The Experience of Oxford, Part 1

The Experience of Oxford, Part 1

Christopher Bogart

I don’t want these entries to sound like a travelogue or a diary of my own particular experiences in Oxford. Personal remembrances tend to lock the reader out of the experience by seeming to say “This is what I did. Don’t you wish you were there?” I want to write something more inclusive, something that would say “This is what awaits anyone who goes to Oxford.” I know that some of the details will have to be based on personal experience by necessity, as I would not be able to share what you could see and experience without having been there myself. However, I will try to be “inclusive” rather than exclusive. And I will try to be informative as well as inspirational.

To begin with, Oxford University is the third oldest university in the world, and the oldest English-speaking University. Founded thirty years after the Norman Invasion in 1066, it really began to grow in 1167 when King Henry II forbade English students from attending the University of Paris. Today it consists of 38 self- governing colleges and 6 permanent private halls. Unlike most American universities, Oxford is based on weekly essay-based tutorials supported by lectures and laboratory classes. In other words, education is placed squarely on the shoulders of each of the students. Students do not apply for one college or another, but to the university, and is placed in a college, not based on the major, but on the profile of the student. You could think of it as being almost similar to the Sorting Hat at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter books. It is the home of the Rhodes scholarship, one of the most prestigious awards in the academic world. While each college has its own library (the Oxford Union, a debate club on the Oxford campus, has three of them), the university library is the Bodleian Library, one of the most unique libraries in the world, and that includes one of the original Gutenberg bibles, an original Shakespeare first folio and the oldest extent copy of The Iliad by Homer. The collection is housed in five buildings, including the Radcliffe Camera. It also has a number of museums that include the world-famous Ashmolean Museum, The Museum of Natural History and the Pitt Rivers Museum as well as a number of art and science galleries and The Botanic Garden. The university has produced graduates that have been come presidents or prime ministers all over the world. President William Jefferson Clinton was the first American president to be a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford.

The last paragraph only skimmed the surface of the unique attributes that Oxford possesses, but it is not the whole story of what makes Oxford so special. Oxford is not only a university, but it is a town as well. The university and the town are not separately sectioned, but are merged into one entity called Oxford. And while in the beginning of its history, the two elements, the “towns” and the “gowns” fought so violently that many students fled to found a new university, Cambridge, these two elements together, working in harmony, form the beginning of the Oxford experience. Only a few miles outside Oxford sits Blenheim Palace, the historic seat of the Dukes of Marlborough. In Adolph Hitler’s plans for the conquest of Britain, Blenheim was marked as Hitler’s residence, and the colleges of Oxford would be the seat of the new Third Reich England.

So much for the background or the broad view. In the next post, I would like to go into that uniqueness that makes visiting Oxford such an amazing experience.