The following article describing certain phases of the tutorial system at Oxford was written especially for the CRIMSON by Deane Jones, a former tutor at Oxford who is now residing in Cambridge.

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I was much interested in an article which appeared in the CRIMSON on last Saturday, May 16, in which the methods and manners of Oxford tutors were described with kindly justice by Dr. Brinton. His rapid and clear survey gives a vivid picture of Oxford life and it is a considerable achievement to have simplified without distortion the mass of inconsistencies and inefficiencies which is Oxford. I can only recall one neater sketch. It is this:--

"Five things that Oxford teaches to revere;

Beef, noise, the Church, vulgarity and beer."

Dr. Brinton is more benevolent than this anonymous satirist--perhaps more benevolent than accurate in his praise of college beer. But then, I should remember that dryness lends enchantment to the taste, if you will pardon the truism.

Hard things have been said of college tutors, none harder than by the modern Juvenal I have just quoted. For example:--

"Vile is the scout (college servant) who steals the student's dole,

But viler still the don who steals the soul,

Takes the fair youth of England fresh from school

And turns him hence a pedant or a fool."

Despite this indictment I confess myself an Oxford tutor, and as such I feel compelled to criticise a little this model of a historical essay, and then to use it, as all tutors should, for the basis of my own suggestions.

Oxford Students Movie Fans

My first criticism is based partly on personal resentment and partly on impersonal jealousy for the honor of the Science of History. Your learned contributor, I hear, is a historian, and I am therefore astonished to see that he has neglected to fortify, his statements by declaring his sources. He forces me to claim the distinction of being an original source--"Tutor est fons animatus", lest any of your readers should imagine that all Oxford dons are movie fans. I admit that it is highly desirable that they should be but I fear that such a state of things is ideal and as yet outside the range of practical academies. So I must claim undisputed paternity of the essay-title he mentions on the cinema as a form of art, while denying stoutly that I encourage the evils which he implies in the mysterious term "Distribution". On the contrary, movie-going is the common, if not the unique form of concentration exercised by Oxford undergraduates; and accepting that fact without moan, I wanted to discover whether they considered it necessary that mental processes should be entirely atrophied to secure proper enjoyment of the spectacle. I was relieved to find that some of them applied the same canons of aesthetic criticism to a film as to a painting, a building or a theatrical revue.

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