Incidents in an Educational Life: A Memoir (of Sorts)

Two: Three Years at Cambridge and Three Years in Europe

two Three Years at Cambridge and Three Years in Europe 12 The end of history For my first term and a bit at university I was a history major. One emerging problem with this choice though was that I found myself reading the same books as I had in my final years at school, such as Tanner ’s Constitutional Documents. Another was that the first-year history students were a large class (some 200–300) and the lecturers to these large classes were—despite their considerable scholarly reputations— for the most part rather ponderous and stolid in their deliveries. Third, I did not get on well with the weekly tutor I had been assigned. He was a graduate student with a stammer who lived in a damp, gloomy basement . The Cambridge system, at least at that time, was for an individual hourly meeting with the tutor, where we would discuss the essay that the student had written. This essay might have been handed in a day or so earlier, or might be first read aloud by the student. For our sixth meeting or so, I had gone to the main university library and found some fairly obscure stuff on my given topic, something to do with peasant life in mediaeval France. As a result, for the first time in life, I had 26 included some footnotes in my essay because this esoteric practice, I had noted, was what many real historians did. So I was reading aloud my essay, and then had to say, “There’s a footnote here and this is what it says”. At which my tutor stopped me and expostulated, “Swales, as a first-year student of history, you shouldn’t be indulging in footnotes. It’s just pretentious at this stage”. I was more upset by this attack on my amour propre than I let on, and resolved to explore possibilities other than history. In the end, I now reflect, it was as much as anything the contrast between Roger Lockyer’s tutorials and those I was now experiencing that impelled me to look elsewhere. So, a little later, I had a chance meeting at dinner at Queens’ College with a student I didn’t yet know who told me he was reading Moral Sciences. The student explained that this was what most universities called philosophy, that there were only about 20 students a year, that you were expected to think rather than read, that most people’s favorite was Wittgenstein, who had died just a few years previously as a professor of philosophy at the university, and there was a Moral Sciences Club, where one evening a week you could hear famous philosophers give papers and hear philosophical arguments. I was hooked. Looking back, I think the individual tutorial system as I experienced it was largely a waste of time for both parties, and this despite being occasionally offered a small glass of sherry. Indeed, it was only in my third and final year that I learnt to enjoy and anticipate these weekly encounters. As happened later, it would have been better—and much less a waste of money—to join up three or four students (especially in the first two years) so that we could better share and compare what we had been thinking. As a history or philosophy student, I was typically cast as the examinee or interviewee without much opportunity for extensive dialogic exchanges. Talking later to friends and acquaintances who had taken degrees at about that time at other universities, I concluded that Cambridge’s antique system was too much of a hit or miss affair. Frankly this wasn’t good enough in a university where lectures were not compulsory, where there was no continuous assessment of any kind, and where everything depended on the final examinations that took place only once a year in early summer. The system, such as it 27 was, depended on recruiting bright young men (and much fewer young women) and allowing them to basically educate themselves by wide reading and by participating in the numerous cultural events that Cambridge had to offer. Many years later, I read an article by a senior British academic in which he argued that universities should be measured by what they had contributed in terms of “value added” to undergraduates between entry and exit. This was, in effect, “How far had they come from where they started?” Since...