On my first, overwhelming day at Oxford, while I was busy quivering behind a JCR pool table and clutching my ‘welfare goody-bag’, I remember drifting into an awkward conversation with a third-year physicist. ‘You,’ he declared pitilessly, ‘are a fresher.’ We surveyed each other in the breathless pause. ‘And I,’ he continued, ‘am a third-year physicist.’ A hand appeared, so I shook it. ‘What can I tell you?’
Oxford is, by legend, an odd place, brimming with endearing foibles and weighty solemnity, haughty egos and quiet modesty, and all sorts of thoroughly unfathomable contradictions. You could plough through the night analysing Nietzsche or Baudelaire, and finish just in time to submit your favourite reptile in a tortoise race. It is, to be frank, unusual. Survival prospects were looking bleak. So I mumbled the obvious question.
‘My first few weeks?’ he boomed, ‘What were they like?’ He rubbed his stubble pensively, and seized the lemonade. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t shake off the sense I was living in a theme park.’
Two years later, I confess, neither can I.
Oxford tweets, has a Facebook page, and runs bustling shops (in various continents) spewing all kinds of improbable paraphernalia (including, surprisingly, a plastic dinosaur, fake gargoyles, and model dons for hanging on Christmas trees). You can barely move for tour guides, and the dreaded walk to exams involves hordes of camera-wielding coach-loads angling for snaps of the subfusc. The current batch of wide-eyed tourists is apparently absorbed in their iPhones, busy stroking their screens to enjoy ‘the Oxford app’. On it you’ll find out ‘where Harry has dinner’ and ‘swots for exams’. Lucky you.
Oxford Limited, the university’s commercial workhorse, supposedly don’t mind playing to this slightly cheesy, Potter-esque fantasy. Their website is a candid, if rather saccharine, eulogy to Oxford’s money-spinning potential. Intriguingly, the company’s last high-profile offering was an Oxford University furniture range, complete with replica “tutor’s chair”, “Senior Common Room sofa”, and something that hasn’t escaped notice as a suspiciously Hogwarts-ish table. But rest assured; apparently – in the immortal words of the furniture line’s manufacturer published in The Telegraph – they are “really, really authentic”.
Ok. I can hear the sceptics. Are a few lovable gargoyles and make-believe sofas really so terrible? What does it matter if the university sells some branded trash? Quite frankly, who cares?
Er, I do – a bit. And I’m not alone. More than a few incredulous academics have already started to reach for the panic button, hurling phrases around involving various arrangements of the words “vulgar”, “inappropriate”, and “meretricious”. There is something rather weird about savouring Oxford’s sports victories as “licensing opportunities”, just as it’s slightly surreal to find that people are dressing their (presumably precocious) newborns in University of Oxford branded baby-grows and bibs (no really, they are).
This is, of course, all a bit silly. But it’s also, in an odd way, vaguely disappointing. It panders to a depressing sort of commercialisation, a general cheapening of Oxford’s status from an academic institution to a theme park. In the mercenary terms of Oxford’s PR strategies, it yearns to recast the university’s identity as a “brand”, apparently to be remoulded “into a powerful consumer proposition” according to their website. It is, of course, a brutal irony that trying to market “values” and “heritage” is an excellent way to debase them.
I might be over-playing my hand: things clearly aren’t quite as apocalyptic as they sound. Oxford is still an institution with something resembling integrity. But I get the nagging feeling that we should sit up, smell the coffee, and listen to the prophetic voices of third-year physicists – before, drowning under a desperate flood of trademarked Harry Potter dolls, it’s simply too late.
