The long boat game

[John Skelton]

Indeed SA. In 834 posts I have never brought the subject up, but as with one's natural mother, when one's alma mater is attacked, maliciously and in many cases with astonishing ignorance, one does get a little bit tetchy. Anyway, it's all a bit of a isn't it?

Does one allow oneself to think at all critically about one's alma mater, or is anything other than a doting and admiring gurgle, combined with an off-hand assumption of superiority, beyond the pale?

One only wonders, because one has mixed feelings about one's own. For the little that they, or it, are worth in this context, of course.

Do any of the Oxford or Cambridge graduates here have any reservations about the universities? Because I am friends with Oxford and Cambridge graduates who most certainly do.

[teamsaint]

If the moderation process works, then standards can be regarded as equal within subjects across the sector.All Universities, I would assume, have a vested interest in equal standards.

I regard my degree as the equal of any from any other institution (whether more prestigious or less) at the same grade.

I have never seen any evidence that levels of academic achievement at each degree classification are any higher at Oxbridge, and I don't believe that they are.

Nobody yet has seen fit to argue that all those students obtaining firsts elsewhere weren't "worthy" of a place at the hot house that we are told is Oxbridge.
There is a lot of self perpetuating myth in my opinion. Oxbridge students may have pressurised work schedules(as do many other students), but they also have the huge help of a great deal of personal attention from the tutors. I wonder where levels of achievement might go with that kind of help in other universities? don't think they would be downwards !!

[Vile Consort]

To limit myself to the Cavendish Laboratories, and starting with the structure of DNA, might I suggest the work of the following Nobel prizewinners:

Watson and Crick (Biology 1962), John Kendrew (Chemistry (1962), Dorothy Hodgkin (Chemistry 1964), Brian Josephson (Physics 1973), Martin Ryle 1974), Anthony Hewish (Physics 1974), Neville Mott (Physics 1977), Philip Anderson (Physics 1977), Pjotr Kapitsa (Physics 1978), Alan Cormack (Medecine 1979), Aaron Klug (Chemistry 1982).

I could add from the Footlights of the same period: Douglas Adams, Clive Anderson, Alexander Armstrong, John Bird, Christopher Booker, Eleanor Bron, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Peter Cook, David Frost, Stephen Fry, Graeme Garden, Bamber Gascoigne, Germaine Greer, Eric Idle, Clive James, Hugh Laurie, John Lloyd, Jonathan Lynn, Miriam Margolyes, Rory McGrath, Ben Miller, Jonathan Miller, David Mitchell, David Nobbs, Trevor Nunn, Des O'Connor (yes!), Bill Oddie, Sue Perkins, Griff Rhys Jones, John Shrapnel, Tony Slattery, Richard Stilgoe, Emma Thompson, and Sandi Toksvig.

Maybe someone will say "...but what did they do?" but I haven't got the time (and I haven't mentioned anyone from Oxford)...

What have the Romans ever done for us?

[teamsaint]

i don't think anybody doubts that Oxbridge does admit and produce some talented people.

The opportunities, both for admission and afterwards are skewed by very powerful networks......and this is the heart of the problem .

The footlights has produced some great talent, but you wonder how much great talent slips through the net elsewhere........

[Beef Oven]

I wonder how tiny the proportion of people following this thread is that would agree with me (excuse the clumsy sentence).

Like many other threads in this forum, we seem to be indulging in a seemingly very 'British' passtime - bashing the talented, cutting down tall poppies and envying the excellent and successful.

We are only comfortable when mediocre institutions and people prevail. I believe this to be on account of our low self-esteem.

Take sport; we hated Chris Eubank and Joe Bugner, but loved losers like our 'enery (Cooper) and Frank (try ducking) Bruno; we never took to the unprecedented success of David Beckham anything like the way we took to the fundamentally pathetic (old sense of the word) George Best.

Can we take a leaf out of the French book? They adore excellence and promote it at every turn, be it their language (see Rex Harrison, EU signage etc), their top universities or, for example, their cuisine.

The boat race news item was just too delicious for us and off we went!

I suspect that it is only within this forum that Oxford and Cambridge aren't viewed as the best universities in Britain and the boatrace isn't seen as a smashing bit of semi-serious traditional fun!

I am surprised that we have not had a boat race rotation suggested, with next year's contest being a three-way between London Metropolitan, Southbank University and the Rohampton Institute of Higher Education (or whatever is the name of the university it has become).

Storm the Winter Palace!! Kick over the statues! Tooting Popular Front for ever!

[MrGongGong]

The footlights has produced some great talent, but you wonder how much great talent slips through the net elsewhere........

Oh, I don't think it "slips through the net" always

The Bourges competition is the equivalent of the Tchaikovsky piano competition for Electroacoustic composition, Prix Ars Electronica is like Wimbledon for electronic music (and i'm not even an ex student of Birmingham !)

http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/facilities/BEAST/awards.aspx

chill Beefy ...... get out the triangle CD and relax

its more a question of "best for what" rather than a "one size fits all" approach........... Interesting that the documentary about the choir at Salisbury had an academic from Bangor talking about the music ! A second class train fare from Oxford is much cheaper

[Nick Armstrong]

I wonder how tiny the proportion of people following this thread is that would agree with me (excuse the clumsy sentence).

Like many other threads in this forum, we seem to be indulging in a seemingly very 'British' passtime - bashing the talented, cutting down tall poppies and envying the excellent and successful.

We are only comfortable when mediocre institutions and people prevail. I believe this to be on account of our low self-esteem.

Take sport; we hated Chris Eubank and Joe Bugner, but loved losers like our 'enery (Cooper) and Frank (try ducking) Bruno; we never took to the unprecedented success of David Beckham anything like the way we took to the fundamentally pathetic (old sense of the word) George Best.

Can we take a leaf out of the French book? They adore excellence and promote it at every turn, be it their language (see Rex Harrison, EU signage etc), their top universities or, for example, their cuisine.

I agree with you entirely, Beefy

[Beef Oven]

I agree with you entirely, Beefy

I knew the proportion would be tiny - cheers anyway Caliban.

[teamsaint]

I think Beefy's comments really just tell us about our perspectives.

Beckham. Love and admired by the many , from where I stand. I suspect he is much more admired than george best , although most people would say that Best was the more talented player. And Beckham was a "winner" too.

As for Mediocre institutions....well perhaps that also tells us about perspective . There are plenty of places producing excellence that do not have the prestige of the elite institutions....but of course, its not in the interest of the powerful alumni of Oxbridge to concede this.

Britain has changed. The people I mix with, and work with, are all for excellence and achievement, but too often we are Lions led by donkeys. Hands up all those working for a company with an under worked , over paid Oxbridge chairman who expects everybody else to work for a tenth of the pay and 3 times the hours that they do, while they make poorly judged decisions from behind the safety of a highly polished oak table.
Example....the city is full, (and I know some) of ex public school boys with a 3 years army commission under their belt, and nothing else in the way of qualifications.. Now these highly paid jobs are hard to come by for most people, and then we wonder why our banks got in such a mess.

[Panjandrum]

I suspect that it is only within this forum that Oxford and Cambridge aren't viewed as the best universities in Britain and the boatrace isn't seen as a smashing bit of semi-serious traditional fun!

Can't you just hear our friends across the pond calling for the abolition of Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Cornell and the rest of the ivy league? No? Neither can I. I wonder why that is?

They'd think we were all off our ****ing heads if they could read the posts on this thread. Cultural institutions which are icons of world learning and achievement, and one of the (very) few things of which the UK can be proud.

[teamsaint]

Can't you just hear our friends across the pond calling for the abolition of Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Cornell and the rest of the ivy league? No? Neither can I. I wonder why that is?

They'd think we were all off our ****ing heads if they could read the posts on this thread. Cultural institutions which are icons of world learning and achievement, and one of the (very) few things of which the UK can be proud.

er, but who is "proud" of them?
the same people who went to them .The people who control the media, and government. Nobody much that I know is proud of those places.They just wish that they, or their children, could have opportunities as well funded as those afforded to those who are lucky enough to go there.
The things we could be proud of, like the NHS, are being destroyed by people who enjoyed the benefits of a free oxbridge education.
Thats nice, isn't it ?

[Panjandrum]

I was wondering if anyone could name, say, three specific things to have emerged from Oxford and Cambridge that we have all benefited from in the last fifty years? This is not to argue that they are bad or should be closed down but to set their reputations in a realistic and practical context. (By contrast, Radio 3 potentially benefits all - its is open to all)

Oxbridge is open to all. You just have to pass the admissions test.

Ok, try a total of 65 Nobel Prizes, the most of any university in the world, 13 more than any university in the world.
In 2009, the marketing consultancy World Brand Lab rated Cambridge University as the 50th most influential brand in the world, and the 4th most influential university brand, behind only Harvard, MIT and Stanford University,] while in 2011, Cambridge ranked third, after Harvard and MIT, in The Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings.
The university has 114 libraries. The Cambridge University Library is the central research library, which holds over 8 million volumes and, in contrast with the Bodleian or the British Library, many of its books are available on open shelves, and most books are borrowable. It is a legal deposit library, therefore it is entitled to request a free copy of every book published in the UK and Ireland. It receives around 80,000 books every year, not counting the books donated to the library. In addition to the University Library and its dependent libraries, every faculty has a specialised library, which, on average, holds from 30,000 to 150,000 books; for example the History Faculty's Seeley Historical Library posess more than 100,000 books. Also, every college has a library as well, partially for the purposes of undergraduate teaching, and the older colleges often possess many early books and manuscripts in a separate library. For example Trinity College's Wren Library has more than 200,000 books printed before 1800, while Corpus Christi College's Parker Library posesses one of the greatest collections of medieval manuscripts in the world, with over 600 manuscripts. The total number of books owned by the university is about 12 million.

Cambridge University operates eight arts, cultural, and scientific museums, and a botanic garden:

The Museum of Archeology and AnthropologyThe Fitzwilliam Museum, is the art and antiquities museum. Admission is free.

Cambridge biologists include Francis Crick and James Watson, who worked out a model for the three-dimensional structure of DNA whilst working at the university's Cavendish Laboratory along with leading X-ray crystallographer Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin. More recently, Sir Ian Wilmut, the man who was responsible for the first cloning of a mammal with Dolly the Sheep in 1996, was a graduate student at Darwin College. Famous naturalist and broadcaster David Attenborough graduated from the university, while the ethologist Jane Goodall, the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees did a PhD in Cambridge without having a first degree.

Distinguished Cambridge academics in other fields include economists such as John Maynard Keynes, Thomas Malthus, Alfred Marshall, Milton Friedman, Christopher Bliss, Joan Robinson, Piero Sraffa, and Amartya Sen, another former Master of Trinity College. Philosophers Sir Francis Bacon, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Leo Strauss, George Santayana, G. E. M. Anscombe, Sir Karl Popper, Sir Bernard Williams, Allama Iqbal and G. E. Moore were all Cambridge scholars, as were historians such as Thomas Babington Macaulay, Frederic William Maitland, Lord Acton, Joseph Needham, Dom David Knowles, E. H. Carr, Hugh Trevor-Roper, E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Niall Ferguson, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr and lawyers Glanville Williams, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, and Sir Edward Coke.

Religious figures at the university have included Rowan Williams, the current Archbishop of Canterbury and many of his predecessors; William Tyndale, the pioneer biblical translator; Thomas Cranmer, Hugh Latimer, and Nicholas Ridley, all Cambridge men, known as the "Oxford martyrs" from the place of their execution; Benjamin Whichcote, the Cambridge Platonist; William Paley, the Christian philosopher known primarily for formulating the teleological argument for the existence of God; William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, largely responsible for the abolition of the slave trade; leading Evangelical churchman Charles Simeon; John William Colenso, bishop of Natal, who developed views on the interpretation of Scripture and relations with native peoples that seemed dangerously radical at the time; John Bainbridge Webster and David F. Ford, theologians of significant repute; and six winners of the prestigious Templeton Prize, the highest accolade for the study of religion since its foundation in 1972.

Composers Ralph Vaughan Williams, Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, William Sterndale Bennett, Orlando Gibbons and, more recently, Alexander Goehr, Thomas Adès and John Rutter were all at Cambridge. The university has also produced members of contemporary bands such as Radiohead, Hot Chip, Procol Harum, Henry Cow, and the singer-songwriter Nick Drake.

Artists Quentin Blake, Roger Fry and Julian Trevelyan also attended as undergraduates, as did sculptors Antony Gormley, Marc Quinn and Sir Anthony Caro, and photographers Antony Armstrong-Jones, Sir Cecil Beaton and Mick Rock.

Acclaimed writers such as E. M. Forster, Samuel Pepys, Charles Kingsley, C. S. Lewis, Christopher Marlowe, Vladmir Nabokov, Christopher Isherwood, Samuel Butler, W. M. Thackeray, Lawrence Sterne, Eudora Welty, Sir Kingsley Amis, C. P. Snow, J. G. Ballard, Malcolm Lowry, E. R. Braithwaite, Iris Murdoch, J. B. Priestley, Patrick White, M. R. James and A. A. Milne were all at Cambridge.

Poets A. E. Housman, Robert Herrick, William Wordsworth, John Donne, Alfred Tennyson, Lord Byron, Rupert Brooke, John Dryden, Siegfried Sassoon, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, John Milton, George Herbert, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Gray, Edmund Spenser, Cecil Day-Lewis and Sir Muhammad Iqbal are all associated with Cambridge, as are renowned literary critics F. R. Leavis, Sir William Empson, Lytton Strachey, I. A. Richards, Raymond Williams, Harold Bloom, Terry Eagleton, Stephen Greenblatt and Peter Ackroyd. Furthermore, at least nine of the Poets Laureate graduated from Cambridge.

Actors and directors such as Sir Ian McKellen, Sir Derek Jacobi, Sir Michael Redgrave, James Mason, Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Graham Chapman, Simon Russell Beale, Tilda Swinton, Thandie Newton, Rachel Weisz, Sacha Baron Cohen, Tom Hiddleston, Eddie Redmayne and David Mitchell all studied at the university, as did recently acclaimed directors such as Mike Newell, Sam Mendes, Stephen Frears, Paul Greengrass and John Madden.

Is that enough for you, or do you still believe that Radio 3 has contributed more to the life of the country?

[Beef Oven]

I think Beefy's comments really just tell us about our perspectives.

Beckham. Love and admired by the many , from where I stand. I suspect he is much more admired than george best , although most people would say that Best was the more talented player. And Beckham was a "winner" too.

As for Mediocre institutions....well perhaps that also tells us about perspective . There are plenty of places producing excellence that do not have the prestige of the elite institutions....but of course, its not in the interest of the powerful alumni of Oxbridge to concede this.

Britain has changed. The people I mix with, and work with, are all for excellence and achievement, but too often we are Lions led by donkeys. Hands up all those working for a company with an under worked , over paid Oxbridge chairman who expects everybody else to work for a tenth of the pay and 3 times the hours that they do, while they make poorly judged decisions from behind the safety of a highly polished oak table.
Example....the city is full, (and I know some) of ex public school boys with a 3 years army commission under their belt, and nothing else in the way of qualifications.. Now these highly paid jobs are hard to come by for most people, and then we wonder why our banks got in such a mess.

This is exactly the sort of mentality that I am referring to!

[teamsaint]

open to everyone?Really?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/dec/06/oxford-colleges-no-black-students

http://www.thecompleteuniversityguide.co.uk/news/black-students-miss-out-on-oxbridge-(1)/

Guess it depends what you mean by open.
I am no professional statistician, but Its a lot more open for white kids from Westminster school, really.

[Beef Oven]

Can't you just hear our friends across the pond calling for the abolition of Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Cornell and the rest of the ivy league? No? Neither can I. I wonder why that is?

They'd think we were all off our ****ing heads if they could read the posts on this thread. Cultural institutions which are icons of world learning and achievement, and one of the (very) few things of which the UK can be proud.

Exactly Panjy! Only in this forum!