A Yank At Oxford

The following op-ed by Anna Terry was published by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on Saturday, August 17, 2002. Ms. Terry served as an intern in the Office of University Relations this summer. She returns to England on August 26.

By Anna Terry*

I arrived at Oxford on a drizzly September morning in 2001. Proud to be among my country’s chosen representatives, I entered the Oxford scene with radiant yet ill-defined expectations.

Soon I discovered the unpleasant truth: that Rhodes Scholars are a dime a dozen at Oxford, and that anti-Americanism is the height of fashion.

I was ill prepared for the vicissitudes of England’s premier university. Its idiosyncratic customs, the accretions of a thousand years, alternately fascinated and exasperated me.

Shortly before my departure, my dad and I had watched the Last Night of the Proms on BBC. The culmination of London’s beloved annual music festival, this Last Night was like no other, dedicated to the dead of September 11. As American conductor Leonard Slatkin led the traditional patriotic hymn Jerusalem, thousands of Britons sang enthusiastically, in London and in the parks of Manchester and Liverpool and Birmingham, where large videoscreens broadcasted the event. They wept as they waved their Union Jack along with my Stars and Stripes:

I will not cease from mental fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England’s green and pleasant land.

That mental fight was exactly the pursuit in which I found myself engaged-the continual struggle to define my beliefs and identity, and to make a positive impact on the world. And it was this that ultimately bound me to Oxford and the people of England, not the overwrought mass sympathy for America’s woes that seemed to dissipate just after my arrival.

Oxford revolves around the life of the mind. You’re supposed to think and ponder and even obsess about the problems of the universe. You’re not meant to be practical or useful or active.

Inevitably, this can lead to deluded ranting. George Orwell once observed that some ideas were so stupid that only an intellectual could believe them, and Oxford’s myriad intellectuals all too often exemplify this remark. The sanctimonious anti-American rhetoric, the overspecialization, and the unbearably dry lectures all conspired to deepen my disillusionment.

At first my fellow Americans and I comforted each other. Together we learned to despise the Guardian and the Independent; together we complained about the bad food and the nonexistent customer service. We attended panel discussions on Afghanistan and lectures on the Middle East, saddened and angered at the loathing our country inspired.

Eventually, we began to make the distinctions between Oxford and the real world, and we accepted the fact of America’s ambiguous image.

Of course, this image inevitably included the aura of America’s most famous Rhodes Scholar. His portrait stared down on me from the wall of Rhodes House at dinners, like Henry VIII and Cardinal Newman in the older Oxford colleges.

My unassuming Arkansas heritage ought to have placed me squarely outside these halls of power. Still, I was not an anomaly among Oxford’s American guests. Two other Rhodes Scholars in my class of 32 had Arkansas roots, and some of America’s most illustrious representatives at Oxford had hailed from Arkansas-J. William Fulbright and General Wesley Clark in addition to the ubiquitous Bill Clinton. Without ulterior motive, Oxford had accepted them into its walls, never realizing that it was harboring the future leadership of the world.

Would we too, one day, follow the well-worn path to American power that runs through Oxford?

If so, Oxford certainly wouldn’t care. Kings and bishops and statesmen have occupied these hallowed halls for centuries. Nowadays Oxford serves as a finishing school for future British politicians, European aristocrats, and developing-world elites. It still educates the cream of the Commonwealth as it did in the British Empire’s heyday. Imperialist Cecil Rhodes’ statue still presides over the High Street from its perch at Oriel College, oblivious to the self-conscious post-colonial guilt that reigns below.

But this indifference, product of Oxford’s sheer historical weight, has leveled the playing field and facilitated a strange but welcome egalitarianism. In fact, the quality of my undergraduate education has never been in question at Oxford, as it too often has in America.

To Oxonians, the University of Arkansas is what we Arkansans already know it to be-the premier university of a great American state. And Oxford admires American public universities, since they combine state funding, the mode by which Oxford itself survives, with effective private support. Indeed, only in the past decade has Oxford undertaken a private campaign comparable to our Campaign for the 21^st Century.

Uninhibited by prejudice about my Razorback roots, I began to enjoy the mental fight-the challenge of broad and clear thinking, of finding traditions and philosophies within which I could define my own beliefs and identity. In the process, I became more proudly American, Southern, and Arkansan than ever before.

And eventually Oxford and I learned to accept each other for what we are.

Behind the Oxford of formal dinners and croquet on the lawn lies the Oxford of avant-garde radicalism and reflexive cynicism about all things Western. But just behind that lies the vast insecurity of an ancient English institution, striving to modernize and to define a greatly reduced role in the world. This is the Oxford whose traditions have enriched my life this past year. My life as a Rhodes Scholar introduced me to the first Oxford, forced me to come to terms with the second, and ultimately ingrained in me an enduring affection for the third.

*Anna Terry, a native of Fort Smith, is a 2001 graduate of the University of Arkansas and the tenth Rhodes Scholar in its history. She is reading for a masters’ degree in Medieval History at Trinity College, Oxford.