Essay on my Odyssean Education

A Comedy of European Manners

In the academic year 2023-2024 I swam in the opposite direction to most of my countrymen and became a European. While completing my Masters degree in History I spent a term at three different universities: Leiden, the Sorbonne, and Oxford, each the oldest in their respective country.¹ The advantages of such an experience ought to be immediately obvious; the disadvantages equally so to anyone familiar with the frustrations of university bureaucracy. To navigate three different university bureaucracies is an enterprise that calls for skilful co-ordination – and the programme that I was on, with seven others, was skilfully co-ordinated by the Europaeum.

The Europaeum was set up under the auspices of Roy Jenkins in a moment of post-1989 European triumphalism. After 31 January 2020, it has become one of those tragic and freakish things: an institution embedded in Brussels, one might even say parasitic on it, utterly devoted to Europeanish ideas while nonetheless based in Britain. (Oxford and St Andrews join the Geneva Graduate Institute as the only Europaeum member universities outside the EU.) Its current chair is Chris Patten: I don’t know whether this is an ex officio responsibility of the Oxford chancellor, but in any case either Peter Mandelson or William Hague would fit it like a glove. Its mission is political as much as intellectual. Oxford is accustomed, thanks to Rhodes Scholarships and popular culture, to looking across the Atlantic in search of peers and competitors. The Europaeum seeks to counterbalance this, pulling Oxford eastwards and keeping it in some way connected to the world’s other genuinely ancient universities.

Having sampled a buffet of different university systems, having mixed my Heineken with champagne and chased it down with summery Pimm’s, I shall now rank and compare my experiences. What follows is a series of recollections loosely stitched together, reconstructed from contemporaneous notes, some of which have previously been tweeted. It is hoped that they will illustrate the present state of higher education, especially as pertains to the study of history.

I. Leiden

Leiden felt like less of a jump from my undergraduate days at Cambridge than I had anticipated: the landscape is flat, the temperature chilly, the people Puritan. Gowns are less frequently worn, but at least there are gowns; drinking societies play a role in student life, though ‘Minerva’ seems to be rowdier than the Pitt Club. Yet unlike Cambridge, which keeps a respectable distance from London, and where intellectual inquiry is consequently allowed to proceed unharried by worldly affairs, Leiden has been swallowed up whole by the nearby metropole; it is in effect a suburb of the Hague, by far the dullest city in Western Europe. Some Leiden facilities are based in the Hague, and many students live there; but my accommodation, and the buildings I frequented, were thankfully in the town proper (the History faculty is housed in an unattractive building, but no worse than Cambridge’s Sidgwick Site). The Netherlands is small enough that one can get to all the good bits from Leiden within an hour: Amsterdam and Utrecht, if one craves urban life or the scent of cannabis; Haarlem and Delft, if one craves cultivation and tranquillity. It was a pleasant base of operations for four months – but four months was probably enough.  

The university historically enjoyed a stellar reputation, distinguishing itself principally in philology, Oriental studies, and law (Grotius remains its most cherished son). Nowadays, however, it is little more than a finishing school for eurocrats. The majority of the postgraduate student body is international, about which it would be hypocritical for me to complain; but I can complain that everyone was studying subjects like ‘international relations’ and ‘European studies’. Even the History faculty, which boasts considerable and wide-ranging talent, has a ‘European studies’ bias, which it indulges with a whiggish enthusiasm. In Leiden the history of Europe, as Macaulay said of England, is emphatically the history of progress: the arc of history is long, but bends towards integration. Euroscepticism, as a historical phenomenon, is treated pathologically, an irrational aberrance for historians and social scientists to explain away.

Two episodes of global significance occurred during my time at Leiden, both driving home my impressions of its political complexion. The first was 7 October, which unfolded while I was spending a day in Utrecht sorting out my residence permit. The Leiden students, it seemed to me, were awfully quiet in the proceeding weeks and months. None of the mayhem that captivated other universities – Columbia, Cambridge, and, in the Netherlands, Amsterdam and Rotterdam – seemed to touch it. Aspiring bureaucrats had little use for ceasefire marches and Instagram graphics. The ‘politically-engaged’ student at Leiden, who elsewhere might have been trespassing on university lawns or disrupting examinations, kept an anxious eye on his or her internships in Brussels or Strasbourg or the Hague. Never before had I encountered a group of young people so reticent about ruffling feathers.

The second was the surprise victory of far-right firebrand Geert Wilders. Walking around Leiden on the morning of 23 November 2023 reminded me of my tube commute into town on the morning of 24 June 2016: shellshocked faces, pale and blotchy-eyed, stalked every café, street corner, and lecture block. This was, I realised, the great living nightmare of the eurogentry; and there I was, in its very creche, there I was to bear witness to it. (A common refrain in the Dutch media at the time, curiously untilled in the international coverage, was that there was a connection between the two events: no 7 October, it was implied, no Wilders victory. I was and remain sceptical, for Primat der Innenpolitik reasons, but something, other than a standard polling cock-up, had to explain the late Wilders surge.)

This political background-noise, I now contend, bred a certain insecurity within Leiden’s humanities faculties. To a greater extent even than in England, one hears constant talk about ‘relevance’. In class we read about medieval ecology to divine messages, Thunberg-style, about anthropogenic climate change; we read books about elective monarchy in early-modern Europe to attain eternal truths about democratic representation. We treated the great works on the history of nationalism – Gellner, Anderson, Hobsbawm, all that lot – almost as a vaccine; and murmurings of ‘Brexit’ or ‘Trump’ were never far away. These anxieties are generated by proximity to power, and power of a certain sort. The eurocrat has no real interest in higher learning, in research: he is interested first and foremost in its political uses. The Leiden historian, when he brushes shoulders with the ‘international relations’ and ‘European studies’ people, is always expected to provide a reason for his vocation that is to their own satisfaction. How is history to bring about social change? What has history to offer the present day? How will history build up your LinkedIn network? How will history help you to get a job in Brussels?

It is striking, in fact, that the field in which the Dutch really lead the way is the ‘history of the humanities’: the standard textbook on the subject was, unusually for such things, originally written in Dutch (Rens Bod, De vergeten wetenschappen: een geschiedenis van de humaniora). I fell in with this crowd at Leiden, as I ended up writing my dissertation on historiography in twentieth-century Germany. As an intellectual phenomenon it is perhaps to be understood as the product – and a fortuitous one – of this same aforementioned insecurity: Dutch humanities research needs to prove its worth, and it is hoped that the ‘history of the humanities’ will uncover some forgotten and robust justifications for these loftier pursuits of the mind. Such efforts as these, I hope, will lead Leiden’s history school out of the morass, allowing it to cater to consumer tastes while resisting the drift towards fully becoming a Sciences-Po-style mandarin academy.

One thing that must be adduced to Leiden’s credit is the seminar. Like most of my undergraduate contemporaries at Cambridge, I tended to regard the seminar as essentially a waste of time: the real learning, as we all knew, took place in the supervisions, and all else was a pointless distraction. But at Leiden students did the reading, and there was a fair amount of it. We discussed it productively, with some scope for provocation and debate. In that regard, Leiden is a worthier inheritor to nineteenth-century styles of history-teaching than Oxbridge is; but Oxbridge never went in for it very much in the first place.

To these warmer words I append a frustration, and one that comes, to adopt the lingo, from my ‘position of privilege’. It is unideal to teach and research history in a setting where (almost) everyone is using English as a second language. I do not mean to impugn the linguistic abilities of my peers and teachers, which were, across the board, excellent. But studying in a second language has some peculiar knock-on effects. When we wrote essays they were expected to adhere to a rigid form: there was no room for personal style. ‘This is How to Write an Essay’, the professors declaimed: the rules were never to be bent. Sometimes I was taken back, unhappily, to GCSE: ‘Point, Evidence, Evaluation’. Partly this, too, was downstream of the prevailing bureaucratic mode, in which history is to be written as administrative grey-literature (‘This paper argues…’). It is not surprising, therefore, that one of the many boxes we were required to tick in our essay introductions was to defend the subject’s relevance (ideally with an unsubtle nod to present-day concerns). I am grateful to my supervisor for many reasons, not least that he allowed me to have some fun in my writing.

But finally a note, a self-deprecating one, on my own languages. I arrived in Leiden, armed with my phrase-book, with some ambitions of learning Dutch. The first blow came at the Starbucks in the train station, when the barista answered my Ik wil graag in English without hesitating. The second came the following day when I tried again, at a different café – only this time it seemed that the barista (Spanish? Italian?) didn’t know much Dutch either: even the natives were placing their orders in English. So I gave up – save one hobby, reading Huizinga in the original. I got myself an attractive coffee-table edition of Herfsttij and managed a page or so a day, strenuously piecing it together from my English, German, and smattering of Old English. I still haven’t the faintest idea how to pronounce any of it.  

II. Paris

Of the three universities that I attended this year, Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne was the worst. This should not be surprising: ‘the Sorbonne’, whatever the achievement of its branding, objectively belongs on a lower rung than Leiden and Oxford. I am, I fear, breaking an omertà in writing this: for there is an unspoken compact among international students at the Sorbonne to keep up the myth, when we’re back in our home countries, that it’s a prestigious university. The French themselves are wise to it: they know well that a université is worth less than a grande école or even (topsy-turvy world) a polytechnique. But it’s a myth that finds particular success in Britain, so accustomed are we to the assumption that, pace Alan Bennett, the smell of cold stone correlates with learning. And the Sorbonne, or rather Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne – if you squint, and make the necessary excuses – is even older than Oxford…

My time at the Sorbonne disabused me of those British assumptions, while reinforcing prejudices of another kind. The French intellectual, it would be safe to say, isn’t beating the allegations. Libraries were poorly stocked on English and German-language materials; solipsistic historiographical debates occurred as though in a parallel universe cut off from the international ‘republic of letters’. At the Sorbonne the garrulous professor speaks ex cathedra to a passive, unresponsive audience. The student in Paris, unless he is barricading the streets, is seen but not heard. Our opinions are not desired, nor even solicited as a means of confirming our sentience. This has an upside, viz. that we can get on with whatever we like. My laptop provided small mercies in the three-hour-long seminars, as the tiny windowless room filled up with verbiage and vape-smoke. French-language lectures and seminars seemed to me no better than the English-language ones (but did, at least, supply me with good listening practice); and every French student I encountered was dissatisfied by the quality of their education.

The Sorbonne building is stunning, though parts of it have fallen into disrepair, like an overlaboured metaphor in a Houllebecq novel. Its interior is something of a farce. It is shared between two notionally independent universities (the Sorbonne was carved up in the aftermath of the 1968 student riots, and these successor institutions have been morphing and splitting like amoebas ever since); predictable problems ensue, regarding, for example, room names. The other building I frequented, where I had my weekly French lessons, was Tolbiac – a horrid skyscraper whose only redeeming feature is its proximity to good Vietnamese restaurants. Here the students are of a more restive sort. The spirit of ’68 lives on, and Palestine posters adorn the walls.

I lived, with the rest of my Europaeum cohort, in the Cité Universitaire in the fourteenth arrondissement, not far from the Périphérique (which one should never, ever cross). Most of the others there were on Erasmus programmes. Erasmus, it is sometimes remarked, has a touch of the eugenical about it: the goal is to sow Estonian fields with Spanish seeds and let European Man spew forth. For all its talk of increasing empathy and cultural understanding, I often wondered if it was doing the opposite. This was most clearly seen in the strong social incentives for people to play up their national stereotypes. The Italians in my building pretended to have an aneurysm over broken spaghetti or afternoon cappuccinos; and even I pretended to have stronger feelings about tea than I really do. I respected my teetotaller Irish friend for his stout refusal to perform the monkey-dance.

The French students, for their part, are an interesting bunch, far more angsty than their Dutch (or English) counterparts. To the uninitiated they can scramble the antennae. One grows accustomed in Britain to recognising certain types off scant visual cues. If you meet a student in Britain with a nose piercing and a tote bag, you can reconstruct within seconds their beliefs about anything. When you meet a similar character in France, it’s a toss-up whether they’re voting for Mélenchon or Bardella. Either way, what can be discerned about them is their generic restlessness, their frenzied support for political upheaval of any sort. I saw students of all stripes whipped into a frenzy over the plight of the striking farmers (we got regular emails about this from student bodies, typically signed off with a ‘syndicalement’). This puzzled me: surely the interests of city-dwelling students, who want cheap food, are at odds with the agricultural interest? I posited this to a left-leaning French friend and was swiftly admonished: this was a rank, utilitarian, Anglo-Saxon perspective. Not a day goes by when I am in France, as I have noted before, that I don’t thank God for Sir Robert Peel.

No such national solidarity, however, could be sensed in the seminars themselves. In one typical moment our Nestor once proclaimed that we all have more in common with the European intelligentsia than with our fellow countrymen. Not so, I thought: surely I have more in common with a Yorkshire farmer than an Italian professor; the minor point of language alone guarantees that, and that’s before we get to a common stock of culture, media, and so forth. But everyone murmured in agreement. Behold the Idea, clearly distilled. 

III. Oxford

As befits a Cantabrigian, I had unconsciously laboured under the old assumption that Oxford is stuffy, less academic. Perhaps I picked this up from Gibbon (‘port and prejudice’) or Macaulay (‘in this hot competition of bigots and slaves, the University of Oxford had the unquestioned pre-eminence; the glory of being farther behind the age than any portion of the British people is one which that learned body acquired early, and has never lost’), or Jude the Obscure. This, it turns out, was false and unfair. Oxford is alive. Every lecture and seminar I attended was worthwhile, every supervision immensely stimulating; almost every day there was an evening talk worth going to. Pub chat was of a high calibre. Leiden had aspects of this too, if only you knew where to look for it, but most students in any case would rather talk about internships or ‘geopolitics’; in Oxford a sturdier intellectual culture was out on display for all to see, and not partaking in it was a choice.  

Palestine encampments dotted the city, like Potemkin villages with more tents than people. They encircled the RadCam beneath the watchful gaze of All Souls; they squatted on the Pitt Rivers lawn, too. I had only civil encounters with them, and wish them all the best. Mysteriously they seemed to dissipate not long after the end of term, as though the allure of a ‘long vac’ trumped the call to political justice. I have only one anecdote to share on the matter. At a wine and cheese night at another college I struck up conversation with an American chap on the Israel-Palestine Question (on which my own views are fairly idiosyncratic). We attracted a small audience. The conversation swerved to South Africa, as these things are wont to do: suffice to say that he despised the ANC for not being radical enough. He expressed beliefs about Hamas which are, to my knowledge, illegal in Britain; but since I am not in favour of those laws, I was in no position to complain. It was, as far as I could tell, a civil encounter. But then, at the end, I stuck out my hand, and he, like Harry Potter to Draco Malfoy, ostentatiously refused to take it. Such characters, I wager, probably exist in every university in the western world. But Oxford might be unique, or close to unique, in possessing a student population of such soundness-of-mind that, in refusing to shake my hand, he roundly lost the argument in the eyes of our modest audience (insofar as his support for Hamas hadn’t cost him their support already). I don’t know whether Oxford students care about ‘free speech on campus’, but I think they do care about fair play.  

I spent my term at Oxford at Corpus Christi, an old, small college with a robust Classical and philosophical tradition. The lion’s share of my dissertation was written in the Corpus library, and the remainder at the Bodleian or Rad Cam. Oxford in the summer might be the loveliest place to live and to think: cheapish pints at the Lamb and Flag; long walks around Port Meadow; and practically unlimited access to all the research materials one could reasonably ask for. There is much about Oxford, and indeed Cambridge, that one might take for granted, or regard as the hallmarks of an ‘elite education’, that is actually specific and peculiar. We do not need to screw our faces too much in order to decipher what sets it apart: the key variable is intense competition in admissions. (Competition, I should add, that is strictly academic; none of that X-Factor sob-story ‘write Black Lives Matter 1000 times’ that you get across the pond.)  

Humanities research at Oxford seemed to carry itself with greater ease than elsewhere as a result; although ‘relevance-speak’ creeps in here and there, these anxieties tend to be brushed aside as though to say: either one has the bug, or one does not, and the former need make no apologies to the latter. Oxford may feel the need to apologise for the intensity of its demands on students, in the form of ‘wellbeing teas’ run by chaplains uncertain of what to do in our secular age, and alpacas at the Bodleian, but it has not yet walked it all back.   

Let me therefore indulge in a bit of Borisian bluster. Britain really does have ‘world-beating’ universities – or at least two of them. This was not foreordained. One hundred years ago, Oxbridge would have been spoken of in the same breath as Leiden, the Sorbonne, and certainly German universities like Heidelberg and Göttingen. Now they are only really spoken of (despite the Europaeum) in the same breath as the elite American universities; and here too they hold the edge, as the Ivy Leagues capitulate to Woke. Oxford has a culture of success, and those things that facilitate it – high workloads, high standards, high competition – ought, in sum, to be jealously guarded.

IV. Postscript

I had originally intended a quiet summer, recuperating from a hectic year and preparing for doctoral study. But I applied, on a whim, to a residential Latin programme in Italy, and a few days before my dissertation deadline I received an offer that I couldn’t refuse. So off I went to Sicily, and thence to Rome. The course was taught with the utmost rigour, and despite starting from the rudiments (I don’t even have GCSE), by the third or fourth week I was able to communicate effectively in (admittedly error-prone) Latin. The ‘natural method’ – learning by speaking – has its detractors, and I confess that I am less enamoured by speaking Latin than were many of my peers, regarding it instead chiefly as a means to an end. But it is an excellent means to that end, by far the most efficient way to develop reading proficiency. Those nine weeks in Italy, as a result, constituted probably the most rewarding intellectual experience of my life.

Now, what does it mean that the most rewarding intellectual experience of my life was provided by Ralston College? Ralston, based in Savannah, Georgia, is a recent foundation; it is an ‘unaccredited’ university, though I am not quite sure what this means. Its chancellor is Jordan Peterson. Its politics are basically conservative, its ethos basically Christian (there is much talk of ‘Truth’, ‘Beauty’, etc.). It may not be an ideal state of affairs for serious Classical learning in the twenty-first century to be in the custody of such people; but there’s no denying that they execute the office well. It is to the discredit of institutions like Oxford and Cambridge, however much I have praised them, that they don’t run similar programs, and indeed that one can go through the motions of a humane education there (in, say, medieval history – or, dare I say, in Classics!) and leave ignorant of Latin.

I spent the month between finishing my Masters dissertation and heading out to Sicily reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, on which I wrote a short essay for UnHerd.² In his Memoirs, Gibbon – who, I think it is safe to say, would have found some aspects of Ralston prima facie unappealing – talks about how, as a young man, he was vouchsafed the ‘keys of two valuable chests’, the Latin and Greek languages. Gibbon’s disciples have as valid a claim to Latin as Thomas Aquinas’s. But if it’s the latter who are doing the hard slog of carrying forth the torch, they deserve nothing but praise; and upstarts like Ralston may yet have something valuable to impart to those more ancient and venerable centres of learning.

1. The Sorbonne can be quibbled in the same way that most of France’s ‘oldest things’ can be, on account of that country’s unhappy discontinuity.

2. https://unherd.com/2024/08/my-summer-with-gibbon/