Aspects of Modern Oxford, by a Mere DonGodley, A. D. (Alfred Denis)
History
Aspects of Modern Oxford, by a Mere Don
Godley, A. D. (Alfred Denis)
University of Oxford
The ’official’ variety of Fellow, or the Prize Fellow who chooses to be
a College Tutor, is a schoolmaster, with a difference. He has rather
longer holidays--if he can afford to enjoy them-and a considerably
shorter purse than the instructors of youth at some great schools. He
is so far unfortunate in his predecessors, that he has inherited the
reputation of the Fellows of old time. Everybody else is working: the
Fellow is still a useless drone. As a matter of fact, the unfortunate
man is always doing something--working vehemently with a laudable desire
to get that into eight weeks which should properly take twelve; or
taking his recreation violently, riding forty miles on a bicycle, with a
spurt at the finish so as not to miss his five-o’clock pupil; sitting on
interminable committees--everything in Oxford is managed by a committee,
partly, perhaps, because ’Boards are very often screens;’ or sitting
upon a disorderly undergraduate. On the whole, the kicks are many, and
the halfpence comparatively few. He has the Long Vacation, of course,
but then he is always employed in writing his lectures for next term, or
compiling a school edition, or a handbook, or an abridgment of somebody
else’s school edition or handbook, in order to keep the pot
boiling--more especially if he has fallen a victim to matrimony, and
established himself in the red-brick part of Oxford. It is true that
there is the prospect--on paper--of a pension when he is past his work,
but in the present state of College finances that is not exactly a vista
of leisured opulence. Altogether there is not very much repose about
_him_. College Tutors in these days are expected to work. It is on
record that a tourist from a manufacturing district on seeing four
tutors snatching a brief hour at lawn-tennis, remarked, ’I suppose
there’s _another shift_ working inside?’ Such are the requirements of
the age and the manufacturing districts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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