Oxford is often separated from other universities in the public imagination, a result of this city’s illustrious history of academic excellence, sporting prowess, and gleaming architecture. Perhaps we should add another reason to the list – the infantilisation of Oxford.
You arrive aged 18, ready to start your independent, adult life, and are instantly thrown into a setting that resembles a vast boarding school. The childishness is glaring. The tone is set during Fresher’s Week when the standard fare of drinking and club nights is complemented by a range of non-drinking activities that bring back flashbacks of secondary-school icebreakers. Talk to an Oxford graduate of the 80s and they would be amazed to hear about a movie night in the first week of university rather than a night in the college bar. Living in halls, with its attendant niceties, inevitably means Oxford students do not undergo the typical student rites of passage. Scouts clean your rooms, put your bins out, and tidy your kitchens, not that you need to use that lone microwave available to you because your college dining hall will feed you seven nights a week. And this for the entirety of your course since nearly all colleges now offer accommodation for all years– student life sans energy bills, pesky landlords, or unblocking drains.Â
Oxford students are actively discouraged from having a job during term time lest it distract from their degree, leaving those students who do need to work both academically stigmatised and socially isolated from their peers. And could there ever be a more telling sign of the willing regression of a group of nascent adults than the obsession with college puffers? Oxford students leave school complaining about school uniform and embrace the next best thing as soon as they get to university, cosplaying tourists wearing University-branded sweaters.
Perhaps the infantilisation of Oxford is part of a broader trend of 20-somethings increasingly aspiring to be more childish. A generation that prefers to work from home as it means we can watch Netflix between meetings and don’t have to have awkward conversations at the water cooler because we’ve all developed social anxiety in lockdown. A generation that needs ‘adulting’ guides to help us with complicated tasks like doing laundry or navigating a supermarket. A generation that just needs to get a grip, or so we are told in the press.
Or maybe what we’re seeing is actually the excessive mollycoddling of university students à la américaine, whereby adolescents raised in an age of ‘helicopter parenting’ and Covid lockdowns have reached university age and found themselves unable to deal with opposing or upsetting views. Degrees are dumbed down. Trigger warnings are given for anything from Shakespeare to Harry Potter. It is not a leap too far to go from being infantilised in your college living arrangements to being patronised in your degree.
This would all make sense applied to Oxford. Describing his undergraduate years at Oxford, Balliol academic John Maier writes of his college JCR that ‘‘many of those in power behaved with a kind of wounded officiousness that suggested they had been bullied too much at school, or perhaps not enough’’. Enter into this febrile mix a crushing workload and you have a recipe for an increasingly childish and self-regarding student population. The prime evidence of this are JCR meetings where the very worst stereotypes of student politics come to the fore. Funds are allocated on the basis of virtue signalling by self-important committees so pleased with themselves to be elected that they forget that the point of their roles is essentially to hand out money to students.
It is tempting to hark back to some imagined glory days in Oxford’s past where students spent their evenings sipping pints instead of scrolling and discussed Tolstoy rather than Twitter. But Oxford has always been childish – then, the scouts didn’t just take out your bins, they served you your port too.
Might there be some benefit to this infantilisation? The university would certainly claim that scouts and college catering fosters an environment in which students can focus as much energy as possible on their academic work. After all, Albert Einstein reportedly wore the same suit everyday so that he wouldn’t waste mental energy deciding what to wear. The mathematician Paul Erdős could work for 19 hours a day precisely because he never learned to cook.
It’s not all doom and gloom, of course. Oxford is still full of brilliant students, willing to engage critically with their subjects and consume vast amounts of beer while doing so. But the University community would do well to remember that there is more to student life than churning out essays or winning JCR elections. There is more to life than Oxford.
