Saying Au Revoir to the City of Dreaming Spires

It is just gone 6pm on an uncharacteristically beautiful summer day, and I have been distracting myself from the discombobulation of leaving by leaning out my window and watching the people hustle and bustle up and down Broad Street. There are tourists in big hats and sunglasses, and there are students in subfusc or dressed for formal halls and Schools dinners, and there is everyone in between, town and gown alike. The sun casts shadows across the storefronts and Exeter College across the road, and I have spent much of today pacing this room, thinking about how much has changed since I first leaned out this window six months ago, jetlagged and disoriented, when the sun set at 4:30 and I was newly arrived, just another American abroad.

The past six months for me have been in all respects about the seductive power of this city. As the days have lengthened, I have felt its hold grow on me, even as my emotions towards it become ever more complicated. In the past six months I have wrestled with eye-to-eye confrontations with privilege and elitism, and as I have become inured to formal dinners so have I spent many hours trying to teach, pushing gently against the current of classism, sexism, and homophobia that has characterized too many of my interactions here. I have spent hours sitting in the Upper Reading Room, hours walking in the Parks or in Christ Church Meadow, hours in this room on Broad Street, hours in the Ashmolean, hours in the chapels of my own and other colleges, constantly feeling past and present collide in uncanny ways. I wrote a 45-page essay about one Oxford-educated Victorian historian who had some things to say about sexual identity, and I got to know people in this city whose secondary education and Oxford degree course mirrored his, who lived where he did and walked the routes he did and felt the things he did. And I spent hours writing essays about the latest developments in historiography; and I spent hours, particularly those of the early morning, drinking and dancing in the ways that I thought people only did in books, before I came to this city.

Oxford is a small world, a tiny enclosed space where you run into in the reading room people with whom you went to secondary school (or who know people with whom you went to secondary school) and people whom you met when you were out dancing the previous weekend. It is a tiny enclosed space in which, you have to think, those who have never left it cannot be blamed for not always remembering that there is a world outside it. For a bona fide city, some number of times the size of the Princeton campus, it can sometimes feel smaller, more insular, more suction-y. Princeton may be its own little world—the Orange Bubble—but for me Princeton has never seduced the way Oxford does. I miss my friends at Princeton, and I miss the Rocky dining hall. But I have never felt its buildings call to me. I have never felt lucky that it is a place whose streets it is my habit to walk. I have never felt it stir the promise of transhistorical connection deep within me that, before I came to Oxford, I had never felt from a place—only from books.

I finished my last Oxford academic obligation a week ago, and since then I have lounged desultorily through my daily routine, going to the library and eating in hall and spending time with my friends. I have floated disorientatedly through my life, not ready to realize that come this Sunday morning, I will have folded my life back up into two suitcases and I will be on a train away from here. I do not do change well, and I do not do leavings and losings well. I have never found it easy to leave Princeton. I am finding it harder to leave here, in a bizarre way that is new, and difficult for me to understand quite yet. When I moved across the Atlantic, I took one step closer to living a transient academic life, and the number of transatlantic connections I have made since then have reminded me that this is what academia is. Thanks to Facebook and the vagaries of academic nomadism, I know that when I say goodbye to my Oxford friends this weekend, I will do so completely confident that I will see them again. I am a historian of Anglo-American intellect and culture, and therefore there is no question that I will be back to England—and to Oxford—by necessity time and again for the next several decades. And yet. There is something about this city—just being in it, knowing it, working with and against its strange customs—that inverts your expectations of what is normal, making it so challenging to return to the real world. This is not like when you leave Princeton and mourn the loss of the embarrassment of riches that is its constant offerings of free food and t-shirts. This is something like how when you leave what Evelyn Waugh called the “city of aquatint,” the rest of the world seems drained of color by comparison.

And so rather than readjusting your sensibilities, being the better person and realizing Oxford’s flaws, knowing that this city’s life is no healthy thing to accustom oneself to, you find yourself drawn inexorably back. What I think I have learned more than anything in the last six months is why Oxford carries the power of image that drew me to it in the first place. It seduces you with the promise that you can still do good things even when you’ve placed style over substance. It is only in this city of strange ways of teaching, learning, and living that “burn[ing] always with this hard, gem-like flame” can be made truly to seem like the only way to achieve “success in life.” I have worked hard, here. But I have also every day averted my eyes from the homeless people whom this city does so little to help, have in the absence of classroom settings neglected to pay my dues at teaching others, have lived for the sake of pleasure as much as, if not more than, for the sake of bettering. All my life I have worked hard. But I have never until this term played hard as well. Oxford has wormed into my consciousness until it has given me permission to do so. And while this may be cathartic, it is not necessarily healthy.

And so when I get on a train early Sunday morning, and I leave the only place I have ever lived where on Sunday morning I wake up to church bells, I wonder if I will cease to hear the siren song that seduces me into a world of surfaces I once only knew through the written word. But somehow—and particularly as my thinking and writing about Symonds evolves over the course of this next summer, year, and academic lifetime—I suspect that I will continue to detect its echo, even a continent away. And I know in my soul, just as I know that I have fallen in love with this otherworldly place, that I will be coming back. The only question that remains is when—and what sort of person I will have become when next I set foot to pavement in the shadow of the dreaming spires.

Bettering as Daily Struggle: A Case Study

It is quarter till 10 on Monday night, and I am curled up in an armchair exhausted. My nerves are frayed; I spent most of today burning with anger. It began before lunch, when, while banging out a mediocre essay for a tutorial on the question “To what extent did nationalism become a mass right-wing movement after 1870?” I realized that not a single book on my reading list was published after 1993, and not a single one was written by a woman. Of course, the first thing I did was look back at the footnotes of the essays I’ve written so far this term: in three essays, each with about 15 footnotes, I’d cited two women, neither of whom was a historian. My essay topics in both General History 1856-1914 and Disciplines, the Oxford history methods class, seem to assume that evolution in historical methods stopped around the mid-90s; General History, in particular, some chronological segment of which all history students have to take, seems preoccupied with dead white men. Of the six essay topics I’ve been given, none lends itself easily to the discussion of anything other than high-political history, and institutions to which women in the years 1856-1914 were denied access. Though I suppose this history is as orthodox as they come, it’s not what I’ve grown accustomed to understanding as the kind of history expected of me on the other side of the Atlantic, with its premium on originality, on primary-source research, on the significance of race, class, and gender, and on giving undergraduates a sense of what it is like to do history professionally today. Granted, this is probably more about Princeton, with its emphasis on independent work, than it is about the U.S.—but General History seems like a powerful step backwards in time. It’s nice to know what it would have been like to read modern history back when the subject was first introduced to this university, I suppose; but at the same time reading history in Oxford in 2011 should not be a time machine in itself. I am sure the whole café heard me at 4:30 this afternoon as, unable to get anything done for the past five hours out of stupefaction at the fact that not one of the seventeen books and articles on my reading list this week was written by a woman or in the past fifteen years, I ranted to my friends about how behind this university is, what a poor sense of what academic history is it is sending to its students, what it must be like to be a female Oxford undergrad for whom unbalanced reading lists like these are normal. I said unequivocally for I think the first time ever that I am glad I am getting my B.A. in the U.S.—that if I were doing it here, I would assuredly not only not be ready for grad school, I might not even think that it was possible for someone like me to be a historian.

And so anger fueled me back to the library from the café, anger made me stare at the computer screen and not be able to focus on the words or the ideas, and anger propelled me swiftly back and forth on my errands, through dinner, through more fierce unfocused staring. The tension didn’t dissipate until just now, when I read a pair of companion pieces in this week’s Princeton Alumni Weekly that respond to the findings of the Princeton Committee on Undergraduate Women’s Leadership about gender inequality on my home campus. Now, as Tony Grafton pointed out in his must-read Prince column today, the situation for women in Princeton, both students and faculty/staff, has gotten only better since 1969; in many ways, it is miles ahead of what I have encountered in the academic conservatism of Oxford. But in the PAW, Christine Stansell, one of the earliest Princeton alumnae, later a faculty member in the Princeton history department, and now a very eminent women’s history scholar at Chicago, reminds us with striking eloquency of the continuities as much as the changes—shoring up the accuracy with which the report from the CUWL pinpointed issues of persistent gender inequality on campus. And my colleague Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, winner of this year’s Pyne Prize (Princeton’s highest undergraduate honor) for her work advancing the cause of feminism on campus, tells an inspiring story of her own hard work to make Princeton a better place, and her belief that as an institution it can become better. Reading the testimonies of Amelia and Prof. Stansell, I felt my anger at my reading list and the essay I spent much of today not writing melt away. Prof. Stansell, who got through Princeton at a time when it was not good to be a woman there and went on to have the kind of professional life that serves as a role model for aspiring historians like me, and Amelia, who has refused to believe that our work is done just because Princeton is a better place for women than it was when Prof. Stansell was an undergrad, reminded me something absolutely critical: that we convince by our presence.

And so if I want not only to be better, but to make things better, I need not to wallow in anger. Instead, I need to collect my thoughts, and I need to write a good, interesting, historically rigorous essay about nationalism. And then I need to walk into my tutorial on Wednesday and inquire of my tutor why my reading list is giving the impression that there are no women historians. And then I need to remember that when I have worked as hard as I can to be the best historian I can possibly be, and am still not satisfied with that, then I will be in a position to be a woman historian who stands before lecture halls of undergraduates, who mentors young women and young men who may or may not want to be historians themselves, whose books break up the monotony of male names on reading lists, who writes into the Princeton Alumni Weekly 40 years from now to remind the readers that our work is not yet done. From each according to her ability, to each according to her needs: I know what I can contribute to changing the culture of academic institutions. Sometimes there is a place in the world for teleologies—such as when day by day, step by step, slowly but surely, I can do my part to bend the arc of progress forward.

Apologia Pro Studio Humanitatum

If you are one of those people who, in the wake of a transatlantic agenda to delegitimize the academic profession and the teaching and practice of “useless” subjects that profession enshrines, have struggled to find the words to suggest that maybe such delegitimization might not be such a good idea after all, Nicholas Dames’ article “Why Bother?” in the latest issue of n+1 is required reading. Reviewing three of the most eloquent and popular recent defenses of “useless” subjects and the academic profession—Martha Nussbaum’s Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, and Terry Castle’s The Professor and Other Writings—Dames ends with this moving conclusion drawn from his words of praise for Castle’s An Academic’s Progress of a memoir:

Richard Rorty once argued that Western culture needs the novel, in order to force us to imagine lives and destinies different from our own. Perhaps the humanities, in their current plight, need to be novelistic again. Not necessarily in their fictional mode, such as the moribund campus novel genre with its essentially demystifying comedy, but the novelistic ability to marshal narratives and details that give us back some sense of why the humanities exist for individuals — how, to put it bluntly, they still rescue lives. One doesn’t enter the academy to become a disillusioned professional (although that will happen along the way). One doesn’t enter it to equip businesses with flexible analytic intellects (although that will also happen). One enters it, shamefacedly and unhappily, perhaps, but enters it nonetheless, in order to devote oneself to something greater than personal resentments — to salvational or transformational modes of thought. Because, put another way, all the grievances that take aim at higher education express real suffering, and that suffering has causes and modes of expression older than most sufferers usually know. The humanities should be, if not their solace, then their weapons of choice. Prig and cynic and naïf she may be, but the newly minted academic knows this — after all, she most likely came from their midst — and one good way of explaining as much is to explain how that knowledge feels. Without such explanations, which might soften resentment into curiosity or sympathy, there may soon be very little left to be embarrassed about.

I read this article—and am writing this post—from a crowded English train, surrounded by the remains of an issue of the Guardian (crossword puzzle completed), a train-station takeaway americano, and a book, stickered with the seal of the Oxford History Faculty Library, that I should really be reading for research purposes. Tony Judt’s words on the decline and fall of the post-privatization British rail system are ringing in my mind as I contemplate the forlorn-looking and extortionately-priced offerings of the refreshments trolley. Dressed in corduroy and herringbone, pecking away at my MacBook, my ticket for Oxford in my jacket pocket, I am nothing if not the intended audience for Dames’ slightly unorthodox answer to the “How do we defend humanists and the humanities in these strange days of declining-and-falling, neoliberal cost-cutting?” And so perhaps this is why I find his the most persuasive gesture towards an answer I have come across in many months, and the closest to articulating my own thoughts on the subject. Dames’ answer to “Why Bother?” is neither strictly utilitarian nor merely tautological. It rests on an understanding of what knowledge and intellectual curiosity are and can do, and why people undertake lives of the mind, that I share and believe with an almost religious fervor. And it comes on the heels of a compelling and compassionate review of a memoir that, as I noted when I read it, comes closer than any campus novel to mirroring my own experience of the young intellectual’s bildung—priggishness, cynicism, naïveté and all.

But what sits uncomfortably about Dames’ answer is that it could not be more ideologically opposed to an argument like Nussbaum’s, defending the humanities for the sake of the good they can bring to society at large. As Nussbaum defines it, this good is tangible, almost quantifiable, and the problem therefore (as those more qualified than I to dispute claims made by Martha Nussbaum have noted) is that her argument doesn’t counter the assumption that value must be tangible, discernible, measurable, or that it can consist (even in measurable terms) of intellectual and spiritual fulfillment. But it is a good that is general, that speaks to the need for the humanities of those outside the university walls as well as in. It explains why those doing the defunding and the devaluing need those whom they are trying to devalue and to defund, and why humanities education and research can be beneficial to those who don’t stay in the academy all their lives. Dames, by contrast, seems rather not to get the joke of Castle’s elegant pastiche of the eighteenth-century novels she studies. It seems as if he invests the role of the plucky young protagonist whose life is changed by books and whose angst is managed by the order of an academic career with heroic importance—and one has to wonder, as it seems one always does, if the psychological satisfaction of those who make lives in the academy is really worth so much as to be the backbone of a humanities-justification argument. One wants to believe that the professor, or even the cynical graduate student, has as much right to love what she does as the member of a state legislature voting for or against her continued employment, and one knows from lived experience that only a teacher who believes in the goodness, and the changing power, of what she teaches is capable of passing that love onto her students. I for one would like to be able to say that Dames resolves the question that still keeps me awake at night: whether it is not just purely selfish to follow a calling which gives me so much pleasure, when I am plainly only one of a few who will benefit from my putative academic career.

We can resolve this dilemma—at least temporarily—but only if we make recourse once again to our battered “for its own sake” tautology. The thing is that I don’t believe in dismissing out of hand any ideas, expressed in expressive language, that I find moving enough to peck out a couple thousand words about on the train. And so I feel inclined to say that Dames’ ideas are valuable to this ongoing conversation—that they humanize the humanists. But the conversation can’t stop with a validation of the motives and the psychological struggles of the privileged few. It needs to find language with which to relate the cosmology of those who think for a living, and those who teach as a vocation, to anti-profit-motive values that involve those in the real world as well.

I’d posit that the humanities offer not just the Terry Castles of this world, but everyone, the chance to decide for themselves what it means to live a good life, and to act in accordance with the principles they have devised. The humanities offer all of us alternative epistemological paradigms, that don’t require an output or an end or a profit. They offer doubt, but they also offer possibility. What they don’t offer is empiricism, equations, or the assumption that there are answers. But for all that, they are no less admitting of possibilities—for a good humanist will recognize the necessity of scientific methods to fill in the gaps in her worldview. The humanities allow us to make ourselves, and our world, as we would have them be. And they do, in the end, promise a place for the seekers after knowledge and the people whose calling is to expand those possibilities of thought and action still further.

Making the case for the humanities and those who teach them today involves preaching the value not just of those apparently special individuals for whom humanistic inquiry lies at the root of existence, but also of those for whom it plays any part, however small. Those who seek to impart their evangelical message to those in the halls of power can couch their requests in the rhetoric of outcomes and utility, or they can do what primary-school teachers—and parents—are doing right now all over the world, and assign their students Harry Potter in an effort to encourage them to read and to recognize not just the benefits but also the joy of reading. They can start small, they can meet their students (first-graders and members of Congress alike) where they are, and then—oh then!—guide them one step forward towards realizing that they had the right answers, the reading-comprehension but also the literary-critical, key inside them all along. Infinite patience and infinite kindness are as impossible things for us to ask of the world’s intellectuals public and private as they are of ourselves (or of our children’s first-grade teachers), but we can certainly start small—with the conviction that what we do, as Dames argues, matters—and from there become slowly and surely better.