What makes the University of Cambridge special? Alan Macfarlane 2011

What Makes Cambridge Special

(Talk for Folk Museums 75th Anniversary: June 2011; based on a talk given at Keio, Japan, October 2009)



Many people who passed through Cambridge University have contributed to the stock of human knowledge over the centuries. This was not until recently through organized research programmes, doctoral theses, laboratories and so on, but through being a place where people learned to enjoy ideas and value knowledge, where they learnt an enthusiasm for the pursuit of beauty and truth.

I shall not dwell long on the contribution, but it is worth noting that it stretched from the ‘softest’ of the arts, like poetry and music, to the ‘hardest’ of the sciences, like physics. These were not held in opposition. In poetry, from Thomas Wyatt, Edmund Spenser and Christopher Marlowe in the sixteenth century, through John Donne, George Herbert, John Milton, Andrew Marvell and John Dryden in the seventeenth, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the eighteenth, to Lord Byron and Alfred Lord Tennyson in the nineteenth and through into the twentieth with A.E.Houseman, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke and others, something like two thirds of the greatest poets in the English language passed through Cambridge.

At the other extreme, in physics, the discovery of magnetism and elements of electricity in the late sixteenth century was made by William Gilbert, then Isaac Newton in the seventeenth, James Clerk Maxwell, the investigator of electro-magnetism and Sir J.J.Thomson, the discoverer of the electron, through to Ernest Rutherford, James Chadwick, Paul Dirac and many other great C20 physicists, the tradition is notable.

There are numerous others in every field of human creativity, including mathematics, philosophy, law, history, anthropology, computing, biology, music and drama who have enriched our world. The University provided training for many of them in high aspirations and a sheltered ground for creative work. This is one of its roles.

Another role is in training those who will are trained to lead, run, organize and provide inspiration for others. Cambridge trained many of the lawyers, doctors, teachers, clergymen, economists and administrators who eventually were called on to run the largest Empire the world has ever knownIt provided the thinking tools, the confidence and the network of ties which would hold together a complex civilization.

Most societies have some kind of mechanism, for turning children into adults, some form of puberty or other ritual. Spending a few years at Cambridge was such a ritual device for the British middle and upper middle class. At times, especially in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century, Cambridge had an intake of students with a high proportion from the upper and upper middle classes. Yet for much of its history it catered for the large ‘middling sort’, the minor gentry, richer farmers, tradesmen and merchant’s sons. For them it acted as a life-cycle stage.

A teenager would move into a partly-free, partly sheltered environment in which the university and college acted in loco parentis, in place of the parents. There was a movement way from the strict supervision of school and direct control of parents to one where people could experiment with being adults, organizing their own lives, making their own decision and friends, but in a half protected environment where their mistakes would not be too costly. This is still largely a central function of a Collegiate university such as Cambridge.

At the heart of the role of the University was the aim of developing the mind of the growing child. The student was to learn that most difficult of skills, to think for themselves. In this way he would complete his education through moving beyond school into the higher reaches of whichever discipline he was studying.

Yet learning to think was only one part of the mission. Equally important was how to feel and how to behave. The University had started from monastic roots, and there remained a mission to teach a ‘rule of life’ in the old Benedictine or Cistercian sense. This stretched from practical etiquette, how to eat complicated meals, how to drink in company through to bodily deportment, how to walk, laugh, run, dance, hunt, relax. And beyond these it was meant to instil deeper values.

These values included as how to make and retain real friends, how to work closely with colleagues so that the team-work needed in order to solve complex problems could be effective, how to lead without domineering, how to keep and exchange confidences, how to trust and be trusted, how to share rewards, how to recover from setbacks, how to charm and amuse others, how to retain one’s curiosity and application in the face of apparent failure.

The University continued the boarding-school training in setting up the individual to be both an effective member of a group, but also able to face loneliness and isolation, mental, moral and physical. In a word, it was to turn the late adolescent into a ‘young gentleman’ who was worthy of being called ‘Sir’ by the Porters and other College servants who waited upon him. It was to instil that calm independence and stoicism famously portrayed in Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If’.

The aim may strike us as over-ambitious, for it was no less than an attempt to construct, or re-construct, the whole man – and nowadays the woman too. It was partly about the mind and the tools of thought. Yet it was equally about the body through the heavy emphasis on sport and other physical activities.

It was also about what in the West is roughly call the ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’, that is the immaterial essence which makes us human. Being derived from monastic roots, there was always a strong spiritual component, compulsory church services until 150 years ago, a College life revolving around Chapels, numerous small religious rituals in the blessing of food and the wearing of special costumes, the rituals to incorporate and to send members on their way. A student was being prepared not just for life on earth, but, ultimately, for the eternal life beyond the grave.


This is why my account of Cambridge had to pay as much attention to things like architecture, drama, music, poetry, games and sports, clubs and associations, customs and culture as it did, in only one chapter out of fourteen, to ‘Education’ in the formal sense. We now tend to think of Universities as strictly about ‘Education’ in the narrow teaching sense – learning a subject, history, economics, biology. Yet Cambridge was an attempt to learn about ‘life’ in all its variety. Even in its disciplinary range, where all arts, humanities, social sciences, physical and natural sciences were encouraged, it was broad spectrum.

All this happened with great intensity in the three, eight-week, terms in a place which, is in some ways ‘sacred’ or set apart from ordinary life, surrounded by walls and rituals so that it has a bounded, out of time and space, feeling. This was possible because Cambridge was a liminal place, neither in nor out of the world, a no-man’s land, an oasis or neutral arena. It was in the world in that there were many connections of an economic, social, personal and other kinds so it was not an ‘asylum’ in the sense that the anthropologist Erving Goffman describes prisons, boarding schools and monasteries. Yet it was also out of the world in that many of the pressures and values of individualistic, capitalist, society were muted.

I have often thought that the essence of modernity is the separation of the great institutional forces of economy, society, politics and religion. In most civilizations these overlap. In the modern West they are separated, at least in theory, so that the individual is the only place where all four join together. To a certain extent we can use this idea to describe Cambridge. It is a place which has kept the over-riding demands of the State, the Church, the Economy and the Society (particularly in its usual form of kinship and class) under control. One can chose one’s politics, largely follow one’s inner religious convictions, feel free of the capitalist pressure to earn a living, and escape many of the pressures of family and even class.

It is a neutral stage where the young person or aged don can move without too much friction, can largely feel free for a few months at a time. It has something of the feeling of a holiday, an ‘Ivory Tower’, a time of diminished weight, a sort of lightness of being, at least in ideal if the worries of student debt or future unemployment or the next teaching assignment do not weigh too heavily. The pleasure and privilege of this experience is what often makes it difficult for students who have been through this to re-join what is sometimes called ‘the real world’. The honeymoon is over, but the memories often remain and, for a few highly fortunate individuals such as myself, the honeymoon has continued for almost all of my life.

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How then has Cambridge tried to fulfil these varied roles, how has it tried to encourage and discipline the mind, body and spirit, over its 800 years?

One area to inspect may be termed the political structure of Cambridge. There are two parts to this. Externally there are the relations with the powerful forces of the State. At least twice, Cambridge might have been destroyed entirely, in the way that all universities on the Continent were destroyed, and similar institutions in early India, Islam and China were crushed by powerful people who were hungry for the accumulated wealth of institutions of learning, or wanted to control the potentially dangerous thoughts which might be generated within semi-autonomous institutions dedicated to thinking.

Yet a combination of luck, certain people both within and outside Cambridge, good connections and certain features of the law of Trusts and corporations helped Cambridge escape these major threats in the past. The threats are still there and have to be faced year by year, however. It is essential for a free University to be free from political manipulation, yet the rulers know that, as Francis Bacon put it, ‘knowledge is power’. They are threatened by this, or want to use universities for their own short-term purposes. In the book I tell the story of how English politics, the growth of the many institutions of Civil Society protected Oxford and Cambridge.

Then there is internal politics. There is a tendency in all institutions towards the centralization of power and hence the destruction of variation and initiative at the lower levels. There is also a tendency towards institutional stagnation – the older members resist all change and crush their juniors.

The way in which the de-centralized system of counter-vailing powers worked in Cambridge over the centuries to prevent either of these tendencies from destroying the institution is too complex to tell her, but is one of the secrets of Cambridge explained in the book. A system of downward delegation of power, a Darwinian competitive struggle between many equal-level units, and of rules of rational discussion, have kept back the bureaucratic tide though in my forty years in Cambridge, though I have seen the waters of accountancy culture rising. As Tocqueville noted in comparison to his own France, England is relatively uncentralized and unbureaucratic and I certainly feel the difference when I visit universities in many parts of the world.

Certainly through my career at the local level of my Department and College I have felt largely free to organize my life, my teaching and my research, without being forced to follow rules set by a bureaucratic centre. I am not a Civil Servant. I am accountable to myself, to God and in only a vague and unspecified way, to the University. The rules which guide my life are self-generated. This leads, of course, to problems of ‘free riders’ and minor abuse. Yet it also encourages many to work beyond their legal requirement and to feel that their efforts are valued and their personal initiatives are what determine a successful life and career.

A second mechanism to encourage the growth of the whole person is to create meaningful sub-communities within the University. Humans seem to he happiest and work best together within face-to-face communities of a few dozen or so. They can share, exchange, play and gossip with friends in an atmosphere of equality and trust where there are borders and a feeling of ‘we’ and ‘us’. The Collegiate structure, which has only survived in its full form in Oxford and Cambridge, and which has not been transferred successfully even to America, provides this ‘genius of scale’ as the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern calls it.

Like the tribal group described by anthropologists, a person belongs to a special community which shares a multi-dimensional space – social, political, economic and spiritual. There are libraries and teaching rooms, dining halls and kitchens, playing fields and gardens, bars and common rooms, chapels and music rooms. It is a corporation – a body – which has existed for centuries and is expected to exist for ever. A person becomes part of this body through an incorporation ritual and stays on, perhaps, as in my case, from quite early in their lives until death.

Yet, unlike tribal groups, these meaningful entities of ‘Fellows and students’ are not recruited on the basis of birth, that is blood and kinship – or even marriage, but supposedly through a certain kind of aptitude and merit, including intellectual ability. A College combines the sentiments, the feelings, the warmth of something permanent, which ‘Community’ in the sociological sense gives, the confidence of multi-stranded, enduring and intimate ties. Alongside there is the flexibility and openness of contract or Association, the ability to leave or join if one wants.

It is difficult to explain all this to those who have not experienced an Oxbridge College. Colleges increasingly feel strange in our mobile and fragmented world. The place of work is also a place of social meaning, there is often life-time assurance, those who work together also eat, play and relax together. It is something like this, but rather than being focused round the production of electronic goods or cars, it is focused round things of the mind – teaching, learning discovery.

The Colleges are immensely important for intellectual collaboration because they are not based on a subject or discipline. Certain Colleges may be famous for certain subjects, Trinity for mathematics, Caius for medicine, Trinity Hall for law, King’s for music. Yet most disciplines are taught and studied. So that when, as is strongly encouraged, people relaxing over meals – lunches, dinners and even breakfast – it is with people in other disciplines.

This enforced intellectual sociality around food and drink, whether in the College bars, dining halls, wine rooms, common rooms, or in the numerous pubs and coffee shops in Cambridge, means that much of the real intellectual work happens outside the class room. A person has to explain the interest and importance of what s/he is doing to others in distant topics. One learns about surprising new developments so that new worlds of ideas are constantly opening up.

To be a student at Cambridge is a total experience for those short weeks. It is not a nine to five, ‘going to the office’, way of life confined to the week-days. It goes on into the evenings, over the week-ends, over meals and in many side-activities. A student does not just read or study a subject. They become a student. It is a mode of being, a kind of calling or vocation.

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While the Colleges provide much of the social and spiritual side of life and organize and provide much of the undergraduate supervision, they are complemented by a world of associational forms which prevent them from becoming a trap, a stale, inbred and limited experience.

In my book I describe this associational world of societies, clubs, associations of all kinds and sorts. For example, Cambridge has over fifty societies listed just under the letter ‘S’ on the University website, including the Scandinavian, Science Fiction, Students in Free Enterprise, Sikh, Skydiving, Slavonic and East European, Slovenian, Strong and Humorous Women and many others. Others include the Amoral Sciences Club, Women’s Belarusian Society, Women’s Bobbin Lace-Making Club, Gog Magog Molly, Harry Potter Society (Society 9 ¾), Life Extension and Rejuvenation Society, Madhouse Theatre, Role Playing Society, Tiddlywinks Club and the Ultimate Frisbee Club. This is a tiny glimpse of a whirling world of play and performance.

Many who look back on their days at University particularly remember these more focused groups. It is here that they often learn what their real passion for life will be – acting in the Footlights or Marlow society, politics and debating in the Union Society, music in the multitude of high level choirs and orchestras, sport in the international level teams, writing and poetry – almost anything. And they also find in the numerous parallel organizations, the Department, Faculties, Laboratories, bookshops, museums and elsewhere, places whey they can expand their talents and learn how to organize a rich world which complements the purely intellectual.

This multitude of groups is one reason why Cambridge is such a rich and varied place. But it does mean that it is impossible to describe an average or normal trajectory. The small bubbles of activity through which people pass often overlap only a little, friendships grow around these shared passions, status and ability is measured, and often the first serious love affairs occur in these sheltered days.

As I have witnessed over my fifty years since becoming an undergraduate, the student intake has broadened immensely from that white, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon set of males who predominated when I went to Oxford in 1960. Now there are, especially at the postgraduate level, possibilities of chance encounters with a much richer set of people from many different ethnic, national, class backgrounds – and of course at least half of the students are women. All that really unifies them is that they know that entry has been based on an estimate of intellectual potential and enthusiasm and that most of those a person meets will share a liberal, enquiring and committed attitude to things of the mind.

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Humans are deeply influenced by the sensory world around them, both the natural and the built shell within which they live. The size and shape of rooms and buildings, the colours and smells and sounds they move through, all affect their thoughts and feelings. In my book I try to explain a little of what is one of the most powerful influences of Cambridge – its architecture and ambience. Cambridge is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, on a par with Kyoto or Sienna. It has maintained a feeling that one is tunnelling back through the centuries as one moves around its irregular shapes. The contrasts of trees, water, stone and grass give it a beauty which has been celebrated in poetry and give many millions of tourist a certain delight. At its apex is the mystery of King’s College Chapel.

The pleasing juxtapositions, the encouragement to refreshing walks and resting of the eye and mind, are all part of the total effect. Many are the stories of discoveries made along the Backs or thoughts first emerging in a magnificent hall or room. Such external beauty seeps through to the mind, encouraging high aspirations, a sense of history and past greatness, which gives hope and a sense of humility.

Imagine if the buildings of Cambridge had been totally destroyed by Oliver Cromwell in the seventeenth century. Is it likely that it would nevertheless contributed what it has to the world, if it had been rebuilt in a dull and cramped way? It is one of the most beautiful, spacious yet domestic, universities in the world and it encourages those who live in it to be inspired.

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When Cambridge was founded, supposedly eight hundred years ago this year, it was set up in a context where teachers taught such subjects as rhetoric, logic, mathematics, music, grammar, astronomy, not in a closed way, in order just to repeat and pass on the wisdom of the ancestors, but to build on this and to devise new insights and knowledge through ingenuity and experimental thinking.

This unusual European tradition was given a particular force by two specifically English features of the medieval period. One was the importance of a customary and oral tradition of the English Common Law. The universities trained lawyers and were often run by lawyers. In English law, the basic tool is confrontational argument, trying to extract the truth through disagreement and persuasion, putting forward one’s best proofs and best logic in order to outwit and outmanoeuvre the other. The great Cambridge trained lawyer Francis Bacon institutionalized this approach and applied it to the natural as well as the human world in his Advancement of Learning in the early seventeenth century. Yet the method was in itself already old.

These methods of proofs, logic and argument were the ones which young students were encouraged to bring to their studies. A student was set a problem or question, told where he might find some preliminary answers in previous writings, and then told to come back and explain his answer to an older and practised ‘Master of Arts’ or teacher. Such a Master’s role was to direct and sharpen the student’s minds, to watch them develop. They were like swordsmen or potters of the mind, being taught a craft or mystery, but in this case the craft was a mental agility and ingenuity which would sustain them through life. A Master was keen that, if possible, they would think for themselves. Resting on authority was not enough; they should explore and, if possible, cast old wisdom in a new light.

This tradition was made possible by the fact that, as today, much of the teaching was done face-to-face, one to one, through conversation. Each week the student would come with his ‘essay’ or other assignment, his thoughts on a problem, and the tutor’s job was to explore its weaknesses and strengths. This is a very strange way of teaching, not just punishing mistakes of memory or logic, or writing up things to be copied down, but encouraging to a certain extent risk, intuition, wit, new thoughts, when they seemed fruitful.

It was also based on another peculiarity of England. In most societies, to argue with one’s elders is not possible. They are the sensei, they instruct, they know the wisdom. Age and perhaps social statues creates a chasm between teacher and pupil. Because of peculiarities of the English age and class structure, it was possible, at least temporarily and within the confines of the university, to assume enough equality between master and student for there to be a real conversation, a reasonably equal game between opponents. I have experienced this many times in practice. My English students usually treat me with some respect, yet not with such deference that they are not prepared to engage in intellectual games. They challenge me and in the best of relationships I learn as much from them as they do from me.

On the other hand, of course, as Tocqueville noted and modern educationalists have endorsed, there is a danger of too much equality. If all hierarchy is lost, respect for knowledge goes and there is no reason for students to listen to teachers. There are considerable pressures to fragment education into a consumer-driven service with many disconnected but hopefully attractive modules.

A University can become a supermarket of the mind, with students wheeling their intellectual trollies through – a tin of pre-Socratic philosophy here, a jar of Renaissance poetry there, a bag of bio-chemistry tossed on top in a series of modules. This is something which Cambridge partly allows through some combinations of courses and easy movement between a Part I and a Part II, but does not take to the American extreme.

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The cardinal danger of the religious-based inheritance of the West, derived from monotheistic religions of the Book, is intolerance. If God laid down the laws, it may be impious of us to seek to probe into them too deeply, and particularly to challenge the interpretation made of them by the current upholders of the faith, the priesthood. This was a danger to which both later Islamic Scholarship as well as Catholics in Spain or Italy after the Counter-Reformation, encountered – and much intellectual speculation was crushed.

Cambridge was the centre of the English Reformation – most of the major early thinkers were in Cambridge, Tyndal, Cranmer, Ridley, Foxe and others – and they continued and expanded the tradition of the separation of religion and thought implicit in Protestantism. They continued a medieval belief that the laws of the universe were at two levels, sometimes known as primary and secondary causes. Ultimately, God was the primary cause of everything and his ways were ineffable, unknowable, immutable and should not be investigated. They were the preserve of the Church with its cloudy mysteries.

Yet God operated in this world through secondary laws, like the laws of magnetism, gravity, motion and evolution. It was both permissible and indeed desired by God that we should come to understand these secondary laws so that we could lead better lives and alleviate suffering. So science was possible and the enquiring mind was not crushed.

In sum, the deeper philosophical premises which lie behind a university were specific and different in the West. These premises are not a sufficient cause for open and sustained investigation, as we see from the collapse of all the great European universities between the sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Yet they were necessary foundations on which, with luck, judgement and a propitious economic, political and social climate a good deal could be achieved in Cambridge over a period of 800 years

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It is often assumed that people make break-throughs of a high level, discover the laws of electricity, gravity, the circulation of the blood, the evolution of species or the basis of life in DNA, largely by hard work. All of these happened in Cambridge, but not just through hard work. Such sustained application, the sifting of much data, is a necessary prelude for a paradigmatic shift. Yet what I have found and tried to explain in my chapters on discovery and creativity in Cambridge is the way in which more than this is needed to make a significant step.

Among the factors I isolate for creativity are the encouragement of curiosity through a supportive institutional context, relative equality so that younger minds are not crushed, the absence of too much jealousy, the tolerance of eccentricity and deviance, a situation which allows an easy flow between specialisms, the avoidance of too much routine and boring teaching or administration, the absence of cynicism, enough time to develop complex thoughts, conversations, accumulated intellectual resources such as libraries, museums and laboratories.

For real discovery, there needs to be a high level of chance or luck – but chance can be encouraged if there is a right mix of high-level talents, a feeling of belonging to an interesting ‘club’ or endeavour, the meeting of exciting minds. People must not be too risk averse and the costs of failure must not be too high. As well as the patient assembly of ‘facts’ one needs intuition, guesswork, an almost playful attitude. People need to become more than specialists, to realize as Einstein put it, ‘it is better to be roughly right rather than precisely wrong’.

And all this needs to take place in a university which is more than just an institution operating on the mind. It should be a liberal democracy, an artistic haven, a sports mecca, a debating chamber, a haven in a heartless world.

In Cambridge University the normal tendency of intellectuals to become withdrawn from the material and social world has been mitigated. There are pure mathematicians and armchair anthropologists. Yet there has also long been a tinkering, strings and ceiling wax, love of making and doing and acting in the world to complement the lonely voyages of the mind.

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Perhaps I can say good-bye to a certain part of my life in Cambridge, as I do in the book, in the following words.

‘Cambridge stands for curiosity, openness, fellowship, wonder, humour, playfulness, awe, delight, argument, competitiveness, modesty, subversion, ceremonial, kindness, tolerance, beauty, utility, liberty, conformity and a whole bundle of often colliding and clashing values. Those who have navigated its still pools and rapids are attracted to many of these features in differing times and to different degrees.

Combined with its charm and a feeling of otherworldly magic, it seldom fails to make a deep impression, even if a person appears to forget or reject it. Like any powerful parent, it affects the rest of their lives, whether they like it or not. It evokes strong emotions.

Above all, Cambridge gives me, and many, a sense of hope. Here is a place which has preserved a set of ideals within beautiful surroundings for over three quarters of a millenium. Much of the treasure it has accumulated is not in its physical buildings, but in what the Japanese would describe as ‘living national treasures’. The poets, scientists, philosophers and others, dead or alive, are its greatest gift, along with the large number of students who have passed through it and gone on to their diverse careers.’