From the Times Higher Education: The Seven Deadly Sins of the Academy.
When the historian David Starkey left the University of Cambridge in 1972, he told an interviewer that he “knew exactly how an ingrowing toenail felt”. There was something deeply dispiriting, he said, about “the sense of introversion, of knowing everyone”.
The inward-looking, incestuous atmosphere of university life has long made it a breeding ground for some of the canonical deadly sins. Take the description that the historian Edward Gibbon gave of the University of Oxford in the 1750s. He was taught – or, rather, not taught – by “decent easy men who supinely enjoyed the gifts of the founder. Their days were filled by a series of uniform employments: the chapel and the hall, the coffee house and the common room, till they retired, weary and well-satisfied, to a long slumber.”
“A silent blush or a scornful frown” would greet questions on whether their research was ever going to lead to any publications. A tutor called Dr Winchester “well remembered he had a salary to receive, and only forgot he had a duty to perform”.
