ONE MAN'S OXFORD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 783, 23 July 1954, Page 12

ONE MAN'S OXFORD

— OXFORD TRIUMPHANT, by Norman Longmate; Phoenix House, through A. H. and A. W. Reed, English price 16/-. ‘THE publishers of Oxford TriumpPhant clatm for it that, for the nonuniversity man, it "is the next best thing to going to Oxford’; and also, that it is "a documentaty." The compatibility of these claims is doubtful; the first concerns itself with experience, and the second with evidence; and in fact Mr. Longmate has tried to produce a documentary. Drawing upon his five years of active residence since the war, and upon the opinions of his friends, he has applied himself with admirable persistence to reducing the complexity of Oxford to the limits of a very readable two hundred pages, He quotes statistics of academic successes and failures for individual colleges, of graduate unemployment in the unappreciative world outside, and of Oxford’s contribution to the present House of Commons. He explains how undergraduates are selected, and how the Fellows and Heads of Houses are elected. He outlines the societies which cater for interests other than the academic. In all this he is lucid, objective, illuminative, almost When, however, his evidence ceases to be statistical, one becomes dubious. Of women undergraduates, he gives the proportion with full sexual experience as "at least 1 in 3 and possibly as high as 1 in 2, or even 2 in 3": these are large limits. He has a kindly word to say of the dons, "many, if not most of them, hard-working and capable men, devoted to the interests of their pupils, amiable, cultured and well-informed." Is one here, strictly, in the realm of fact? And when he reproyes "irresponsible deans and bursars, who are unable

to appreciate that they are the servants of their employers and paymasters-the public and the undergraduates," and calls for a Royal Commission into abuses, one questions his vision and his values. For though Oxford, after centuries, has become "a pensioner of the State," and must render account to the State, changes must come, as C. S. Lewis says somewhere of very similar issues, "from within the Tao," or the essence of the institution will be changed. Whether, as Mr. Longmate -suggests, Oxford will concentrate on an intellectual élite, ‘is for her to decide, not ‘the State. In spite, therefore, of al! attempts of objectivity, this book, like its predecessors, is "One Man’s Oxford." One can say of it that it is sincere, that it is provocative; but it is not "the next

best thing."

J.R.

T.