OXFORD FOR INSIDERS
'Who can ... walk up the Oxford High Street on a sunny morning or linger on a clear night in Radcliffe Square and not be aware of something more authentic than the life of eve yday?'
i \e Character of England. (1950)
In 1918 C.S. Lewis observed candidly that 'People talk about the xford manner and the Oxford life and the Oxford God knows what lse ... As if die undergraduates had anything to do with it... The real xford is a closed corporation of jolly, untidy, lazy, good-for-nothing umorous old men who have been electing their own sudcessors since he world began.' Things were about to change - at least outside the niversity itself.)

In the second and third quarters of the twentieth century it seemed to many that Oxford as a city had made an historic break away from its traditional domination by the university to achieve a more 'normal' dependence on manufacturing. In die closing decades of the twentieth century the more traditional pattern reasserted itself. Oxford is once again a city of students, though not all of them are 'at Oxford' in the sense in which that has generally been understood.

Oxford University itself has over 16,500 students, over a quarter at postgraduate level and almost a quarter from overseas, representing some one hundred and thirty nationalities. The city's other university, Oxford Brookes, has nearly 15,000 students and the College of Further Education some 14,000.

Smaller institutions include Plater College, a Catholic residential college for students aged over twenty, a dozen language schools and tutorial colleges plus the overseas campus programmes of American universities, catering for those who wish to say that they, too, were 'at Oxford'.
The whole history of Oxford is an attempt to answer the question of its own purpose. The masters who ran and taught in the earliest student halls sought to replicate themselves. The medieval founders of colleges aimed to turn out servants of the church and indirectly of the state. The author of that enduringly successful mid-Victorian spoof The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green was, for once, probably being serious when he made his protagonist announce that 'it is formation of character that I regard as one of the many great ends of a university system'.

Cardinal Newman in The Idea of a University, published in 1873, conceived of it as ideally constituting a community for the moral development of its members and not in any way vocational. Jowett, Master of Balliol in the following generation, saw its prime function as breeding a man-darinate to oversee nation and empire like platonic guardians. His near contemporary, Mark Pattison, thought it should be a powerhouse of research.

Cecil Rhodes looked to Oxford as a finishing-school for >, supermen. Quite possibly there isn't a right answer, certainly not a angle one. Perhaps the nearest comes, from a novelist (Oxford, of course) — 'it doesn't matter what the professors teach, it's what die place teaches ...'

 

accommodation oxford