Bill and friends' excellent adventure; Rhodes scholars may know a lot. But they didn't learn it at Oxford - President-elect Bill Clinton attended University of Oxford in the United Kingdom - Cover Story

Washington Monthly, Dec, 1992 by David Segal

I used to work with a young English woman named Tracy, a freshly minted graduate of Oxford University who spoke with one of those British accents that make you want to put on a tie and sit up straight. Tracy once told me a story about her alma mater and a professor--or a don, as they are known in England --whom she suspected was not paying much attention as she read her essays aloud during their weekly one-on-one tutorials. To find out if she was right, she randomly inserted the word "ferret" in three places in one essay, which was about John Donne and had nothing to do with animals, weasels or otherwise. Her don, as she suspected, did not say a word. So the next week, Tracy upped the ante by inserting 12 "ferrets" into her essay; the don didn't so much as shift in his seat. The pattern continued until the term ended, by which time Tracy had installed a few zoos worth of gratuitous "ferrets"--72 of them by her count. Had he bothered to listen, the don would have heard what sounded like the ravings of a lunatic: "The problem ferret is that the Romantics ferret ferret could not countenance ferret. . . ."

This story came to mind back in October when George Bush engaged in an improbable bit of pre-debate posturing by claiming to be underschooled ("You know, I don't pretend to be the world's greatest debater. I didn't go to Oxford.") and again when Bush tried to paint Oxford as a hot bed of fancy ideas about "social engineering" ("My opponent is drawn to these views. He and a number of his advisors studied them at Oxford in the late sixties."). If Bush couldn't figure out whether to compliment the university or charge it with sedition, it hardly seemed to matter. Dukakis and Harvard may have been wounded four years ago by Republican rabble about elitist "boutique" ideas, but Bill Clinton and Oxford weathered Bush's last round of arch populism virtually unscathed.

In fact, Bush's campaign demagoguery, Clinton's eventual triumph, and the imminent arrival of a whole slew of Oxonians at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue have only increased the cachet and glamour of the gothic spires. From the regents and dons of the university you could almost hear the happy tinkling of sherry glasses toasting a new generation of the best and the brightest in the White House: economic advisors Robert Reich, Ira Magaziner, and Saul Benjamin, and young turks George Stephanapolous, Bill Halter, Atul Gawande, and Bruce Reed. Post-graduate stints at Oxford were the favored path of success for upstart politicos and the overly ambitious long before Clinton ever set foot on British soil, and long before the two Supreme Court justices and five senators now toiling in Washington got their Oxford sheepskins. But more than ever, a two or three year jaunt to the Mother Country is the confirmed ticket to punch now that the university has finally sent an entire crew to the varsity team.

"Oxford! The very sight of the word printed or sound of it spoken, is fraught with most actual magic," says Max Beerbohm's narrator in Zuleika Dobson, and you can't blame him. It is hard to argue with Oxford's beauty, its mystique (just ask George Bush), or its track record in producing scholars, politicians, and entertainers of world-class caliber. Oxford, after all, gave us Adam Smith, Shelley, Samuel Johnson, Oscar Wilde, Graham Greene, penicillin, and one third of Monty Python.

The school has also produced its share of American luminaries. But our national crush on Oxford has less to do with its alumni than with our Bridesheadish image of the place: its aura of tweedy erudition, its dewy green fields, gargoyles frowning from the turrets of medieval buildings, and all those pipe-smoking lads in white pants and thick sweaters debating the merits of Gibbon and Eliot. But like a lot of crushes, this one is partially founded on misconceptions. As I discovered during my own two years there in 88 and 89, our hoary vision of Oxford contains some kernels of truth. But I also learned what my friend Tracy already knew: To the extent that a university's reputation is derived from the quality of education it provides, Oxford is overrated. And most Americans studying there couldn't care less. For them, the main challenge is finding ways to stay amused. With its star rising as fast as its most famous alum, the time has come for an unsentimental look beyond the myths.

Don yawn

The heart of the Oxford education--for British undergraduates and for the many American grad students who do two-year versions of undergrad degrees --is the tutorial system. It sounds at first like the perfect antidote to America's overstuffed and impersonal lecture halls: lock yourself in a room with a learned prof and go mano-a-mano for an hour on the topic of the week. The session begins with the reading of an essay you have written, leaving the bulk of the time for chin-stroking and discussion. At the end of the hour, your don offers up a new subject, a list of books to pore over, and sends you off to write another cogent synthesis of another topic. It sounds great, and sometimes it is. With a dedicated don and a curious student, it's hard to conceive of a more intense learning experience. Some Oxford alums get downright soggy recalling individual tutorials.