Passage Transcript

um, generally i, i have found with my studies that, um, historians as a sort of breed of academic. were particularly conservative in their sort of, um, outlook. um, perhaps... tendency, um, and i don’t know, i, i felt talking to other friends and, sort of getting a, a, knowledge of the way other degrees are, and the way, um, courses are organised, that it was a more general problem. um, even in you know, subjects which might seem more, uh, more inclined to be direct and contemporary and relevant. like, um, politics or economics. that, um, there was a sort of... tendency of universities in, in Britain to be conservative.

um... partly i think, it is the sort of inbuilt nature of any institution, um, to_ there is a tendency to ossify and unless there's forces for, um, change which stir things up and move on a bit. it, it can tend to stick. um, i think in Britain you have a particular problem with, uh, certain universities, Oxford and Cambridge most notably, are known to be good, and known to be old and are presumed that, um, well this is the way things_ they are. we have always taught this way. that the course has always been like this and that we should stick with the, the way things are. and that, um, there is a terrible difficulty to sort of integrate, um, intellectual advances. um, i think it is particularly bad in, in Oxford as a university. Cambridge has always had a, a slightly better, um, reputation for, um, being advanced.

its_ as i say it is particularly bad in, in certain subjects, it seems to me. i think it is my misfortune to have done history. in that it, it is one of the more conservative ones. but even in a subject like English literature, um, you would have an undergraduate degree in Ox_ in Oxford, um, hugely based on sort of, taking courses in Yates and Elliot. and then you have after the whole three years, um, you, you have six weeks doing literary theory. and i- in this you are supposed to encompass, you know the... basically the sort of intellectual history of the last thirty years. um, and the rest of the time you are dealing with the texts of, of Yates, Elliott, Milton, you know, Shakespeare in a sort of workman like, common sense, uh, analysis. and, um, really this_ i, it doesn’t seem to me to reflect, um, a lot of the sort of scholarship that might be, going on in, um, America or France, or, or elsewhere or_ certainly in Britain. it doesn’t, in a way, reflect, um, what the people who'd be regarded as, as the, um, uh, leading, um, authors. people like Terry Eagleton and, um, Anthony Easthope, and um, what not. it doesn’t really reflect the sort of things that they're writing about.

um, so it’s, it, it does seem unfortunate. and in, in a way the un- the universities that are new and, you know, where there is a dynamic for change. um, it is very interesting that, that what used to be called the polytechnics which is about half the universities in Britain, that were set up in the 1960’s. they're, um, they're obviously much more open to, to, um, changing their curriculum and, incorporating new ideas and, the sort of what's the discipline o- of what is now called cultural studies. um, most of the polytechnics have a department of cultural studies. where as in the, the older universities sort of_ that some of the most_ um, in the newer universities, um, oh sorry. in the older universities, um, sort of cultural studies is done by the sort of back door in departments of sociology and departments of English. and, um, it, it is sort of, almost absurd in the way you, uh, could go to Oxford and you, you, you couldn’t almost directly study, um, the way the media works, how media texts work, how film works. um, yet, so much of, of contemporary culture is, is, is in those formats. and that you have to do it by a back door through, you know, reading the, the works of, um, people who are in English departments and supposedly doing English literature.

um, and it, it can be, sort of depressing that, um, there is so little change and so little regard for, um, the contemporary world