The view from Oxford

OXFORD, March 14 — I began my semester at Oxford confident in my prowess as a writer. Having penned for The Daily Princetonian such fascinating stories as 'Students obey hunger late at night' and 'Freshmen seek their place on campus,' I knew that my first Oxford essay would be a masterpiece.

My tutor — Oxford-speak for the faculty member who's responsible for teaching me — disagreed. This was made clear by the prominent "NO" he wrote next to my introduction, and the "Interesting, but in many ways misconceived" near my conclusion. Since essays here are not graded, I took some consolation in being spared the shame of having my failure quantified.

Getting slammed on a paper is, alas, not an experience unique to Oxford. But the way in which I learned of my failure was unlike any experience I have had at Princeton. Rather than being handed my marked-up paper at the end of a precept, to be read and mourned privately, I got my paper at the beginning of my tutorial — the weekly, hour-long meeting with my tutor that forms the core of academic life at Oxford. This meant that for 60 minutes I sat in my tutor's office, receiving a personalized lecture that alternated between Augustinian theology and the most grievous faults of my essay.

Tutorials, though at times intimidating, have been among the most rewarding experiences of my academic career. Each week, a student at Oxford receives a massive reading list — impossible to get through in a mere seven days — and a writing assignment of about 2,000 words. A typical Oxford student's schedule would look astoundingly empty to a Princetonian — even a diligent student spends relatively little time in class — but all that "free time" quickly vanishes down the ravenous maw of the Bodleian Library. The result is that academic life at Oxford is much more individual and independent than that at Princeton.

It's odd that Oxford's academic life seems so foreign to a Princetonian. This academic year marks the centennial of the preceptorial system — a style of learning Woodrow Wilson, a member of the Class of 1879, modeled on Oxford's tutorials. Wilson hoped the new system would lead undergraduates to take ownership of their education. No longer would they sit in front of professors, regurgitating the contents of lectures and textbooks in order to earn their grades; instead, they would focus on "the reading which they should do for themselves," namely tracts by leading experts in their fields. Precepts, led by faculty members especially hired for the task, would "give the undergraduates their proper release from being school boys."

Precepts today bear little resemblance to either Wilson's vision or his Oxford model. Rather than forming the core of the University's academic life, as they were supposed to — and as Oxford's tutorials still do — precepts have become an afterthought, for students and preceptors alike. Today, precepts supplement lectures; at Oxford, it's the other way around. Wilson had hoped precepts would invigorate undergraduate studies; though I've attended some excellent precepts, led by dynamic and dedicated preceptors, I've also endured classes that began as soporific exercises in clock-watching and concluded with students' frantic efforts to protect their participation grades.

I don't mean to idealize Oxford. I've talked with enough students here to know that tutorials can be just as uninspiring as precepts. I also recognize that Oxford's system has its costs. According to John Robertson, chairman of Oxford's history faculty and a tutor at St. Hugh's College, most history tutors spend eight hours per week or more meeting with students for tutorials. This is on top of marking each student's essays, delivering lectures and supervising graduate students — who, incidentally, play a much smaller role in teaching than they do at Princeton.

Tutors also do much of the work handled at Princeton by fulltime administrators: tutors run the admissions process, for instance, as well as the Oxford-Princeton exchange program. With all of these academic and administrative duties, I wasn't surprised to read in the Cherwell, a weekly student newspaper here, that Oxford professors have about twice the workload of their counterparts at Harvard or Princeton. This, of course, leaves less time for research though tutors are still expected to publish regularly.

The differences between Oxford and Princeton run much deeper than tutorials and precepts. Oxford educates its undergraduates in a single discipline: I am thought of not as a history major but as a historian. At Princeton, on the other hand, even engineering students have to fulfill distribution requirements that force them to move beyond their specialty.

There are major structural differences as well. Oxford is broken up into 46 semi-autonomous colleges and halls which play a much larger role in Oxford life than Princeton's residential colleges ever will. While providing a sense of community and tradition, they can also bring to mind the United States when it was still under the Articles of Confederation.

These major differences mean that comparisons between Princeton and Oxford aren't always useful. They are different universities, with different histories and different ideas of what it means to educate an undergraduate. But since Princeton imitates Oxford in many ways — from its architecture to its colleges — it might be helpful to look across the pond as we look back on a century of Princeton precepts.