Virginia Military Institute - Bomb Yearbook (Lexington, VA)

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Virginia Program at Oxford For thirty-eight students, including nine cadets, summer study at Oxford University proves to be a rewarding experience. 10 Virginia Progra

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The new building program will completely aller ihe looks of the area behind the buildings on the south side of the post. Mark Thompson modular furnilun ifle rack into hh i installed in all i w i 1 Assisting rats in the acadi in which they had troubh of the new S-2 rank whicl ed this year in order to put stronger emphasis on academ among members of the Corps. pari add- Moving Forward

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0 XFORD — This morning I jogged to Mesopotamia and back. Not bad. eh? The speaker is David Twillie, a spring 1985 graduate of Virginia Military Institute now doing a summer term at Ox- ford University in Britain. Twillie has always been known as a superb athlete — a scholastic Ail-American selectee, in fact. But jogging to Mesopotamia? Hardly. It ' s a joke. And in this case, the joke is a reflection of Oxford ' s inbred confidence in matters academic and a sense of humor that unabashedly appeals to the over-educated. For nearly 200 years, an elongated island just to the east of the city in a branch of the Thames called the Cherwel! has been known as the land between two rivers, or Mesopotamia. Gel it? Like its namesake between the Tigris and Euphrates? As I said before, it ' s a scholar ' s joke. a widely respected program now in its se- cond decade. Twillie and 37 other students from five Virginia colleges — Sweet Briar, Mary Baldwin, Hampden-Sydney, Washington and Lee. and Virginia Military Institute — are studying at Oxford University. They live and eat at St. Anne ' s College (founded 1879). study at the Bodleian Library (opened 1602), and generally wander the streets, guidebook in hand, of a city that has been called one of the world ' s greatest architectural Of an evening, like Oxford students the year round, these Virginians are apt to be found tasting the local brew at one of the corner pubs. In other words, they very quickly become indistinguishable from the ordinary Oxford undergraduate. Although the students attend up to five lectures a week, delivered by widely-published historians and literary scholars, the most demanding part of the course lakes place in their tutorial sessions. The tutorial system is the method British higher education long ago devised to ensure thai there would be none of that slouching down in the rear of the classroom to avoid eye contact with the teacher. In the Virginia Program, each group of three students is assigned two special tutors, an Oxford don for English history and one for English literature as well. The groups meet with each tutor once a week for two hours. There, the week ' s writing assignment is read aloud and intensely reviewed and criticized. It can be, as they say. a withering experience. The bulk of your work in the British university is done with your individual tutor, says Dr. David Blair, director of the Virginia Program at Oxford. The holder of a doctorate from the university ' s renowned Balliol College (founded 1263). the lanky Blair is a specialist in 16th Century English literature. In the United States, you concentrate on ' courses, ' which are actually a series of lectures. Over here, it ' s the individual give and take with the don that does the trick. And just what does it mean to be at Oxford? Most students agree with Twillie: It blows my mind when John Ashdown [an Oxford architectural historian] tells me that the tower of the university church went up in 1 280. We ' re talkin ' old. I ' m also a fan of Sir Thomas More ' s. He was a good man. And when I walked in the back quadrangle of Christ Church College the other day, I realized I was looking at the same spot where he studied. Another VMI graduate, Jack Rose, 21, from Pittsburgh, is the holder of an engineering degree and on his way to Pen- sacola, Fla.. to begin Navy flight training. This may be my last chance to improve my writing ability, he says. And to become a lot more well-rounded at the same time. History that was only vague to me before is suddenly all around me here. Every street has something. I just walked past the spot where Latimer and Ridley were burned at the slake in 1555 [during the reign of Bloody Mary]. Truly, Oxford exudes history. The past even beckons from beneath your feet. The very time thai the Virginia Program was al Oxford, a portion of ihe old Saxon north-south road, dating from the 8th century, was discovered during an ex- cavation at a new building site. The road is associated with the city ' s founding, laid down well before there were col- leges here. The town is first mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle in 911 AD, and scholars now figure that Oxford became known as a center for learning in the 1 1th century. Another day. students were returning to their rooms at St. Anne ' s when they happened to pass through the cloister of Christ Church. Archaeologists working at the site had just unearthed the skeleton of a monk buried for 700 years. It was a breath-taking find. Mike Ellis, a senior history major at VMI, revels in the con- troversy. We ' ve had famous lecturers come to us and pre- sent extremely contrasting views on major issues in history. Take the Rise of Protestantism in England during the Elizabethan Age. Christopher Haigh of Christ Church Col- lege told us this transformation was very slow and almost didn ' t happen, because it was a revolution from the Court down to the common people. But Christopher Hill [of Balliol College] told us it all happened very quickly. I ' ve never come across this before — major authors argu- ing in person for opposing points of view. This means that it ' s sort of up to us to make up our minds. Just like we ' ll have to do later in life. Indeed, one consequence of the American education system is that students get very used to being fed answers. Or worse, thinking that there is a single right answer to every question. The tutorial system promotes controversy and the search fur questions rather than answers. The distinction between answers and questions is not lost on Danielle Spinelli, who at 17 became one of Mary Baldwin ' s youngest graduates ever. Here we ' ve had to become very question oriented. Ordinarily. I like to give a precise answer to a question, even though I realize there are very few exact answers to anything. Mavbe tins process is supposed to give us a sense of confidence in our own power ol thinking. she offers. With two essays and several books to read each week, the Virginia Program is one summer course that really puts its students through their pares. Well, they shouldn ' t be sur- prised at the hard work. says Dr. Tom Davis of VMI ' s history department. The students are paying 81,875 (plus airfare to England) for the experience. And the colleges are awarding six semester hours of credit on successful comple- tion of the coursework, We want them to gel their money ' s worth. This summer, Davis is the one American assigned to ihe program, though he ' s jusl an invigilator, a watcher. He doesn ' t teach. All the tutoring and lecturing is being handled by Brits. The fact that the program so closely approximates the British Oxbridge experience is its grealest virtue. For Anna Southeringlon. 21, a Mary Baldwin senior and drama ma- jor, to actually be taught by English faculty is a great asset. It makes it seem like we ' re not just tourists in Oxford. We ' re really going to school here. To my mind, though, Oxford ' s greatest asset is nothing so grand. Instead. I prefer the town ' s simple ability to teach people the value of walking. It is nothing short of a miracle to see students begin lo fish guidebooks out of their backpacks as ihey make their way along ancient streets and hallowed passageways — streels and scenes thai these same students passed among jusl a few weeks ago but heeded them not. I was there when Chris McGhee of Hampden-Sydney. Stephanie Moore of Mary Baldwin, and Sheldon Davis of VMI discovered, in an Oxford backyard- the very stone model that architeel Nicholas Hawksmoor built in 1736 and proposed as the design for ihe new Radcliffe Camera (or Librarv ) he was seeking to build. For a variety of reasons, including Hawksmoor ' s death, this domed building was never built. Instead, James Gibbs got the commission and pui up the very building lhal Oxford undergraduates and the Virginia Program studenls use daily. But, as McGhee, Davis, and Moore discovered, there sits the Hawksmore version today, in a 12-foot model, gracing the top of a stone garden house. Any place else in the world, this liny bit of history would be a major stop for tourisls and scholars alike. In Oxford, it ' s just a part of a very much larger picture. I study under the Radcliffe dome every day, Sheldon Davis points out. And yet only a few blocks away sits the second-string version. Amazing. I think I like Hawksmore ' s design better though. It ' s less Michael Olmert writes the column Points of Origin in Smithsonian magazine and his Official Guidebook to Williamsburg has just been published by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. He holds a doctorate in English Literature. Virginia Program at Oxford