Looking for Class

by Bruce Feiler

  As with class, when one brings up the subject of exam results, everyone has a story to justify his or her position—especially those in the middle. One person says he studied too hard; another confesses he worked too little. A friend of mine who earned a 2.1, for example, claimed he got Firsts on his first two sections but then slept through the final part and received a Third. I was unsure how to respond to this story. Was I supposed to think he was a genius for getting two Firsts? Or was I supposed to think he was a fool for failing to set his alarm clock? In fact, what I thought was how sad it is that so many people at so great a place allow their identities to be caught up in such a mindless way. Instead of learning to count their blessings and be generous toward others, Cambridge students are learning to quibble over rankings and compete among themselves.

  Communication. The general breakdown of the old social order in Britain is nowhere more apparent than in the area of language. Traditionally, language patterns have mirrored class structure. Writer Nancy Mitford divided all speech into “U and non-U language,” for upper-class and non-upper-class. Leslie Stephen believed the differences could be traced to schooling. The world could be divided into two classes, he wrote, “those who have and those who have not received a University education.” For generations, members of the British ruling elite were educated in prestigious schools, where they were expected to learn the lingua franca of enlightened conversation. In turn, these people were expected to use their learning to lead the country. As George Orwell realized, to his dismay, no revolutionary change could happen in Britain without the leadership of this educated class. “In almost any revolt,” he wrote, “the leaders would tend to be people who could pronounce their aitches.”

  Like so much else, this rigid order in language no longer exists and has been replaced by a creeping classlessness. Cambridge today offers a stunning example of the changing patterns. Speech at the university can be divided into “S and non-S language,” for student and nonstudent speech. Among the nonstudents—the administrators, the professors, even the porters—language still follows the old rules. Clare College communicated with its members under the false assumption that we all spoke the same language. Announcements were filled with such enigmatic terms as placets and non placets (votes of yea, “it pleases,” and nay, “it pleases not”), absits (letting a student be absent during term) and exeats (letting him leave when term is done), as well as a host of hierarchical distinctions, such as procancellarius (one who grants degrees from the university) and prae- lector (one who grants them from the college), and—most important of all—Cantab (for degrees earned by hard work at Cambridge) and Oxon (for those just given away at “Awxford”). As if these were not enough, every night before dinner in Hall, a fellow would stand on the raised platform that supports the High Table and attempt to read a prayer in Latin, even though the language went out of general use over a millennium ago.

  Students, meanwhile, no longer speak the rarefied language of the Conversation. Because of their varying social backgrounds and specialized courses of study, the only common language students share these days consists of pub-speak, pillow talk, and street slang they picked up from the telly, which they were all watching when they were young in lieu of studying Latin. The headlines of the Clare Procrastinator demonstrate the true level of intellectual discourse among students today: GET PISSED, CLIMB ABOUT A BIT, AND STEAL SIGNS WITH PETER; EIGHT BALL: AN ORGY OF SPITE, VENGEANCE, HOPELESSNESS, DESPAIR AND SEXUAL PERVERSION; and, a weekly feature in this esteemed journal of higher angst, the PRETENTIOUS BASTARDS' CORNER.

  Over the last several decades the old order seems to have broken down and been replaced not by a new order, per se, but by a general free-for-all, and in some cases a complete turnabout. When Norman Podhoretz arrived at Clare in the 1950s, he was surprised (and pleased) that a lower-class kid from Brooklyn was given a room with a fireplace; was waited on night and day by a gyp, who woke him with a cup of tea every morning at a time of his choosing; and, most shocking of all, was called “sir” by the porters. When I arrived at Clare in the 1990s, I was given a room with a red lightbulb for heat; was woken up in the middle of a dream by a bedder who said she would arrive at the same time every day whether I liked it or not; and, most significantly, was made aware that I should call the porters “sir.” The chickens, my lord, have come home to roost, and they have laid a scrambled egg.

  Citizenship. Without a doubt, the greatest contribution that Oxbridge made to the rise of the British Empire was the production of a steady supply of well-educated, well-mannered men who could steadfastly steer the ship of state. These men, with their common language and upstanding characters, became the backbone of what is known in Britain as “the Great and the Good,” a kind of Who’s Who of Upstanding Citizens. After the Second World War, however, the Empire quickly began to implode. Given the central role that Oxbridge graduates played in the buildup of the Empire, it seems fair to ask what role these distinguished alumni played in its demise. Noël Annan poses the question directly in his book Our Age, a sort of collective biography chronicling the lives of the Oxbridge elite in the twentieth century. Annan, the former provost of King’s College, acknowledges that Oxford and Cambridge did not prepare its students to revolutionize the British economy after the Second World War. He admits that government leaders were unable to diminish seething class tensions. And, after remarking that many of these changes might not have been possible under the economic circumstances of the time, he accepts that Britain did not have the leadership from Oxford and Cambridge the times demanded. Comparing Britain to Germany and France (and perhaps unwittingly thinking of Japan), Annan concludes, “Sadly enough the humiliation of defeat teaches men better than the vanity of victory how to revive and inspire their own dear country.”

  By restricting access to their elite conversation fraternity at Oxford and Cambridge, the Great and the Good had convinced themselves of their own invincibility. Annan says that the greatest achievement of the Oxbridge ruling class was the peaceful dismantling of the Empire; their greatest failure, he asserts, was the decision not to join the European Community at its beginning. The members of that class were able to accept the failings of their imperial past, but were unable to embrace a new vision for the future. In a way, this mirrors what happened at the two universities. The greatest accomplishment of Oxford and Cambridge since the Second World War has been to throw off the yoke of exclusion and accept a much broader cross section of the population; their biggest failure has been their insistence on maintaining a high-minded isolation and thus not encouraging students to play a leading role in forging a new social order in the country. Cambridge bends over backward to teach its students to be good scholars; yet it fails to raise even a finger to encourage these students to be good citizens—of a country in need, a continent coming together, or even the world at large. The result today is an institution—Oxbridge—that takes young people headed for a glorious future and isolates them for a spell within the high walls and sequestered courtyards of its own vainglorious past.

  “Come in, Mr. Feiler. Have a seat. I’m afraid you’re a little bit early today. Your examination will begin in a moment.”

  Richard Langley, M.A., was seated in a rotating black leather chair, thumbing through a copy of my dissertation. His hair was suitably silver, his jacket characteristically tweed, even his tie was stereotypically maroon. But his trousers, to my surprise, were inexplicably denim, and his shoes were shamefully white—sneakers, to be precise. As he sat beneath a faded portrait of Lord Palmerston and tapped his foot on the floor, Mr. Langley looked like a cross between a rare-book librarian and a member of the Mickey Mouse Club.

  On the day after my meeting with Dr. Long, I had printed out two copies of my dissertation, carried them to the Board of Graduate Studies at 4 Mill Lane, and placed them on the counter. Two women stepped forward. “Are you submitting two copies of your dissertation?” the first woman asked, to which I replied, “Yes, ma’am.” “He’s submitting two copie
s of his dissertation,” she repeated, to which her comrade responded by checking the first line of a multilayered form that appeared, from my angle, to have about the same number of pages as my thesis. “Have you signed a supplemental sheet declaring that your dissertation does not exceed twenty five thousand words?” she asked; again I responded affirmatively. “He has signed the sheet declaring that his dissertation does not exceed twenty five thousand words,” she repeated; and again her compatriot made an affirmative mark. This process continued for about two dozen more questions, at which point the second woman signed the form and slid it to the first woman, who signed it and slid it on to me, who signed it and slid it back. “The Board of Graduate Studies now have your dissertation,” the first woman said. “We will pass it on to the Centre of International Studies, which will then pass it on to your two examiners, who will then submit their evaluation. When this is complete, we will notify you that it is time for your viva voce exam. Do you have any questions?”

  “Well, yes,” I said. “How long will that take?”

  She patted me on the hand with a sudden friendliness. “Oh, don’t worry, honey,” she said. “We have plenty of time. We’ve got a whole year to finish.”

  A week later, after escaping to London, I was summoned to St. John’s.

  “We would like to ask you a few questions of fact,” said Mr. Langley after his deputy, Philip Toole, the one with the (Oxford) D.Phil., had settled in beside him and they had dispensed with perfunctory pleasantries. “First of all, you say in your first chapter, page nine, that in 1921 John Maynard Keynes resigned from the government.”

  I nodded my head in agreement.

  “Lord Keynes, Mr. Feiler, was never part of the government. In point of fact, he worked at the Exchequer.”

  I looked at him blankly.

  “Sorry,” I said. “It’s an American mistake.”

  “Indeed,” Mr. Langley replied.

  “Quite,” Dr. Toole agreed.

  “Moving on,” Mr. Langley continued, reading down his list of prepared questions. “On page ten, you state that Prime Minister Lloyd George went to the Paris Peace Conference in 1918 intent on imposing a strict reparations settlement on the Germans.”

  He turned to the page in his copy of my dissertation and nodded ominously at Dr. Toole, who nodded equally ominously back and tapped the offending line in his copy of the thesis in a manner that reminded me of the similar tag team I faced when I turned in my dissertation at the Board of Graduate Studies. I crossed and uncrossed my legs. I loosened the collar of my shirt. Had I made another factual error? I wondered. Was Lloyd George not prime minister? Was this examination going to continue at this pace for another hundred pages?

  “Mr. Feiler,” said the director of the Centre of International Studies, University of Cambridge, who a little less than six months earlier had invited me to a private, chummy lunch in his rooms. “Are you aware that in this country we don’t say ‘Prime Minister Lloyd George,’ we say ‘the prime minister, Mr. Lloyd George’?”

  I mumbled my reply, “I see.”

  “And that reminds me, Mr. Feiler,” said Dr. Toole, showing no resistance to hitting a man when he’s down. “On page eleven you mention that in 1909 a young British journalist named Norman Angell wrote a book called The Great Illusion.”

  I nodded apprehensively.

  “I wonder if you could tell us what exactly you mean by the word, young.” he said. “In 1916, Mr. Angell was thirty-seven years old. Do you consider that to be young, or were you just trying to flatter your examiners?”

  The two of them giggled in delight. I felt my swallow swell up in my throat.

  “Sir, I’m sure I didn’t make it up,” I said. “I must have made an error.”

  The two of them looked at each other. Mr. Langley took off his glasses and rested them on the plastic dustcover of my dissertation.

  “I’m sure you didn’t make it up either,” he said. “But still, I trust that you will want to correct these oversights before we deposit your thesis in the University Library.”

  I sat back in my chair. They returned to their notes. The examination continued apace.

  For the next half hour, as Mr. Langley and Dr. Toole proceeded through their separate lists of errata, peccadilloes, typos, solecisms, and assorted American boo-boos, I began to grow increasingly frustrated—not unlike what I felt the previous year during my admissions interview. Then it was: “Why did you get a B+ in French?” “Did you say ‘please’ when you asked for admission?” Now it was: “Why did you say ‘Central Europe’ when you really meant ‘Southwest?’” “Did you say ‘thank you’ for our considering giving you a degree?” In both of these interrogatory encounters—the bookends of my Cambridge experience—the emperors of the mind seemed more interested in discussing my typing skills and grammatical manners, in pointing out the differences between the “intellectual correctness” of England and the mental barbarism of America, than in eliciting any ideas I might have had that were related to my course of study.

  At the end of my year at Cambridge, I had been feeling disappointed with the general quality of academics I witnessed but pleased with the quality of people I had met and the quality of work I had done. Now, just days after accepting a toast from Dr. Long, that work was being mocked in an examination that wasted almost three quarters of its time wallowing in introductory chapters before even arriving at the central topic of my thesis—the Allied occupations of Germany and Japan. In retrospect, the reason seemed simple: neither Mr. Langley nor Dr. Toole knew much about my topic, nor were they able to find anyone who did. Instead, they were both British historians and, as a result, homed in on the one part of my thesis that dealt with British history, even though this was the one section for which I did no original research. The main body of my dissertation, the main thesis of my work, they completely ignored.

  To be sure, I had made some minor errors in my introduction; I had made some typographical errors in the body of the work. But that hardly seemed worth riding fifty miles from London—nor even walking five minutes from Clare—just to sit through a thirty-minute lecture on the virtues of the English use of the definite article. Rather than viewing the exam as a rite of passage before receiving my degree, I began to see it more as an exercise in humiliation designed to remind me—as well as my friends, who related similar experiences—of the hierarchy within the university community. Instead of treating me as an adult, as they had promised at the beginning of the year, they treated me as a child, reminding me at every turn of their eminent authority.

  “Well, Mr. Feiler,” Mr. Langley said as the examination dragged to its conclusion and he handed me both copies of my dissertation. “I believe you have a little more work to do.”

  “What exactly does that mean?” I gulped.

  “Oh, your degree is not in doubt,” he said. “In fact, your dissertation is quite exemplary—especially your conclusion. If you’ll just take a few minutes this afternoon to clean up those errors, we will notify the Centre of International Affairs, which will notify the Board of Graduate Studies, who will inform the praelector at Clare that you have satisfied the academic requirements for the M.Phil. degree.”

  They shook my hand and turned toward each other. I took my papers and left the rooms. Two days later I received a letter from the University of Cambridge informing me that the Board had approved my degree and that my name had been officially removed from the Register of Graduate Students. I had finally reached the end of the maze. It was time for me to go down.

  EPILOGUE

  GOING DOWN

  Brideshead Visited

  We drove on and in the early afternoon came to our destination: wrought iron gates and twin, classical lodges…, open park-land, a turn in the drive; and suddenly a new and secret landscape opened before us. We were at the head of a valley and below us, half a mile distant, shone the dome and columns of an old house.

  —Evelyn Waugh

  Brideshead Revisited, 1945

 
; “So this is it? You’re going down?”

  The day after receiving my M.Phil. I stepped into the Porters’ Lodge to say goodbye to Terry.

  “Back to America,” I said.

  “Well, then,” he said, rising from his chair and lifting the swinging top of the counter. “Why don’t you come in and have a chat before you go? One more for the road.”

  I stepped behind the counter and for the first time all year sat down beside Terry’s desk. He began to reminisce, recalling the first day that we met and telling me how after thirty years of service he deserved the O.B.E., Order of the British Empire. After a while he worked his way around to a request.

  “I want you to do me a favor,” he said. “When you get back to America, don’t tell people what it’s really like here. Tell them what they want to hear.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “Let me tell you. When I meet people and they find out how I earn my stipend, they are fascinated. But if they knew what the typical undergraduate life was like on a rainy day in January, they would be disappointed. If they knew that the student rolls out of bed in the morning, fixes himself a piece of burnt toast, then hurries off in the freezing air to be ten minutes late for lectures—well, they just wouldn’t believe it. They think we wear the ‘Oxford Bag’—forty-two-inch trousers, bow ties, straw hats—and go punting up and down the Cam singing the ‘Eton Boat Song.’ Of course it’s like that some of the time, but it’s not what we call the normal way of life, fifty-two weeks a year.”