Great Expectations, Great Places

A friend who studied at Oxford last Spring told me that it would be best to approach my experience here without any particular expectations. I confess I wasn't quite sure how to do that, since it seemed that I couldn't avoid having expectations on some subliminal level. So, rather than try to avoid all expectations, I decided to channel them into the one which I could rely on: that I expect to invest my most excellent efforts and abilities in learning as much as I can through my experiences and opportunities here - whatever those turn out to be like. If this expectation is unmet, there is none but myself to blame.

During orientation week told us all sorts of things to expect. Perhaps their most emphasized point was that, unlike typical Great Books programs in America, the Oxford way of working is that of the professional academic: Use tons of secondary sources in your essays! They highly value the academic community, and view undergraduate students as junior members of it. Therefore, we must dialog with other scholars in our writing, and understand the context of our own ideas within the broader academic discussion.

As I've anticipated working in this way, I've thought a lot about the benefit of scholarly community, and the fact that scholarship can only be advanced by the efforts of multiple people. It is simply impossible for one person to research or muse upon the whole vast array of topics within a given field of study. If I am researching the life of merchants in the colonial era, for instance, I don't have time to sift through endless records and bits of evidence in search of information relevant to my historical query. Hence, we have archaeologists, paleographers, archivists, and librarians. A philosopher or textual critic, bright as he or she may be, still must have his or her ideas challenged and strengthened through dialog with others.

On the other hand, there is great benefit to doing one's own work, particularly in the area of great literature, and in educational situations. There is no point in dialogging with other scholars if I cannot comprehend books well on my own and form good opinions about them. This would be like joining a choir before I knew how to sing on pitch. It is important that students learn to wrestle through hard texts and challenging questions on their own, and consequently develop skill sets that will benefit them throughout their lives.

All this is to say, that there is great importance to both primary and secondary source based learning, and both must be incorporated into our educational methods.

Yesterday morning, I went to my first meeting with my Shakespeare tutor at Regent's Park College. My tutor is a lot how I would expect an Oxford tutor to be like - not too tall, perhaps in his 50's or 60's, balding just a bit. He had volumes of Shakespeare on his shelf, piles of paper on his desk, and a cup of tea in his hand. I could tell he must be very busy, because he seemed to have a lot on his mind. Shortly into our meeting, he said, "We're going to do this tutorial the Oxford way, which would probably seem utterly sacreligious to your teachers at home, and that is, that we will not use secondary sources!" (the italics are to indicate that he said this very emphatically.) I was rather surprised, and greatly humored. This was certainly not what I'd expected to hear. He wants to receive an essay each week consisting purely of my ideas on Shakespeare. He will recommend some good literary critics, of course, but not until I've produced an entirely original essay.

I am quite content with this method of studying Shakespeare because I think it is a good way to study great texts. However, I am considering the idea of asking him if I can write a few extra essays in which I place my own argument in the context of other scholars' work. Asking for more assignments seems like a rather crazy idea, but while I am here in Oxford with one of the world's greatest libraries at my fingertips, I fully expect to use it.