to you, the diff in feel between oxford, cambridge, and [say, for fun] a small exclusive college in vermont which may or may not exist? as a connoisseur of such things.
alright well i could talk about this for hours (as anyone who went to high school with me can attest) but i’ll try not to ramble too much
i think we first need to emphasise that, compared to hampden, oxford and cambridge are old. it’s impossible to forget, especially in oxford, which is all grand conformity in sandstone, could’ve all been built at once — oxford, which held king charles i’s court during the civil war; oxford, where england’s first parliament was held. the place has always been tied up with power. in 1096, so the legend goes, alfred the great founded it, and even if we just look at confirmed dates, it rose to power as early as 1167, when henry ii called back all his scholars from paris. nobody was escaping anything here.
and then you have cambridge — cambridge, a refuge from the bitter, violent town-gown fights that in 1209 led to the deaths of two oxford scholars. a market town. and you can tell, if you look. the fens didn’t have a lot of stone so they imported it from anywhere they could; the colleges are more spread apart than in the other place. there’s still a market square.
and it’s grown away from that, now — 600 years of holding a duopoly over english university education made it easy to forget — and so it became oxford’s counterpart, the Other Place, the rival and the twin. the stereotype is that you go to oxford for the arts and cambridge for the sciences, and again, you can see it in the buildings, especially in their libraries: oxford’s form versus cambridge’s function. oxford’s charles — his court was held there during the civil war — versus cambridge’s cromwell.
and that epitomises the differences between the two, i think. oxford nowadays seems far more concerned with tradition and old glory and wearing sub fusc to exams. cambridge — despite turning out extremely similar graduates — feels less unapologetically grand.
hampden is a different beast altogether. there’s no old-money-sons-of-lords here: sure, there’s old money, but even the old money isn’t that old, not really. it feels fresher, less set in stone — sure, there are stone buildings, but the dorms have painted wooden fronts. it‘s a separate institution from its town, which is itself extremely small — which, incidentally, makes it perfect for the bacchanal in a way that simply wouldn’t work in oxford or cambridge. it’s smaller and it’s more removed and anything secret is going to take place in the woods, not in smoky rooms. the fate of the country isn’t decided here. it’s more open; more cosmopolitan; more quintessentially american. julian treats his class as if he were a tutor/supervisor, and the fact that this is treated is unusual, i think, epitomises the difference between the attitudes of all three.
