having a good time. Ten years later…yep, made the right choice there.
2) Depends on the class. I was happy to go to lectures by good speakers post 10-AM. Discussion sections, generally not: if my peers had anything worthwhile to say, which they generally didn’t, they wouldn’t say it in a discussion group while trying to suck up to the professor, but rather at 3 AM when we were playing drunken Mario Kart.
I just want to know if the active volcano thing is figurative or literal, and if the latter, whether it refers to the Performing Arts or Geology department.
I think this is Silas University. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4QzRfvkJZ4&l…
This collection of the usages of “lobster salad” suggest that it might mean it’s a twee, effeminate affair for the rich?
Also, that last citation at the link is an anecdote about Charles Lamb included in a collection of stories compiled by Charlotte Bronte–what a happy bunny trail for a lunch hour!
Sure of course, “the whole thing was lobster salad”, as opposed to the manly steak and ale pie of our Anglo-Saxon forebears who conquered France and drove out the Danes.
“more probably they find it gratifying to the self-respect of a superior sex to observe and to pity the notoriously ineffectual attempts of mere bachelors to render existence bearable”
THE NOTORIOUSLY INEFFECTUAL ATTEMPTS OF MERE BACHELORS TO RENDER EXISTENCE BEARABLE.
“‘Mr. —- presents his compliments to Mr. —- and regrets that he is compelled to be absent from his Latin Prose lecture, because I cannot come.”
Keeping this one in my back pocket for future use…
I have received several variants on this from students already. Basically.
“I will not be in class… REASONS.”
I taught one college class and was honestly pretty blasé about the reasons for students’ absences. If there was an ongoing health situation I would refer them to the disability & accommodations office, and if it was a religious holiday I was obliged to let them be gone without consequences, but other than that, it didn’t make any difference to me if they were hung over or on vacation or doing other homework or just tired. I just couldn’t think what I would do with that information. That turned out to be a tricky policy to explain, though, because I didn’t want to say “You get x free absences, no excuses required!” and encourage students to skip.
That is actually EXACTLY my attendance policy! “You get 2 free absences and I don’t even want to know.” Sick, hungover, working, car broke down, tired of life, whatever, I don’t have to judge the validity or debate with students.
I would get detailed explanations of the consistency, color, and frequency of bodily fluids. I could never decide: corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative? Or conscientiously covering the bases? Either way, I desperately wanted to write back, “Not that kind of doctor, don’t need that kind of detail.”
I mean, heck, now I work in the food service industry and we don’t even need that kind of detail for our illness logs. Just “Barfy McBarfersons vomited on Spewtember eleventyfourth but was back at work after the 24-hour quarantine period on the eleventysixth.”
I enjoy the switch from third to first person.
As a professor, those excuses sound awfully familiar, even if they do now come by email.
Yes, especially variations of “I won’t be coming to class because I can’t come to class” with no further detail.
“…to pity the notoriously ineffectual attempts of mere bachelors to render existence bearable.”
Aw, now I feel sorry for the mere bachelors and their unbearable existences.
The syntax of this confused me. Is the superior sex in reference to women or men?
It doesn’t seem like those guys in the illustration will have to wait for the cox for too long, what with those calf-revealing short pants.
Late to this thread and was surprised to see this joke so far down in the comments. Toasties are falling down on the job in the dick jokes department.
Stroke being a double entendre in rowing is all well and good, but that photo is making it ridiculous.
When I was about to start grad school, I needed to learn Greek (I was planning to read Plato and Aristotle). I spend the summer before I began class working my way through all 4 years’ worth of undergraduate Greek (like, 10-12 hours per day most days). Since it was August in Houston and our apartment was inadequately cooled, I did in fact spend most nights reading Greek and drinking water. I never really felt amused, though. Mostly grimly determined.
On that schedule, I don’t know how you confined yourself to water!
I have a friend doing a classics degree right now and his latin/greek homework sounds truly terrifying. Much respect.
I enjoyed this and will think of it the next time I read a hand-wringing piece about today’s Youths.
I especially appreciated the first one about everyone wanting a trophy. I’ve been hearing about participation trophies (why they are terrible, why they are not terrible) since I was in grade school (mumble mumble years ago).
Clearly a long standing issue for the youths.
Friedersdorf even sounds properly 19th century…
Project Gutenberg is legitimately one of my favorite things in the world, mostly for stuff like this.
“Perhaps the female mind is piqued by a subdued flavour of impropriety…”
it me
(but don’t let that get around)
The undergraduate who has made … a century for his college second eleven
I know what each of these words means individually, but strung together like this they make no sense to me. How do you make a century? What is a college second eleven?
A hundred runs in cricket. For the second string team I guess…
I believe a century is a cricket score and a second eleven a type of cricket tournament, from memories of Peter Whimsy novels, but google’s answers confirmed, but also confused me on those points.
also, there should be an e in Whimsey, ha!
…and no “h”.
ah, yes, my spelling fails me, as it often does, ha!
And thanks, mspym for the cricket info. Sadly, it will likely sink to the bottom of my info pile and only be vaguely recalled the next time I bump into cricket info.
I’m afraid that cricket is just another of the multitudes of sportsballs that I don’t ever totally pin down.
1st Eleven is the top team at the school, 2nd Eleven is the next one down. Fierce competition as to which team you were placed in etc.
Transalation: the dude is putting on swank for scoring 100 runs but he’s not good enough to be in or play against the best teams soooo it undercuts the value of his achievement. It’s like hitting a home run in t-ball. You don’t brag about that over the age of 5.
I think it’s a cricket thing? I do not understand cricket well enough to explain further
Does a subdued flavor of impropriety taste like lobster salad?
(Regardless, I am totally swiping that lobster salad line for the beginning of a short story.)
that illustration at least gives us comfort that Freddie Mercury will live forever in 1890s Oxford, getting all the tail he could ever want
All the cox you mean
“You hurry to run through the second of the Aonian sources your self, in order to drink from the holy stream of Bacchus. No fastidiousness slows this course: for Phoebus colors the foreheads of the tired with the spring of perennial waters.” -a Greek Grammar teacher in N. Germany, 1604.
Translation. “Do your homework before you go out drinking!!”
I read “work ethic” with scare inverted commas.
Waiting for the Cox
By Lancelot Speed
Hur hur hur
Sorry.
‘Mr. —- presents his compliments to Mr. —- and regrets that he is compelled to be absent from his Latin Prose lecture, because I cannot even with Latin Prose.’
Additionally, “Eleven: no more men, thank goodness.” is on the spreadsheet. I really need to get around to embroidering some of these.
HA similarly from ‘Oxford’ by Christopher Hobhouse, 1942.
“Relatively few men go to lectures, the usefulness of which was superseded some while ago by the invention of the printing press. The women, docile and literal, continue to flock to every lecture with medieval zeal, and record in an hour of longhand scribbling what could have been assimilated in ten minutes in an armchair.”
“The women undergraduates have a truly Teutonic respect for their own dons, who in their turn take full advantage of it”.
Relevant page: https://scontent-lax3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash2…
Docile and literal!
“Undergraduates throw bread about. No one in evening dress but myself.”
did anyone else get powerful Drones Club vibes from this statement
(also apparently there is a Drones Club rpg!!!! i found it while looking for a drones club bread-roll-throwing quote: http://unseelie.org/rpg/drones/
“Following are a few ‘standard’ advantages and disadvantages which cover most of the trials and tribulations that face the average Drone.
Romantic resistance
Tolerance for alcohol
Luck
Etiquette
Conscience
Sports car
Student of the Turf
Good sportsman
Specialist interest
Connections
Gentleman’s Gentleman
Difficult relation”
awfully rummy, these games, what?
nice
Did you ask for a refund from the university?
“They are temporarily happy if they can see a Proctor in his robes of office, and rise to the enthusiasm of ‘never having had such a delightful day’ if the Proctor happens to ‘proctorise’ an undergraduate within the ken of their vision.”
Completely true. I have fond memories of waiting outside the Exam Schools for a friend to finish their final exam, and seeing one of the Proctors (stationed there to try to keep the revelry within appropriate bounds; there’s a lot of food-throwing) brandishing an inflatable cutlass, which I assume he had confiscated from someone. It was wonderful.
I am a graduate student and this article tell me good info about college life and also tell me how to spend our time in study and other activities thanks for share it reword my sentence .
I am a graduate student and this article tell me good info about college life and also tell me how to spend our time in study and other activities thanks for share it reword my sentence .