Arthur's Blog: I Am in Every Respect Enjoying the Fantasy of an Oxford Education (Minus the Black Cloak)

I have just concluded the first four days of a weeklong stay at Christ Church College in Oxford, England, where I am enrolled in the "Oxford  Experience," the world's most famous learning vacation.

My course of study, formally called "Virginia Woolf and Her Circle," relates to the Bloomsbury Group, those remarkable British authors, artists, philosophers and economists of the early twentieth century who set out to challenge the accepted social, political, and sexual mores of Victorian England.  They were, among others, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa and Clive Bell, E.M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, John Maynard Keynes, and others.

We meet each day in the living room of an apartment assigned to an Oxford don (a tutor or professor) in one of the awesome sixteenth century buildings of a college that was planned by Cardinal Wolsey and completed by Henry VIII.  There we discuss and argue the texts of four outstanding Bloomsbury books from 9:15a.m. to 1p.m., breaking only for coffee about halfway through each morning.  Those sessions can only be described as intellectual fireworks.  You do not become a don at Oxford unless you are an outstanding scholar of proven quality, and our don is like a combination of the English department heads of Yale, Harvard and Princeton in one person, sprinkled with a bit of Harold Bloom, Lionel Trilling, and Alfred Kazin. 

Other students in our group (half from the U.S.; others from France, Italy, and Australia; a few from Britain) are pursuing courses ranging from Particle Physics, to The Life of Cardinal Wolsey, to the History of the B.B.C., and The Brain and Its Senses.  We meet for meals in the Harry Potter Dining Hall (yes, it's the one from the first movie in the series), and also attend evening lectures on a variety of other subjects in other buildings looking down on the several quads that make up Christ Church College.  I want to pinch myself when I walk through a setting that hasn't changed at all since the year 1549 (other Oxford colleges date to the 1200s).

Because this blog deals with travel and not with academic matters, I won't go on about the nature of the experience itself.  But so you can decide whether you'd like to attend one of the six weeks of courses scheduled for 2013, I should tell you something about the cost of coming here to participate in an extraordinary adventure.

The seven days and six nights cost around $300 per night (not including airfare to Britain).  That sum brings you:  all tuition for the classes you take, six nights of accommodation in a comfortable student residence where you also receive the services of a "scout" who makes the bed and cleans the room each morning, three gigantic meals a day in the Harry Potter Dining Hall, daily escorted sightseeing of Oxford itself and other sights and famous palaces and stately homes outside of Oxford (which are optional, free activities scheduled for each afternoon), wine with your meals three times a week and at two extra wine receptions scheduled for each week, evening lectures most nights delivered by other famous Oxford Dons, and constant coffee breaks each morning, and again at night in various college halls.  I count that a pretty hefty return against the $300 a night you are spending.  It compares with the meals and escorted sightseeing you'd receive from standard tour operators, but it also includes those incomparable daily classes and other intellectual activities brought to you by distinguished teachers.

I'll be writing a greater length about the program scheduled for 2013.  I will myself try to come back for more, and can't imagine why other intellectually curious Americans might not want to do the same. Here is a vacation activity that towers over almost any other you might consider.