Looking for Class

by Bruce Feiler

  XXI

  GRADUATING

  Port and Prejudice

  As soon as the University authorities had settled in Cambridge, they built their schools and drew up a syllabus for the students. Everything, the University said, was to be done by degrees. That is why things change so slowly at Cambridge.

  —C. R. Benstead

  Alma Mater, 1944

  The garden on graduation day was a bouquet of blooms—rosy round mums with blush on their cheeks; dandy lean dads with lions on their ties; and budding young siblings with wide iris eyes. The bouquet of blooms was a strange menagerie—goose-necked tourists with cameras quacking, batty students with winged gowns flapping, and owlish dons with their pupils squinting as their students flew away. With parents, porters, and packs of French schoolgirls looking on from the bridge, the graduands of Clare College gathered in the garden, processed slowly through Old Court, and disappeared into the marble belly of the Senate House, where they were asked to bend down on one knee, grip the pinkie of the vice-chancellor, and humbly receive their honours degrees. After the fleeting ceremony, the newly suffixed graduates emerged from the building and returned en masse to Clare, where they were allowed for the first time in their careers to walk unaccompanied on the grass.

  “Are you sad to see them go?”

  I stood underneath the main archway of college watching the students picnic in the court and discussing the day’s events with Terry, who was dressed for the occasion in his three-piece regalia with a freshly brushed bowler crownlike on his head. He gripped his drooping pipe to his chest like a teddy bear.

  “They’re good kids,” he said. “They always are.”

  Only undergraduates are allowed to participate in the degree ceremony held in June, and, in any case, I wouldn’t be eligible until after my oral exam. Earlier that day I had walked over to the Sidgwick Site to meet Dr. Long. Our fourth and most important meeting of the year had been shorter than any of the previous three. “Well done,” he had said, as he handed me my thesis, “Winner Take Some: The Politics of Reparations in Japan and Germany, 1945-1948.” It was 109 pages long, and, as instructed, had footnotes at the foot of the page, a bibliography at the back, and was written as best I could entirely in English English. “Better than most. Quite good, actually. I never expect much from these M.Phil. dissertations, but this one was quite readable. I’ll be curious to hear what your examiners say. They ought to be quite pleased.” He reached toward his cupboard. “A glass of port to celebrate?”

  I looked at Terry as I recalled the incident and realized I had probably received more one-to-one tuition from him than anyone else.

  “I understand that the fellows of Clare had a meeting last evening and decided to allow visitors into the college today.”

  “That’s right,” Terry said. “And just between you and me, those fellows are a bunch of bloody fools.”

  “That’s pretty strong language,” I said.

  “We are in the business of education,” he declared. “And for one day a year I think we should be considerate to the third-year students who are graduating. We should at least keep the tour groups out of the college. We are not Notre Dame or the Eiffel Tower. We are an institution of higher learning.” He nodded his head defiantly, then added, “Oh, I told them what I think.”

  “At the meeting?”

  “Oh no! They don’t invite the likes of me to those meetings. It’s a true port-and-sherry affair. But I said to one of the fellows today that tourists don’t respect our traditions. Why, I remember a time last week. I went up to a man in the garden and asked him to leave. He told me he was a member of the university. ‘You’re lying,’ I said to him. ‘If you’re a member of the university, then I’ll put feathers in my bum and fly around the garden. You’re no more than a bloody tourist.’ Well, he took exception to what I said. And then he got violent. It’s always the liars who get violent. ‘Young man,’ I said, straightening my back and smoothing down my tie. ‘I don’t believe that a member of this university would strike a porter. I will ask you again to kindly remove yourself from the premises of this college.’ He spit on my feet as he left.”

  The following day I went walking in the garden and discovered the limits to the college’s open-door policy. Simon, who would soon be returning to Japan for the “long vac,” was hosting his father’s boss from Tokyo and asked me to come along and translate. The boss, Mr. Horie, who was visiting his son in London, wanted to take a tour of Cambridge and drove up the M-11 for the day with his wife, daughter-in-law, and two-year-old grandson. After gathering for tea in Simon’s rooms, we headed down the path toward town, stopping briefly for a detour in the Fellows’ Garden, which showed no signs of the Grand Marquee that had shaded its lawns a week earlier.

  By chance we were the only people in the garden that morning. Although tourists are requested to stay out, many still climb over the slagging garden chain at the entranceway. Members of the college are allowed in at all times. After admiring the flowers and taking a few snapshots of the bridge, the six of us wandered back toward the path. As we approached, I noticed one of the porters, a tall, thin man with an aquiline nose, walking briskly across the bridge in our direction. I had never seen him outside of the Porters’ Lodge in Old Court.

  Continuing on, we stepped up the low stone stairs onto the pathway that led from Memorial Court to the river when the porter came to a huffing stop directly in front of me and said, with tilted head and raised eyebrows, “Are they with you?”

  I looked at the kid on my shoulders, his grandparents a step behind me, and his mother, along with Simon, several feet behind them. “Yes,” I said. “Is that all right?”

  “Well, uh…I guess so,” said the porter. “You see, I just received a phone call from the master, who said he saw some Japanese in the garden and that I should get them out.”

  I looked at him with disbelief—was it worse that the master had made such a call or that he had just repeated it to me?

  “Is there a problem?” asked Mr. Horie.

  “No,” I said. “There isn’t a problem. It’s just time for us to leave.”

  During the time that I lived in Japan, my friends and I used to play a game. The game involved trying to answer a riddle: “If you put a Japanese, a Chinese, and an American into one room—and assume there were no language barriers—which two would become friends?” For those most familiar with these three cultures, the answer was nearly unanimous: the Chinese and the American. After my year in England, I began to turn the question around: “If you put a Japanese, a Briton, and an American into one room, which two would become friends?” To me the answer had become surprisingly clear.

  Slowly, reluctantly, and to my great astonishment, over the course of my year at Cambridge I began to see great similarities between the British and the Japanese. I resisted these impulses at first, thinking them the product of the fact that I had spent most of my years outside of America living in these two cultures. Later, when I felt more strongly and first mentioned these ideas to friends—British, American, even German—my friends not only summarily rejected this notion, but acted gravely insulted, as if I were somehow committing a heresy by comparing the land that produced Shakespeare with the land that produced the Walkman, the country that fought off the Nazis with the country that attacked Pearl Harbor. Chastened, I retreated and rethought. Still, after numerous more coincidences and encounters, including the one in the Clare garden, I became convinced that comparing Britain to Japan was far more valuable and far more suggestive than comparing either with the United States.

  To begin, the two countries share a remarkable number of structural similarities. Both Britain and Japan are island countries, slightly removed from their continental mainlands. They are roughly the same size (Japan has 50 percent more land than the United Kingdom, but it’s mostly uninhabitable; its population is twice as large) and have roughly the same weather (in Japan, unlike Britain, the sun does shine at times—at least on the flag). Moreover, bo
th are constitutional monarchies, with symbolic royal families and bicameral parliaments, and both are leading industrial nations that within the last century have both seized and lost colonial empires. Both require driving on the left.

  Beyond these structural similarities, the two nations share an even larger number of underlying cultural resemblances. Both Britain and Japan, for example, have largely homogeneous populations (Britain has fewer than 5 percent nonwhites within its borders; Japan has fewer than 1 percent non-Japanese) and both have unifying national religions (the Church of England and Church of Scotland are both state institutions; Shinto, formerly a state religion, now melds with Buddhism into a national creed). Both have languages with similar emphases on courtesy, hierarchy, and indirec-tion, and both have diets with similar, simple, nonspicy foods (just as most Japanese could not imagine an evening meal without rice, so most Brits are bereft without potatoes: in Britain, a day without potatoes is like a day without rain). More important, both countries boast a powerful national pride that verges on the xenophobic. Both Japan and Britain, for example, have gone out of their way in recent decades to avoid immigration, integration, and other ways by which alien elements might intrude on their national heritage. In many ways it was not surprising that the master of Clare would think the Japanese had invaded his garden. In the year that I was a student at Clare, the college had no blacks, no Indians, and only one half-Japanese, half-English student in an undergraduate population of over three hundred. If Cambridge, one of the leading centers of liberal education in the country, is that exclusive, imagine the corridors of power.

  While these cultural similarities were everywhere apparent, one episode more than any other convinced me of the uncommon affinity between Britain and Japan. In early spring I was waiting on a train platform in London with an American friend. We were reading down the row of adverts along the Tube tunnel when we came across one by British Rail. IF YOU SEE SOMEONE GETTING CAUGHT WITHOUT A TICKET, the ad said, WOULD YOU LOOK AT HIM? THINK ABOUT IT. Later, inside the train, we saw another ad in the same series. HAVE A GOOD LOOK AT YOUR FELLOW PASSENGERS. IF YOU'RE CAUGHT WITHOUT A TICKET, THEY’LL HAVE A GOOD LOOK AT YOU.

  “What are they trying to say?” my friend asked. “I don’t understand.” His comment forced me to reread the slogans, which I realized were similar to many I had seen in Japan that appeal directly to one’s sense of public embarrassment, or shame. In Britain, although it is a Christian culture, this sense of shame is rampant. Embarrassment, I had often teased Simon, is the national religion. Whereas an American transportation authority would probably use the threat of prison—a policeman with a giant gun, a police dog with a vicious bite—the British politely encouraged people to purchase a ticket so that they might avoid being looked at by others. TRY DISAPPEARING INTO A CROWD WHEN THE WHOLE CROWD IS STARING AT YOU, said the last of that series, which I spotted on a kiosk at Cambridge. JUST THINK WHAT YOU SAVE WHEN YOU BUY A TICKET. You save your image, the adverts suggested, you save your reputation. In short, you save face.

  Having discovered such a strong cultural affinity between Japan and Britain, I was left at the end of my year with one nagging question, which was similar to the thought I had when I began my journey: namely, if these two cultures are so alike, why is Japan at century’s end on the rise, and Britain at the same time in retreat—or at least in remission from irreparable decay? Again, I suspect that the answer to this question has partly to do with structural reasons. Britain, which was more industrially advanced at the start of the twentieth century, was on the winning side of both world wars and, as a result, believed it had little reason to change course. Japan, on the other hand, was literally and psychologically destroyed in the Second World War and thus forced to remake itself. Also, the diverging paths of these two countries have partly to do with social differences. Britain has never expressly overturned its outdated class structure, but instead has allowed its classes to tear one another into pieces in a bloodless civil war. Japan, meanwhile, explicitly outlawed its feudal class structure earlier this century and has moved to create a new model of a communal state.

  Unlike what some people suggested to me, neither of these trends was predetermined: it was not somehow written in the stars or passed down through the blood that Japan would pull itself together in the twentieth century or that Britain would pull itself apart. Rather, these outcomes owe more to government policies and national attitudes toward their country’s one dominant and inexhaustible national resource: people. Britain and Japan, in the final analysis, have vastly different perspectives on the role of education in their land. At the elementary level Japanese students go to school more hours every day and more days every year than their counterparts in Britain. At the secondary level Japanese students continue their education longer and in greater numbers, with proportionally twice as many people staying in school until they turn eighteen. And at the highest level more Japanese students pursue further education and more companies demand it: 40 percent of Japanese students go on to university or college, while in Britain the number continues to languish at the lowest level among major industrial nations: 17 percent.

  While in Japan I learned to evaluate the role schools play in the success of a country not solely in terms of the “Three R’s”—reading, writing, and arithmetic—but in terms of a broader gauge, what I call the “Four C’s”—curriculum, character, communication, and citizenship. This same measurement of how schools prepare their students for their role in life can be applied to higher education as well. While it is not possible to understand the entire, multicontinental, cross-generational rise and fall of the British Empire by examining merely its chief brain trust, the Oxbridge colleges, these institutions have played a central role in British society and thus can provide clues to its current condition. As my Blue Badge Guide to Cambridge might have put it: Oxbridge is England’s past; the past is the present; and the present holds the key to the future.

  Curriculum. The curriculum is the pride of the Oxbridge system. Students are admitted to a college after demonstrating proficiency in only three or four areas, and then, once they arrive, they narrow their already diminished course to one subject. The university argues that this system produces experts rather than amateurs. My experience at Cambridge convinced me otherwise. In the area of history, for example, which was my major at college, undergraduates at Cambridge may know more history than their counterparts in American universities, but they are certainly not better historians. If anything, one could argue that Cambridge student-historians are worse off than their American counterparts since they have less knowledge of parallel and perpendicular fields, such as literature, psychology, even maths. Instead of producing broad-minded thinkers, the Oxbridge system more often than not produces narrow-minded specialists. After twenty-one years of the Great British Education, for example, Ian the Classicist could easily read ancient Roman texts in the original, yet he could hardly keep score in a game of darts. Simon the Engineer could factor equations and equate factorials even after four pints of lager, but he had no books—no books!—anywhere in his rooms, only papers and worksheets and music magazines scattered about his four empty bookshelves.

  Even more than narrow-mindedness, the Oxbridge curriculum has engendered a greater problem: an antibusiness bias. For centuries the English elite maintained a cool attitude toward industry because it was considered “dirty,” and this prejudice was reflected in the country’s leading intellectual retreats. In the nineteenth century fewer than 10 percent of Oxbridge students came from business families (compared with 42 percent at Harvard), and only 4 percent went into business after leaving. Thus, even those who came to university predisposed to business were turned off to the idea during their tenure. Cambridge, much more than Oxford, moved to embrace the practical sciences in the twentieth century, but still a royal commission found in 1922 that “science teachers [at Oxbridge] are too few, their accommodations insufficient, their students lamentably small, and the output of work less than shou
ld be expected from universities promising such great appointments.” The number of students going into industry rose briefly in the 1930s, but dropped off quickly after the war. Today, fewer than 8 percent of Oxbridge graduates go into industry (compared with two-thirds in Japan), with the majority becoming doctors, lawyers, accountants, or consultants. In effect, by creating an academic elite who don’t wish to clutter their minds, Oxford and Cambridge have produced a ruling class who don’t like to use their hands.

  Character. One of the things that surprised me most while reading about Cambridge was how many famous people who spent time there actually did not like it. “I was not for that hour,” wrote Wordsworth, “nor for that place.” A few, such as novelist and don Kingsley Amis, did not like the setting. “[Cambridge] is a town whose most characteristic images—King’s Chapel, say, at dusk in a thin mist—seemed cold and lonely, a setting more appropriate to an unhappy love-affair than the bustling exchange of ideas.” But most, such as E. M. Forster, complained that the students were too elitist. Many of the boys coming up to Cambridge, he once wrote, have “well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds, and underdeveloped hearts.”

  Today the student population at Cambridge is no longer drawn from an exclusive social set. Yale, with its high-priced tuition and rarefied standards, seemed far more elitist than Cambridge. But Cambridge students still seem far more conscious of status. This attitude is best exemplified by the pressure surrounding exams. It is a Cambridge tradition—and a surefire mark of a shame culture at work—that exam scores are posted publicly outside the Senate House and, for third-years, are printed in the newspaper. Officially, Cambridge gives each student one grade based on the cumulative results of his or her year-end exams. These grades are divided into three classes: Third Class (for a few stragglers), Second Class (for the vast majority), and First Class (for the top 10 percent). In practice, however, most faculties divide the Second Class degrees into two categories, 2.1 and 2.2. Moreover, they divide these categories into even more arcane divisions, such as a “high 2.1” or a “low 2.2.” The result of all this academic gerrymandering is widespread confusion and deep-seated anxiety.