International Exchange

At which elite school do students wear robes to exams, classmates toast each other with Madeira wine before precept and students conduct elaborate rituals when the clocks go back? No, it's not Hogwarts, but Oxford, Princeton's peer across the pond.

J.K. Rowling discovered the perfect setting for Harry Potter's trials and tribulations in Oxford University's dreaming spires. And Oxford students who choose to come to Princeton are surprised and amused when they see how their British alma mater has inspired its Ivy League counterpart.

"I like to picture Americans chiseling stones off an Oxford college in the night and carrying them home," said Liz Chatterjee '08, one of 12 Oxford undergraduates currently studying on campus as part of the Oxford-Princeton Exchange Program. "The rumor is that Whitman College is going to have a moat. I think that's the funniest thing ever."

Appearances, however, can be deceptive. Despite their similar architecture, Princeton and Oxford are worlds apart, say students who have experienced both campuses. Though Princeton originally modeled itself on Oxford, today its educational system, work ethic and culture are radically different.

Oxford is arranged around colleges, each with its own unique character, faculty and societies. Students live in their college, normally for at least two of their three years of education, and take classes there. Each college controls its own finances, and most would look upon Princeton's $13 billion endowment with envy. Oxford students at Princeton marvel at the immaculately kept and well-funded facilities. While some Oxford colleges ooze cash donated by wealthy alumni, others teeter on the brink of bankruptcy. Unlike at Princeton, colleges are largely autonomous and make their own admissions decisions, though Oxford has long been considering moving to a central system.

Life at any Oxford college revolves around a number of revered institutions: tutorials, the college bar and "formal Hall," the Oxford dining experience. This last may seem heavy on ceremony to those Princetonians accustomed to wolfing down sushi at Frist.

Students must normally don black robes known as "sub fusc" when they eat in Hall, as Oxford dining rooms are called. In the older colleges, Hall is a huge wood-paneled chamber, often with stained glass windows, set with long tables and benches and lit by glowing lamps. Oil portraits of former College Masters peer down at undergraduates as they consume their fill of English fare. Tutors are seated on a raised dais called High Table, and to be invited to join one's professors there is a rare privilege.

"Before the meal, all the kids were sitting down. The college master and tutors filed in, then everyone stood up and the master said something in Latin," said Laura Melahn '07, describing her first meal in Hall at Merton College, where she did biochemistry research. "I was amazed."

Then there is the famous Oxford tutorial system, where students meet in pairs with a college professor to discuss an essay or a problem set. Oxford students, who are used to regular direct contact with prominent faculty during weekly tutorials, give Princeton's precept system less than rave reviews.

"You don't get the dialectic that emerges from a tutorial, where comments bounce off each other, rather than putting your hand up because you have to," said George Hodgson GS, who graduated from Pembroke College in Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) in 2002.

The Oxford crew at Princeton also seems to agree that Oxford has more of a culture of open debate in tutorials, while the approach in Princeton's precepts is more supportive, sometimes to a fault. "If you step on someone else's point here, it's seen as knocking their marks down," explained Jon Gartside '07, an Oxford engineer currently at Princeton.

Oxford tutors are notoriously eccentric; Chatterjee's history tutor once asked her if she had picked up any vices while she was at Oxford, and when she demurred, he produced a snuff box with a flourish and demonstrated how to snort tobacco. Another history tutor liked to share his collection of Marie Antoinette pornography — a trait that would be regarded with horror, not indulgent humor, in America.

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Princeton's faculty, Rohan Mukherjee GS found, had a presence at Oxford too: "A lot of the texts we studied in PPE at Oxford were by Princeton professors, like G. John Ikenberry and Andy Moravcsik. Here I'm in their classes," he said.

After a hard day of studying, Oxford students can swap gossip and set the world to rights in the college bar over a pint of warm beer. The overall result is "a great community feel," said Scott Moore '08, who studied at Worcester College for a semester. He also liked hanging out in the college grounds: "I miss lying out on the lawn, pretending to read and waiting for someone to say, 'Let's go punting.' "

Princeton's combination of residential colleges for living and eating clubs for socializing is, needless to say, very different. Forbes probably gets closest to recreating the unique Oxford college atmosphere. "Because everyone lives in the same building, they go down and eat breakfast in slippers. That's the only thing remotely approaching the Oxford college vibe, but I like the fact that, at Princeton, I meet so many other people," Chatterjee said.

Students who have studied at Oxford are divided on exactly how college bars and the lower drinking age — it's 18 there, not 21 — affect student life. One student who has studied at Oxford and asked to remain anonymous for fear his comments might damage his future career, said "I think there's a much bigger drugs scene at Oxford than at Princeton." He described the parties of Oxford's Piers Gaveston dining society, where "the idea is about drinking, getting trashed and having sex in a field ... One year, the dress was bondage gear," he said.

Academically, Oxford's typically British three-year system, where students are admitted to specialize in just one subject, is also in sharp contrast to Princeton's four-year liberal arts education, with its compulsory core requirements in math, science and literature. Oxford students lament being forced to choose a single subject so early in their lives and embrace the opportunity to branch out that Princeton offers. Princeton is also much less academically conservative, they say.

Students also dislike the intensity of Oxford's system. Oxford culminates in "Finals," a series of eight three-hour exams, which determine a student's final grade and can make or break career chances. "People have massive psychological trauma," said Chatterjee. "Before exams last year, some people needed medication."

Mukherjee agreed. "Oxford was putting all of your eggs in one basket," he said. "It's a one-shot game."

Just as Oxford and Princeton students are united in detesting the vicissitudes of the grading system, they are both fond of their school's wild and wacky traditions.

On May Day every year in Oxford, students returning from all-night parties wearing black tie and glamorous dresses once threw themselves off Magdalen Bridge into a dank tributary of the Cherwell River. Like Princeton's Naked Olympics, this tradition has now been banned. Others, however, still flourish. At Merton College, when the clocks go back, students walk backwards around the quadrangle drinking port, supposedly to preserve the space-time continuum. (Physicists have license to groan.) Compare that to the time each year at Princeton when hardcore drinkers test their stamina by consuming 1 beer per hour for 24 hours on "Newman's Day."

Overall, Oxford students say, their time at Princeton has helped them to understand the culture of their transatlantic cousins. "I really like Americans — they're open, welcoming and friendly," said Lucy Thorne '07, who is doing biochemistry research at Princeton. "I knew it was going to be different here, but I didn't know how different. I think more people should try it."