Experimental History

They were applying for fellowships to go study there; I had recently returned from doing one, and Harvard was happy to keep me housed and fed if I would help students win. But I had a bad time at Oxford and I wanted students to know what they were getting into, so I would sit across from them in the dining hall, plates full of chicken tenders and french fries, and explain that postgraduate education in the UK is largely a way of extracting money from foreign students. Professors over there are checked out, classes are bad, and the whole place is pervaded with this sense of isolation and alienation, like everyone is behind a plate of glass. (Also you might end up briefly homeless.)

Sometimes I run into these students after they return from Oxford. “How was it?” I ask. They usually say something like: “The professors were checked out, the classes were bad, and I felt isolated and alienated.” And we share a knowing look, the kind that can only occur between two people who have been hurt exactly the same way.

We spend our lives learning hard things the hard way: what it feels like to fall in love, how to forgive, what to say when a four-year-old asks where babies come from, when to leave a party, how to scramble eggs, when to let a friendship go, what to do when the person sitting next to you on the bus bursts into tears, how to parallel park under pressure, and so on.

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