Content area
Full Text
The Decline of Privilege: The Modernization of Oxford University, by Joseph A. Soares. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. 322 pp. $50.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-8047-3488-7. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 0-8047-4819-5.
Since its founding in the twelfth century, Oxford University has been one of the leading institutions of higher learning in England, Western Europe, and beyond. We are first reminded of this by Joseph Soares in the Introduction of The Decline of Privilege: "Over the past hundred years more high-level [British] politicians and civil servants have passed through Oxford than through all other universities combined" (p. 5). For Chaucer's clerk, for the leadership class from the ends of the far-flung British Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and beginning in 1904, for hundreds of Rhodes Scholars from over 300 American colleges and universities, it has been unrivaled for the study of the humanities. Moreover, the assumption of the responsibility of Oxford (and Cambridge) to direct the social life of undergraduates has from the beginning been a guiding principle in the development of American higher education.
Soares wistfully describes the transformation of the Oxford of tradition and lore. He much admires the Oxford of 1900; there is much about the Oxford of 2000 that distresses him. Many who would compare the old and the new, including the great poet and novelist Thomas Hardy, who wrote Jude the Obscure, would see matters quite differently. Although recognizing the snobbishness and retrograde political and social ideology of so many Oxford graduates and dons, Soares gives credence to the contention that its distinctive "collegiate life" provided not only "book learning and opportunities for research," but also "a social life that fostered tolerance and civility" (p....