Word: oxfords
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Gordon Marsden, a Kennedy Fellow from England studying international relations at Harvard, read Modern History at Oxford as an undergraduate. He is an occasional contributor to the Opinion Page...
...astonished by the extent to which the structures can be penetrated by personal links and informal approaches--in academic applications particularly. You will not be required to fill out things in sextuplicate. You will find chemistry tutors who write musicals on the side, and the head of an Oxford college who also chairs a very popular radio quiz program. The most brilliant intellects will display a modesty bordering on absent-mindedness: someone who says he dabbles in Anglo-Saxon poetry may well turn out to be the world's greatest expert on it. If you can accept all this...
...their tuition fees paid by the government, but a considerable proportion of their living expenses as well? The introduction of government aid since 1945 has grafted a meritocracy onto a system of tradition designed to make "gentlemen." The student lounging in the Junior Common Room of one of the Oxford colleges (often medieval in origin), taking afternoon tea (provided by the college butler) and resplendent in T-shirt and jeans, may be the son of a lord, a nouveau riche city businessman or a coal miner: you won't automatically be able to tell which. Course-work may be specialized...
...harmful influences of T.V. on children--especially the dreadful impact of detective shows from our linguistically degenerate cousins across the Atlantic. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, so English tutors abhor transatlantic jargon and the fondness for acronyms so prevalent in the U.S.--as caustic essay comments from my Oxford tutors would testify...
Going into an Oxford college, you will find that coexistence of the traditional and the modern that all but the English would find quite schizophrenic. Your college tutor may call you "Mr. Marsden," offer you a glass of sherry on arrival, even in some cases like you to wear your academic gown to tutorials--but at the same time be prepared to have you dropping in at all hours of day and night in a way. that Harvard professors, with casual attitudes to first names but rigid ones to office hours, would find quite intolerable. The same student who will...