1. Students generally are required to attend lectures at Oxford.
2. At some colleges students must change clothes to dinner.
3. In a short stroll one can pass the house where Christopher Wren discovered his comet.
4. Tolkien wrote notes for the Hobbit trilogy in one of Oxford’s pubs.
5. Mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson wrote a children’s book called Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in Oxford.
6. Margaret Thatcher and John Kennedy studied at Oxford.
For 800 years the University of Oxford has been polishing minds and confusing outsiders in roughly equal measure. It is a place where students generally aren’t required to attend lectures, don’t receive grades, seldom study anything outside their chosen subject, and take just three sets of exams during the course of their college careers — “one to get in and two to get out,” as one alumnus told me.
“There are more rules and traditions than you can imagine,” Owen Sheers, a cheerful but slightly shell-shocked-looking first-year student, told me toward the end of his first week in New College. “At my college you dress one way if you go to the first sitting of dinner, another way if you go to the second. It’s very confusing.”
A confusion of tradition is perhaps an inevitable consequence of a place so deeply steeped in history. In a short stroll you can pass the house where Edmund Hailey discovered his comet; the site of Britain’s oldest public museum, the Ashmolean; the hall where architect Christopher Wren drew his first plans; the pub where J.R.R. Tolkien wrote notes for the Hobbit trilogy (it stands opposite the pub where Thomas Hardy made similar preparations for Jude the Obscure) ', the track where Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile; the meadow where a promising young mathematician named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson refined The Formulae of Plane Trigonometry, An Elementary Treatise on Determinants and — oh yes — a children’s trifle called Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Walk down the broad and curving High Street and you follow in the footsteps of Samuel Johnson, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, Jonathan Swift, Roger Bacon, Oscar Wilde, Graham Greene, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, and Bill Clinton, to name just a few who have worked and studied here.
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