The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics, and Geniuses

Noel Annan
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000
357 pp.

Michael Sexson
English
MSU-Bozeman

"Who could resist the charm of that spiritual apparition gliding in the dim afternoon light through the aisles of St. Mary's, rising into the pulpit, and then in the most entrancing of voices, breaking the silence with words and thoughts-subtle, sweet, mournful?" The writer of these lines is Matthew Arnold, the great British statesman, educator and poet of the 19th century, and the object of his excessive affection is John Henry Newman, then Vicar of St. Mary's, an exemplar of what Noel Annan means by the word "don." In the simplest terms, a don is a charismatic academic intellectual, the like of which flourished at Oxford and Cambridge in the 19th and 20th centuries Annan, who died shortly after completing this book, was Chairman of the Trustees of the National Gallery, a Trustee of the British Museum, and a director of the Royal Opera House. There is little doubt, however, that he wished to be remembered as a don, a mesmerizing academic, an historian of ideas, and a university administrator.

The Dons gives gossip a good name. If you want to know something of the ideas of the dons at Cambridge and Oxford for two centuries, this isn't the book for you. But if you would like to know about what they wore, ate and what they thought of one another, this is your delightful cup of British tea. We hear of William Buckland, ardent scientist and first president of the British Association, who claimed to have "eaten his way through the whole animal creation" to conclude "that the worst thing was a mole." A religious skeptic, Buckland examined a patch of supposed martyr's blood in an Italian cathedral by licking it, and then drolly concluded, " I can tell you what it is; it's bat's urine." We hear of A.D. Lindsay who remarked, after finding himself the sole dissenting member in a controversy, "I see we are deadlocked." Annan gives local habitations to names we grew up with but never saw as flesh-and-blood people, teachers such as Maurice Bowra and Isaiah Berlin, Benjamin Jowett, and the underappreciated Greek scholar Jane Harrison. It is all gossip to be sure, but it is delicious gossip, and the book appends a handful of photos to further endear these people to us.

And this is what Annan sought to do-to endear these people to us. He knew that the age of the dons was over, and he wanted to make a last hurrah for this vanished type of personality. Annan's last chapter, "Down with Dons," is an embittered remembrance of how the Thatcher administration almost single handedly dismantled what may have been the finest university system in the world. Anti-intellectual and demanding "accountability" from the scholars and teachers, the Thatcherites forced Oxford and Cambridge "to plead guilty to the charge that they were elite institutions." At book's end, Annan sees no help from the Blair government. Although he does not say so directly, he implies that Matthew Arnold's infamous "philistines" have taken over the universities. Fearful and contemptuous of the don's charisma and pied piper powers, the philistine offers us instead the manager, the steward of outcomes and assessment, the "guide on the side" rather than the "sage on the stage."

Gossipy to the point of being bitchy, The Dons nonetheless ends in the keys of nostalgia, bitterness, and elegy. Something wonderful in academic life has passed--the presence in the classroom of (to quote the terms of the book's subtitle) mentors, eccentrics and geniuses. The don appears to us now as foppish and pretentious, a shabby prima donna. And geniuses, we are told by fashionable theorists, are merely local manifestations of a particular variety of cultural energy. The don is dead.

But long live the don, says Noel Annan, nostalgically. For "Nostalgia...is the mother of loyalty." At book's end, Annan wistfully recreates memories of lights burning late into the night, of libraries where illumination first dawns, of plays, concerts, poetry readings, and of "teachers and preachers." He ends with the words of E.D. Adrian, whom he calls "one of the greatest dons." "The time may come," writes Adrian, "when the colleges become alms houses for the old and cafeterias for the young, but it will always be something to have fallen asleep to the sound of the fountain playing in the Trinity Great Court."


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