TWILIGHT OF THE DONS

Elites in crisis.

In the mid-20th century, writes Kidd, a historian at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, the academics of Oxford and Cambridge universities forged alliances with powerbrokers and policymakers to enhance their impact on British rule. Oxbridge teachers (or “dons”) sometimes came from families of wealth and privilege. They were not an intelligentsia raised on brains and diligence, but an elite of ease. The author writes, “There was aristocratic resistance to a proliferation of middle-class swots”—eggheads. But soon, smart kids from grammar schools filled tutorials. Government grants became the currency of success. New provocations from Europe and the U.S. challenged complacencies of class and sensibility. The humanities and social sciences embraced overarching theories designed to explain human behavior and linguistic understanding that, by the by the mid-1960s, challenged, in one intellectual’s phrasing, the British “obsessional interest in particulars and an exaggerated suspicion of generalization.” Student protest threatened the unquestioned authority of the professoriate. A social gap between the teacher and the student emerged, such that, to at least one don, undergraduates looked like “Attila’s Huns.” And, by the 1980s, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s policies largely dismantled Oxbridge’s hold on British intellectual life. Thatcherism undermined the finances of ancient Oxbridge colleges. It shattered the conventions of “academic etiquette.” By the end of the 20th century, Americans were coming in droves to study and teach. And some of the most successful Oxbridge scholars were moving to the U.S., lured by high salaries and little teaching. This book offers a prehistory to the “‘disabling lack of confidence’ [that] has become the global hallmark of the twenty-first century university.” It provokes us, now, to ask and answer: What is the new place of an intellectual elite in a world of doubt and dissent?

A rich history of Britain’s academic leaders and their fall from grace and power.