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Views of Wadham College
Pictures of Wadham College, Oxford University, by Andrew Hodges. |  Oxford images |
| The Main Gate: Old Walls and Odd Balls On the Web, Wadham College has an imposing portal, but back in the real world of early 2000, the first icon that the physical Wadham College presented to the browser was this:
A picture of men in kinky drag, against the seventeenth century stonework.
The Wadham 2000 May Ball promised to be Odd.
I didn't relate to it very positively, but I was probably being too serious as usual. An Odd Ball might have looked consistent with the college image within the university. Wadham is the only college with a Student Union, and certainly the only one where the student union organises a Queer Week.
Note added later: The Ball turned out a disaster, losing the College £30000. This would cover three years of my salary.
What the moral of this is I do not know. |
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| The next thing you see at the Main Gate is usually an advertisement for the chapel goings-on, which gives me pause for a different reason. I think theology belongs has rather less claim to university recognition than does astrology. It was a tremendous fight to end the church's stranglehold on education, and I am on the side of the lions. | |||
| INSIDER OR OUTSIDER?
| The Daily Telegraph quoted the chaplain as saying that a gay person wouldn't want to go within two hundred yards of a church. True enough, but I can't give it that wide a berth and do my maths teaching at Wadham. I have even been inside the chapel. Twice. The first time was for Roger and Vanessa Penrose's wedding in 1986. They asked me to act as Best Man, so I overcame my moral scruples. (I wouldn't for anyone else.) Then in 2000 I went to look at this sculpture by John Robinson. It is based on a Möbius band. I could identify immediately with its imagery. | ||
| Yet the chaplain told me that he feels the outsider in a secular Wadham; he sees me as the scientific insider. | |||
| The chaplain and I are both outsider-insiders in the Senior Common Room, where the Fellows and Lecturers chill out. It is the coolest room in the original seventeenth-century quadrangle. One fab feature of the SCR is that it makes me feel young by comparison. The chaplain and I have the shortest hair in sight, and are unusual for knowing something about clubbing. Neither of us have a money-career and we often agree about political issues. |
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| I do my best to have a serious talk with someone every time I'm in lunch (I am entitled to 108 a year) but this is not always easy. As a mathematician I don't expect anyone to ask about my work, though my stock went up briefly when I had some soundbites on television. To be honest, my web of e-correspondence is nowadays much more vital than physical collegiality. | |||
 | This fine staircase is in the Student Union building, a 1950s addition to the Back Quad. This brings me to geometry, and to my part-time job as tutor for the Wadham maths students. What I like about my job is that it is one where I never have to lie. There is neither a royal nor a politically correct road to geometry. The university exams set a very demanding standard, and Wadham does as well as any college in getting the students to meet it. I like the way we are really immersed in serious problem solving, and it keeps my wits sharp. | ||
| But the depth of the maths course unfortunately goes with an Oxford narrowness; you can go through it without ever reading anything but a maths text book, without writing any kind of critical report or exercising any independent value judgment. Also, I am too much a coach for examination technique. Working in the vacations to alleviate mounting debts leaves the students little time for broader education. The careers advice service propels students remorselessly towards big-business management consultancy. I think this is a shame when there is more scope than ever for individualism. Whether there is any real purpose to my work I do not know. | |||
| This is the patio outside the Student Union bar. Underneath the tables are rhombi making a small piece of a non-periodic Penrose tiling for the patio. Roger Penrose is now an Emeritus Fellow of the college. I don't know if the students notice this amazing pattern: something that had gone unseen in thousands of years of studying geometry, symmetry and designs. This is just one tiny aspect of Roger's originality. It's his work in creating twistor theory that brought me to Oxford. |
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| The students, unfortunately, see virtually nothing of our research, although the influence of Roger's geometric methods comes through a bit in my teaching. Nowadays, half of Oxford appointments are research contracts outside the collegiate structure. There is an unresolved conflict between teaching and research priorities which is bound to be inflamed again in the future; innovation has an uneasy insider-outsider relationship to Oxford's traditional role in educating future world rulers. | |||
| The patio lies at the foot of the fine new Bowra Building, completed in 1992. Wadham is a large college and cannot accommodate all its students inside the walls. Some of them have to be exposed to the realities of life in East Oxford. | ||
| In 1999 the college had a PR video made. It started with how Maurice Bowra, Warden of the college in the 1950s, decided to open the doors to working-class boys. The college was also the first Oxford college open to women equally with men in 1974. This was long before our students were born, but never mind. The gardener remembers Bowra walking round this spot, and reflects on how the seasons have changed with global warming. |
 Maurice Bowra | ||
| Sources close to the Senior Common Room tell me that Bowra was well-known for being particularly welcoming to handsome working-class boys. I feel rather uncomfortable when sexuality is mixed up with real (not play) power roles. Or am I being too serious again? For some light relief, let me tell you that my great-uncle, son of a Somerset housepainter, was the only one of my forebears to have had some higher education. He was at Wadham for a spell as some kind of compensation for severe injury in the First World War. Fifty years later, when as a boy I visited him, his books and works of art made a great impression on me. And he was gay too, I knew that even then. The moral of this story is that it confirms the Wadham gene theory. | |||
| The students I know do not come from rich backgrounds: more middling, and often from the surviving grammar schools. Oxford makes some effort at outreach with its Access scheme, but it is obvious that school students in poorer economic backgrounds are greatly disadvantaged not just as regards Oxford entrance, but as regards any kind of higher education.
Wadham like all institutions has to juggle ideals and economic realities. Its stance differs more in style than in content from that of the Blair government, but style counts for a good deal and Oxford is out of favour with new Labour spin gurus.
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| The £1000 fee, imposed by the new government on students, looks like the thin end of a wedge which is pushing Oxford towards privatisation. Lacking the great endowments and business traditions of the major private American universities, Oxford would then become a finishing school for the rich again. Are we seeing the end of a temporary twentieth century occupation of these old walls by the plebs? My great-uncle saw the beginning of it, but maybe I am seeing the writing on the wall. Fortunately I have absolutely no responsibility for coping with this situation. | |||
| My only responsibility at Wadham is for mathematical truth-telling, which is a wonderful privilege. I do not envy the duties of the Fellows. A few years back I met a Wadham student in the gym, and when I said I worked at Wadham he assumed I was a gardener. Like the risen Lord I took this as a great compliment. The gardens are really really cool. |  | ||
 | Back to the main gate, out on the street again, and another thick but beautiful stone wall. I am writing a realistic Oxford novel, The Unwelding, which alludes to Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure of a hundred years ago. There is a Crozier College in my story, borrowed from Hardy's alternative world. The fictional students call it Crazier College, and it has a passing resemblance to the real Wadham. Jude was a stonemason; nowadays physical walls are less important. As in Berlin, the walls that count are those that lie in the head. | ||
Photographs March/April 2000, text written Easter Sunday, 23 April 2000.
Some revisions were made in 2002: the Wadham College website no longer gives access to the Student Union material and some comments have therefore been removed.
The chaplain, Giles Fraser, has moved on to become a London vicar. You can see his pro-religion arguments in The Guardian, 23 August 2002, and his 2003 comments on the Battle for the soul of anglicanism over gay bishops.
My song, Gerry's Nightmare, was partly inspired by my dialogues with him.
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