WHAT HAPPENED TO THE DONS OF YESTERYEAR?

DOES the don still exist? There are university professors and lecturers - their numbers swelled by the conversion at a stroke of all the polytechnics into universities. But are all the teachers in the world of "tertiary education" dons?

Certainly not, according to Noel Annan.

Dons exist to cultivate the intellect. "Everything else is secondary."

Above all, dons have been teachers and fellows of Oxford or Cambridge colleges. They stood in special relation to their pupils who came to their rooms each week to be taught personally.

To describe that is already to offend. The system of individual tuition at Oxford and Cambridge is precisely the "litist" sort of provision that governments are eager to attack. The financial independence of the colleges, which gave the fellows their confidence and, no doubt, their arrogance, shocks the spirit of the age.

Dons in the now nearly defunct sense had their birth in the early 19th century. The Oxford Movement was a movement of dons.

They were scholars, to be sure, but their status as dons gave them a sounding board, a huge audience of admiring and potentially influential young men.

Newman's sermons, when he was Vicar of the University Church, were overwhelmingly dramatic performances. When he retired for three years to a semi-monastic place called Littlemore, pondering whether to go over to Rome, the whole of Oxford and (it seemed) of England held its breath. The great donnish families - the Stephens, the Venns, the Darwins intermarried, forming an essentially liberal intellectual aristocracy. As well as being scholars, dons were wits, performers, men of affairs, objects of fascination to undergraduates. When I went up to King's College, Cambridge, from a provincial Catholic grammar school, I found a place still breathing the last enchantments of Bloomsbury.

My director of studies, "Dadie" Rylands, friend of Virginia Woolf, gave us but one supervision a year, accompanied with excellent sherry. All I remember was that he took a couple of lines of Donne and explained that he could not understand them. But the sense he gave of learning worn lightly, and of easy intercourse with the great world, made an indelible impression.

We took it for granted that dons were eccentric - that the famous classical economist who advanced upon innocent tourists, his eyes glowering furiously under the tea-cosy that served as a hat, was in the nature of things. We simply assumed the truth of any picturesque story - for instance, that one particularly grand figure habitually gave supervisions in his bath.

(When I became a don myself I was gratified to discover that this particular legend had now got attached to me.) The cultivation of learning and the intellect - yes, that was taken to cover every sort of eccentric donnish behaviour. Annan tells of the Oxford scientist, Buckland, the whole of whose life was penetrated by his zeal to observe: "He used to say that he had eaten his way through the whole animal creation, and that the worst thing was a mole."

Buckland was a great opponent of Roman superstition. Pausing before a dark stain on the flagstones of an Italian cathedral where the martyr's blood miraculously renewed itself, he dropped to his knees and licked it. "I can tell you what it is: it is bat's urine."

It has all gone. The old style don who devoted himself to teaching and forming friendships with undergraduates can hardly exist in a world where promotion depends on ceaseless publication and where, anyway, such friendships are vaguely suspect.

Above all, the old arrogant confidence has vanished as the ancient universities are swallowed up in that grimpen mire called "higher education".

Noel Annan brings his usual panache to telling what is, in fact, a melancholy story. All the dons he describes took for granted intellectual and social independence. They did not have nervously to placate politicians who have not the faintest idea what the "cultivation of the intellect" consists in, and would hate it if they did. His book is an engaging epitaph on an all-but-vanished world.

Copyright 1999
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