The impact of Oxford and Cambridge on Britain: mostly adverse?

Most of Britain’s prime ministers and many of its leaders in all sections of society went to Oxford or Cambridge Universities. The influence of those two universities on Britain is huge, but has it been benign or malign?

I’ve already written a blog about an essay by the journalist Simon Kuper, an Oxford graduate himself, in which he argued that Oxford is responsible for the current lamentable state of Britain. https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/2019/06/27/is-oxford-university-the-cause-of-the-downfall-of-britain/  Oxford, he said, teaches you to talk confidently about a subject of which you know little, not how to get things done.

Today in Robert Skidelsky’s marvellous biography of Maynard Keynes I’ve been reading about the Apostles, the secret club of the cleverest students at Cambridge, and I’ve been left thinking that the ways of the club may also have had an adverse effect on Britain.

The club was founded in1820 and was “more like a family than a club.” They met every Saturday where a “moderator” would read a paper that would be discussed by members (including “embryos,” new members, and “angels,” dons who had been Apostles) speaking from the “hearthrug.” Between meetings the Apostles spent most time with each other. “Their discussions were full of in-jokes, personal allusions, private meanings. Their talk was spiced with blasphemy and sexual innuendo, much as it had been at school.”

The Kantian jokes was the club was “real” and the rest of the world “phenomenal.” “What this meant was that the world outside was regarded as less substantial. Less worthy of attention than the society’s own collective life.” Members of the club felt superior. Most of the members “combined great cleverness with great unworldliness.” They were, writes Skidelsky, “a product of a very English reaction to industrial life, based on the cult of dead languages, chivalry, moral utopias, and the rejection of commercial careers.” The whole university “saw itself as a world of learning and beauty set in a land of barbarians and philistines.”

Tennyson, Bertrand Russell, and G E Moore were all members as were Lyton Strachey and Leonard Woolf, who recruited Keynes. In his turn Keynes recruited Wittgenstein, who left almost immediately, thinking it ridiculous. Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and two other Soviet spies were also Apostles. Women were admitted only in the 1970s.

The Apostles had a great influence on Keynes, giving him, writes Skidelsky, “the opportunity, incentive, and justification for becoming the person he wanted to be.” A friend who went to Cambridge (but was not, as far as I know, an Apostle) thinks Keynes the greatest Englishman, and he certainly had great worldly achievements, rather undermining my argument that Oxford and Cambridge have had an adverse impact on Britain. But many of the traits exemplified by the Apostles—a sense of superiority, disdain for non-Apostles, and a celebration of unworldliness—have not served Britain well, especially when put alongside the misplaced confidence installed by an Oxford education.