Unwise Words
My God it's all so futile. You can sit on your expensively clad arse all day and think sublime thoughts, but at the end of the day, it mostly comes down to this truth: none of us ever do anything worthwhile.
You might accuse me of being a little pessimistic, but you only have to play the auger for a few moments to see that rather than Larkin's long slide we are actually plumetting down a tedious and irresistably slick slope all the way to jobs at KPMG and Arthur Anderson, and all the while we are protesting that no, we won't sell out. That VSO year will actually come about and I won't wilt at the first flash of ready cash fluttered at me by some towering mound of banking blubber in an expensive suit.
Who are we kidding. Oxford is a production line of the tedious and mediocre. It is a shame that the first class education we have recieved will probably turn us into second class people. It is all very well having a rudimentary understanding of Chinese verb construction or a nascent empathy for 18th century slave narratives, but what Oxford really excels as it making us whole-heartedly believe that we are better than our peers.
Take for example the childish rivalry with Cambridge. Many will say that this is exactly what it is, a harmless juvenile obsession, but in reality this just disguises the fact that Oxford's repeated public failure to outdo her younger sibling means that we have to denigrate Cambridge when we should be striving to equal her achievements (if that is what we have decided to place importance on). Cambridge for their part can't even be bothered to think up an insulting name for us, countering our bitter cries of "Tab" with vague mutterings about the "dark side" which could just be a harmless reference to the hue of our unnecessarily capacious scarves.
OUSU, the Union, The Cherwell, this newspaper - all Oxford landmarks of one kind or another, yet all in the grand scheme of things they amount to nothing. And this is because in reality there is no grand scheme. Union presidents may go on to become Prime Ministers and heads of industry and the editors of Oxford's two newspapers may one day be rivals in national newspapers, but what does this matter to the rest of the world? Oxford teaches us to be so self-obsessed that we ignore the passage of time for the counry at large. If we are not getting a highly paid job out of it, or if it is not making us look clever and cultured we don't care.
Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to assert that Oxford undergraduates are all foolishly living self-decieving lives, quite the opposite. Oxford teaches very little other than selfishness. Perhaps this is unsurprising when one notes the huge amount of wealth held by many of its undergraduates. If you can in all conscience live with great wealth while you hold the knowledge that there are those greatly disadvantaged in your own country, let alone the wider world, then why on earth when a multitude of opportunities are presented to you in this city would you turn them down? Why would you not make use of the college old boys network, which although doubtless markedly less prevalent than in times past still exists? Why would you bother to recognise the terrible disfiguring condescension in the endless student moralising over international affairs when the majority of the spokespersons campaigning in the university for such diverse causes as Tibetan independence and workers' solidarity will be only too happy to put their chairmanships of committees down on their application forms for Deutsche Bank.
It is not the selfishness of Oxford that irks, but the mendacity of the place, where base instincts are covered up with the display of good intentions.
4th May 2000