Word: balliol
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Balliol College...
Conversion at 8. Balliol began as a penance imposed on John of Balliol, a Scottish baron who kidnaped a bishop in a dispute over land, and to make amends endowed a hostel for 16 indigent scholars at Oxford. The resulting college went on to harbor such notables as John Wycliffe and Adam Smith, but its star did not really rise until the advent of Benjamin Jowett, the great classicist who took over as master in 1870, molding men and minds for 23 years...
Master Jowett disdained "all persons who do not succeed in the world," exhorted Balliol men to do or die the empire over. "Never apologize, never explain," Jowett advised one viceroy-designate in a famous aphorism. "Do you possess the art of picking other people's brains?" he asked another. "This is a great shortening of labor and saves many mistakes." Viewing his office as one of the kingdom's greatest, which it still is, Jowett once found something "offensive to God and highly displeasing to me." No friend of doubters, Jowett is supposed to have warned...
...Balliol's current master, Sir David Lindsay Keir, is a legal scholar who maintains Jowett's old stress on under graduate minds and muscles via stiff classics, intimate tutorials, rugger and rowing. Graduate research is still rare at Balliol, but science is finally getting its head; of the 39 fellows, nine are scientists and mathematicians. The, others remain brilliant eminences in philosophy or Sanskrit-men like Theodore Tylor, tutor in jurisprudence and one of Britain's best bridge players, although he is almost blind...
...Lord Peter Wimsey. Balliol wafts along on a modest budget of $450,000, costs students about $1,260 a year, and is well laced with state scholarship boys. To spruce up the premises, it is launching a $2.8 million birthday fund drive, but bricks interest it less than brains. Only the brightest apply each year, and only about one out of six (including six or eight Americans) gets in. Hardly anyone drops...