printable versionTwo months in Oxford, trying out tutorials and umbrellas amid dreaming spires
BY CYNTHIA HAVEN
The tall, white building at the center of this photo is 65 High St., Oxford, which features the main entrance, a red door, to Stanford House. The residence is an amalgamation, consisting of several adjoining houses.
The enormous east window of Merton College Chapel, completed by the end of the 13th century, looms over Oxford’s Front Quadrangle. The chapel is one of Oxford’s most popular venues for chamber concerts.
The misnamed “Bridge of Sighs” in New College Lane links the Old and New Quadrangles of Hertford College. It resembles Venice’s 16th century Rialto but was completed in 1914 and designed by Sir Thomas Jackson.
Beyond the windowsill, pigeons soar and dive among the ancient, crocketed spires on the nearby roof of Pembroke College at Oxford.
But the birds don't distract Stanford junior (now senior) Nicholas "Niko" Reid, who is in serious conference with his Oxford tutor, Rafaela Hillerbrand, in Littlegate House. It is mid-June, and they are halfway through one of those private tête-à-têtes known in Oxbridge parlance as a "tutorial."
"Do you want to pursue a Kantian line?" she asks, glancing over his essay again. This is no fusty professor in a collegiate gown grilling a nervous student. Hillerbrand, the James Martin Research Fellow on Global Catastrophic Risk/Future of Humanity Institute, wears a voile summer blouse and sports an auburn ponytail. Reid, a laid-back product engineering major, is a tousle-haired Angeleno in jeans. Their conversation rambles through science fiction, new kinds of consciousness, philosopher Jürgen Habermas' definitions of the human, and the new gray area of "transhumans," which leverages science and technology to "improve" people. Clearly, this discussion is a postmodern one, yet outside, it's impossible not to see Brideshead Revisited replayed on these streets, where old stones and gray slate fade into a muted sky. Again the spell is broken: Leaving the modern building on St. Ebbe's Street, a Philip Glass composition pours onto the streets from a shop near Pembroke, where J.R.R. Tolkien was once a fellow.
The apparent languor of the tutorial is deceptive: It is Reid's important, final meeting with his tutor during Trinity Term as part of the Stanford Program in Oxford, offered through the Bing Overseas Studies Program. Like the other students who live behind the red door on 65 High St., known to its residents as "Stanford House," he is in the last of his eight weeks at the Stanford program.
Eight weeks. That is all the time the 45 or so Stanford students packed in Stanford House have to absorb all of Oxford. For Stanford students, the temptation is always to do too much in too little time. But Oxford is no place to slack off on studying.
Stanford's presence in Britain began in 1966 at Harlaxton Manor in faraway Lincolnshire; in 1969, the program moved to Cliveden in Buckinghamshire, the stately home associated with the Anglo-American Astor dynasty. Cliveden, only 25 miles from London, was a step in the right direction—and since it was also only 28 miles from Oxford, it gave a taste of other possibilities for the program. Steven Zipperstein, acting director during Trinity Term, recalled the history as Stanford students relaxed during a year-end celebration at The Gate Hangs High Inn at Hook Norton. (They had ventured into the Oxfordshire countryside to see the megalithic "Rollright Stones," a trio of sites marked by ancient stone monuments.)
Stanford House was leased from Magdalen College in 1983. In the commotion of renovation for Stanford use, "I thought the Starship Enterprise was being built on High Street," said Zipperstein, who taught at Oxford as a research fellow from 1981 to 1987.
It wasn't. The amalgamation of six adjoining houses into the current Stanford House has left it light years even from modernity, with its worn wooden stairs, rabbit warren of rooms and mint-green walls.
The Victorian terraced housing (some of it even earlier, from the mid-18th century) is another way to taste a bit of Oxford. Such bits must be treasured; Professor Geoffrey Tyack, director of the Stanford Program in Oxford, warns that eight weeks is not enough for total immersion: "All you can do is put your toe in the water, you can't swim," although he added that highly motivated students get a "tremendous amount" even in that short time.
For Niko Reid and the others, seven of the eight weeks are marked by an intense writing schedule, during which they produce 2,000- to 3,000-word essays. They must discuss each essay with the tutor—as Reid did on that June afternoon in Littlegate House.
Oxford is almost entirely based on the ritual one-on-ones with a tutor (nowadays sometimes two- or three-on-ones). The tutor may be a graduate student, college lecturer, freelance or retired academic, but is most commonly a "fellow"—that is, an academic with a teaching appointment within an Oxford college, roughly equivalent to a U.S. professor. (An Oxford "professor" is about the same as an endowed chair in the United States.) These exchanges, which may be preceded by reading as many as four books a week, are the heart and art of an Oxford or Cambridge education. They have a mystique about them.
It is a system of teaching that is particular to the two universities. It evolved from medieval methods based on arguing in a public forum. Later, it was reinterpreted during educational reforms in the 19th century.
At Oxford, "most students get most of their teaching through tutorials," Tyack said. "Lectures are supplements to tutorials. You're not examined on the lectures."
According to Stephanie Williams, administrator for the Stanford program, "Every tutor's style is individual. It's a completely new format in which to learn. It's incredibly rewarding, often enormously intimidating. You defend what you have written."
In a 2001 article in the New York Review of Magazines, Katie Prout explored why Britain has produced supernaturally prolific and provocative journalists. Christopher Hitchens, Anthony Lane, Andrew Sullivan and Tina Brown come to mind. With a host of others, they were educated at Oxford or Cambridge, where a tutorial system ensured a rigorous and bracing one-on-one analysis and discussion of each subject. It trained them for intellectual confrontation.
"In the tutorial system, the professor assigns an examination-style question to the student, hands him or her a lengthy bibliography from which to work, and expects the student to return the next week, ready to discuss and vigorously defend the eight pages he or she has written on the subject, thus learning to think, write and debate. And this happens week after week," Prout wrote.
John Carey, an English professor at Oxford, told the Review: "At Oxford and Cambridge, you do quickly develop an aggressive manner. You never repeat what you're told in lectures. You must be sharp, aggressive and original if you want to be noticed. Defending your point of view is a vital part of the education with a tutor."
In some ways, however, the tutorial system is antithetical to the training at a major American university.
"The whole basis of Stanford education is highly individual," said Tyack, who is also a fellow at Kellogg College, one of the newer colleges at Oxford. Stanford students "think that they can set the agenda"—indeed, America generally encourages initiative. At Oxford, "you pretty much stick to a set syllabus. No student would dream of saying, 'This is what I want to do.'"
These are not the only differences: Life at Oxford takes place within a college—Merton or Balliol, Christ Church or Magdalen, for example. Inevitably, the colleges acquire reputations, even stereotypes—Balliol College for statesmen and politicians; Jesus College attracts Welsh students; sports addicts go to Brasenose; Christ Church is the party school. Teaching occurs within a college, fellows are appointed to a particular college, students sleep and dine within a college. The university is the examining body that confers degrees.
Other American universities offer programs at Oxford. Princeton has students at Worcester College, for example. But such programs have their pitfalls: the potential for feeling lonely and stranded in a strange, damp city with a radically different program among students who, wrapped in their own concerns, are unlikely to form deep attachments to those visiting Oxford for just a few months. Foreign students can get lost in a big system designed for a different kind of student on a different kind of program (Oxford students, for example, don't have roommates).
And the Oxford emphasis on tutorials, with reading and writing and arguing, can be grueling—too grueling for Stanford students who may want to use the opportunity of being in England to dash across the Channel to Paris or Amsterdam for the weekend, an option regular Oxford students cannot take because of the rigor of their studies.
The Stanford program is an amalgamation of tutorial and classroom approaches; students typically take one tutorial and one or two other classes. Stanford students have their own faculty (a mix drawn from Stanford and Oxford), and classes in Stanford House. The classes offer unique opportunities of their own: In a class on history and biography, Zipperstein, the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History, presented his own newly minted manuscript on American Jewish writer Isaac Rosenfeld for discussion (Rosenfeld's Lives: Fame, Oblivion and the Furies of Writing is scheduled to be published next year by Yale University Press). "I finished it literally a few days before I gave it to you," Zipperstein told the class. He compared the prospect of their reading it to "a stranger seeing you in your pajamas."
"What I do at my desk and what I do in class isn't usually quite so close," he said.
In a very loose sense, Stanford has almost created its own "college," a sanctuary with its own familiar traditions. Some cushion for culture shock helps; the Oxford culture can seem clannish to outsiders. For example, watching students at New College play croquet on the manicured lawn in front of their school, one is inclined to wonder whether Stanford students could play, too. Certainly not, one fellow explained: It would be like walking into a private country club without a membership.
The invisible lines may seem foreign to a Stanford visitor, coming from a campus where any student, faculty or staff member could picnic on any lawn, as could anyone in the surrounding community. Clearly, a psychological gulf, bigger than the Atlantic, separates the two universities and the worldviews they grew from: different ideas about ownership, initiative, success, entitlement and much more.
Not surprisingly, surveys reflected the students' euphoria with the opportunity, unhappiness with its brevity and dissatisfaction with how little they mingle with Oxford students and how much they remain among their Cardinal brethren. But Oxford students are essentially on a different program. Tyack and Williams encourage the Stanford students to find other opportunities to mingle—choral groups or rowing teams or religious clubs that cross college lines. The ones who took this advice lauded the experience. Yet students generally remain "quite lyrical" about the experience, Tyack said.
"I had a great time," recalled Reid in a telephone conversation from his Los Angeles home. "Academically, it was extremely strong." He said he learned a lot of "cool things" that he's still thinking and talking about—and he got an "A" from Hillerbrand. Moreover, he developed an affinity for the country, even for its "absurd" architecture and dreaming spires: "After college, I'm definitely applying to U.K. design firms." If so, he won't be the only one to head back across the Atlantic.
Tyack estimated that, at any one time, about 10 graduate students at Oxford are former participants of the program. "A lot of them come back and do graduate degrees here—quite a lot," he said.
And some return for other reasons: Two of them, who met during spring quarter three years ago, returned to marry at Stanford House, in its garden, among the foxglove, St. John's wort and magnolia.