Writing in Soliloquies in England (1922), the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana, who quit Harvard and America in 1912 to wander across Europe, never returning and eventually settling in Rome, reflected on Oxford as he had observed it during the First World War:
Dons are picturesque figures. Their fussy ways and their oddities, personal and intellectual, are as becoming to them as the black feathers to the blackbird. Their minds are all gaunt pinnacles, closed gates and little hidden gardens. A mediaeval tradition survives in their notion of learning and in their manner of life… In the grander ones there may be some assimilation to the prelate, a country gentleman or a party leader; but the rank and file are modest, industrious pedagogues… The general systems to which the dons may be addicted [are] probably some revision of Christian theology, of Platonic mysticism, or of German philosophy. Such foreign doctrines do very well for the dons of successive epochs, native British philosophy not being fitted to edify the minds of the young; those vaster constructions appeal more to the imagination, and their very artificiality and ticklish architecture, like that of a house of cards, are part of their function…
Traces of this donnish life were still visible when I arrived in Oxford in the late Sixties. Everything was centred in the colleges – small, self-governing medieval-style institutions with their own endowments and loyalties. (Partly because of the demands of laboratory science, Cambridge had a stronger central authority, though some colleges were and are far richer than any in Oxford.) The university hardly impinged on us, putting on lectures at which attendance was optional – I must have gone to barely a dozen in my three years of philosophy, politics and economics – and issuing degrees, which included Fourth Class Honours, a perversely prestigious category meant for sportsmen, socialites and idlers. The intellectual backbone of an Oxford education consisted of weekly hour-long tutorials, in which one or two undergraduates read out essays and discussed them with their tutor in what amounted to a version of Socratic dialogue.
In those days, being a don was not so much an occupation as a way of life. Quite a few never published – they focused on teaching or managing college properties and gardens, instead. Today, this would inevitably be seen as an expression of privilege. For me it represented an alternative to the monotony of a bourgeois career. Teaching and taking your turn running the college, you could read and write as you pleased in a community where conversation was cherished and erudition worn lightly. There was a sweetness of life under Oxford’s ancien régime, which I found still intact on becoming a fellow of Jesus College in 1976.
That donnish world, with its evanescent atmosphere and flavours, is not easily captured by the historian who relies – as Colin Kidd, born in 1964, an undergraduate at Gonville and Caius, Cambridge, fellow of All Souls, Oxford, and professor of history at the University of St Andrews, confesses he does – chiefly on the written word. He misses its peculiar gentleness. The days in which swarms of “hearties” or “bloods” raided and trashed the rooms of “aesthetes” – assaults Isaiah Berlin recalled in conversation to me as being not uncommon in the Twenties – were long gone. The ugly hostility that festers in universities against unfashionable minorities – Jews, Christians and dissenters from the progressive catechism – was yet to come. Discreetly, Kidd passes over the rise of a persecutory orthodoxy as a factor in the decline of the 21st-century academy.
When I arrived as an undergraduate in 1968, Oxford was a haven of laissez-faire. If there was any instruction in what to think or believe, I never came across it. Oxford philosophy, more a style of writing than a body of doctrine, eschewed any such ambitions. Clarity of expression was valued more than anything else, and grand abstractions regarded with mistrust. Suspicion of ideology went with diversity of opinion. Among the dons there were liberal and reactionary Tories, social democrats and Whiggish sceptics of democracy, a scattering of Marxisant historians, and many variations on what would later be called Old Labour. For most, politics was an object of intermittent curiosity rather than personal commitment.
Donnish laissez-faire was not without limits. As Kidd reports in one of the thumbnail sketches that enliven Twilight of the Dons, the Irish classicist ER Dodds – appointed by the then prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, to Oxford’s Regius chair of Greek in 1936 – was snubbed at Christchurch, where the chair was based, on account of his Fenian sympathies and conscientious objection in the First World War. His colleagues in the faculty were scandalised by his view of ancient Greek culture as being soaked through with mysticism, undercutting their belief in classics as an intellectual preparation for a modern ruling class. Stirred by his pioneering study The Greeks and the Irrational (1951), I sought Dodds out as soon as I arrived back in Oxford from three years as a lecturer at the University of Essex. He told me that taking the Regius chair was the worst mistake in his life. Yet he never claimed to have been silenced. The practice of cancellation – applied, unsuccessfully, to the distinguished Oxford theologian Nigel Biggar when he was leading a project on “Ethics and Empire”, a moral audit that included the possible benefits of empire for colonised peoples – was unimaginable then.
There were some serious deformations at Oxford. In the late Sixties, women were still a small minority in the student body and the faculty, but not so small as in many universities at the time, as there were five colleges set apart for women, which tended to elect female fellows. A large majority of undergraduates had been educated at private schools, but I came across many from grammar schools, and it was in no way unusual to meet some from working-class backgrounds like my own.
In my experience, Oxford – an “elitist” institution – seemed more socially variegated than other sectors of higher education. At Essex – which, like most of the new universities, was solidly middle class – I watched transfixed as a student leader urged, absurdly, that the campus be ransacked, provoking – he predicted – a proletarian rising in nearby Colchester, the site of a large army base. The antinomian ritual completed, he ambled off contentedly to the bar.
Kidd begins this attempt to capture “a short-lived moment in the corporate life of England’s cultural leadership” by noting that “there was something odd about the dons of Oxford and Cambridge – not simply as a set of quirky and eccentric individuals but collectively, structurally… The dons of postwar Oxbridge were not so much an independent adversarial intelligentsia as something more akin to an estate of the realm.” Oxbridge dons resembled what the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge envisioned in 1830 when he wrote of the need for a clerisy – a distinct social stratum charged with promoting civilised values.
As late as 1945-46, around 20 per cent of the country’s student population was at Oxford and Cambridge. Oxbridge dons shaped educated public opinion. They also taught the country’s rulers. In 1950, 60 per cent of civil servants in the highest ranks had been educated at Oxford and Cambridge. Among postwar prime ministers through to the 1980s, so had Clement Attlee, Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home, Harold Wilson, Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher. In Wilson’s cabinet, former dons included Wilson himself, Richard Crossman, Patrick Gordon Walker, Anthony Crosland, Lord Longford and Douglas Jay of All Souls, which also provided three ministers in Thatcher’s cabinets and the head of her Downing Street policy unit.
Kidd attributes the dons’ “golden sunset” to “various shocks”. The student revolt of the late Sixties and early Seventies “made a serious dent in donnish self-assurance… Eventually the coming of Thatcherism – both in its penny-pinching economies and its aggressively philistine tone – deflated donnish ebullience.”
Minutely researched, Twilight of the Dons breaks new ground in showing how their golden age was a by-product of their part in the Second World War. Some, like the physicist Frederick Lindemann, were “at the very core of the war machine”, while the philosopher JL Austin was “essential to D-Day preparations”. Many entered the intelligence services, cementing their connection with the British state. Kidd discusses the secularisation of postwar Oxbridge, with most dons tending towards religious indifference rather than atheism, the slow rise of social science, and conflicts around French anthropological and literary theories. A chapter on the role of some well-known donnish figures in the controversy surrounding the Warren Commission on the assassination of JF Kennedy adds unexpected spice to his story.
Kidd is careful to avoid overstating the importance of student protest in the eclipse of the dons. In November 1968, a raucous demonstration was staged outside Oxford town hall against a visit by Enoch Powell, and in February 1970, part of the Clarendon building was occupied for a week. In Cambridge the Senate House and Mill Lane lecture hall were occupied in 1969, and in February 1970 there was the “Garden House riot” in which a hotel hosting a “Greek Week” while a military junta was in power was stormed. Sporadic demonstrations and occupations continued throughout the Seventies.
Photo by John Downing/Getty Images
Following the student eruptions in Paris and Chicago, protests that concerned public issues were mimetic, performative and wholly ineffectual. The large demonstration against the Vietnam War in London in October 1968, which I joined along with many others from Oxford, had no effect on the conflict, which raged on until the fall of Saigon in April 1975. But as Kidd notes, many of the Oxbridge protests concerned college regulations – the wearing of academic gowns and collar and tie at dinners, rules forbidding overnight visitors of the opposite sex and the like. Most were soon resolved in favour of the undergraduates, and collegiate life flowed on smoothly, much as before.
Kidd is less sure-footed on Thatcherism. Focusing closely on two strands of donnish opinion that were somewhat sympathetic to Thatcher – disenchanted Whig grandees and a harder right-wing Toryism associated with Cambridge’s oldest college, Peterhouse – he neglects a larger truth. The intellectual stimulus for Thatcherism did not come from the academy. It originated in think tanks, particularly the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), a temple of market fundamentalism from the Fifties. The Conservative Philosophy Group was similarly unacademic. Founded by the Tory MP Hugh Fraser, Roger Scruton and the Cambridge scholar John Casey, it hosted Richard Nixon, Harold Macmillan and Edward Heath, among other notables. Most of those who attended were not academics, donnish or otherwise, but journalists or politicians, including Margaret Thatcher, who came twice. Not all attendees took its deliberations seriously. When someone asked if Thatcher was a true conservative, the Tory sceptic Michael Oakeshott dissolved into laughter. Held in Jonathan Aitken’s townhouse in Lord North Street, Westminster, a few doors away from the IEA, the gatherings had a semi-clandestine charm. Their influence on policy was zero.
Few in higher education were aware of the tempest that was about to hit them. Their stupefied incredulity at the sudden upending of a status quo that – however radical their politics – they took for granted was an entertaining sideshow of the Thatcher years. With a few exceptions, such as the swashbuckling Scottish historian Norman Stone, Thatcher had little time for the professoriat.
Finding myself alone with her after a meeting in 1987, I raised the issue of tenure, which I had heard she planned to abolish as a “restrictive practice”. Her academic supporters amounted to a few dozen, I pointed out, and most of them opposed the measure. She showed no interest. I ploughed on. Might not tenure be justified in that it gave protection to such intellectual minorities? She fixed me with an icy glare. I tried a final gambit: wouldn’t alienating academics increase opposition to her policies? This was too much for her. “We’ll win without you,” she declared, ending our exchange. As I expected, tenure was abolished in the Education Reform Act in 1988.
In her attitude to the academy, Thatcher was both right and wrong. Right, because higher education played no part in her downfall, which began with her imposition of the widely unpopular poll tax, a creation of the doctrinaire free-market think tanks. For me, the market was useful in shaking up the stagnant corporatism of the Seventies, not an all-purpose panacea – a view not too far from Thatcher’s in her early years in power. I was not surprised when the attempt to inject market mechanisms throughout public institutions became damaging and self-defeating.
In higher education, this process involved some ironical turns. Marketising universities functioned as an engine of state control. Research assessment exercises based on spurious measures of “impact” replaced qualitative scholarly judgement.
As the conservative historian Elie Kedourie commented in a pamphlet published by the Centre for Policy Studies, this was “a regime akin to that of a command economy”. What Kedourie identified as “perestroika in universities” – a late-Soviet-style apparatus of managed pseudo-markets – required a managerial caste. One duly appeared, equipped with a legitimating ideology – the “diversity-equity-inclusion” (DEI) gospel imported from America, but rebadged for the UK as “equality, diversity and inclusion” (EDI). Equipped with this formula, an over-expanded sector was able to assert its place as part of the establishment while contriving to imagine itself an oppositional intelligentsia of the kind that existed in continental Europe. The postwar clerisy reappeared as the intellectual wing of the lanyard class.
With its fondness for “foreign doctrines”, British higher education today has something in common with Santayana’s dons. The difference is that the entire sector is now a house of cards. A business model founded on penury-inducing student loans and the mass production of degrees that serve as passports to gig work or unemployment is not viable. Artificial intelligence is rendering the modern bureaucratic university obsolete, and institutions producing surplus elites can no longer count of the support of cash-strapped governments. The era of the academic nomenklatura looks like being as brief as the golden age of the dons. How curious if the future lies with small, self-governing foundations, not unlike the semi-medieval communities that the peripatetic philosopher observed and celebrated over a century ago.
John Gray’s books include The New Leviathans: Thoughts after Liberalism (Allen Lane)
Twilight of the Dons: British Intellectuals from World War II to Thatcherism
Colin Kidd
Princeton University Press, 288pp, £30
Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops
[Further reading: Ben Rhodes’ empty words]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 08 Jul 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Great Con
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment