Built in system for Competitiveness in Oxford University



When Japanese student comes to Oxford university, they notice the weird, dare to say, ORIENTAL and EXOTIC feature of the university.

Obviously, today’s competitiveness of Oxford is attributed to its language adopted and, as the result of which and its brand name, imported theories and students from America.

When we see the university as the research institute, these facts are the most important facts. Despite the backwardness in terms of technology and facilities, the most important reasons why many pundits evaluate the competitiveness of this university is above mentioned ones.

I here focus on the other relatively minor factor which university students to be diligent and competitive.

Long before America dominate the science world the University has built in its competition promoter: college system which American University didn’t adopt.

As a rule, university student must belong to one of less than 40 colleges. Colleges function as a living space. It is a long tradition in Oxford since it started an institution to educate religious students. As such each college has a church, dormitory, and dinner space. The college members live together inside the college. In primitive style, college tutor (perhaps) exclusively teached the members. College members could access books storaged in the college library. At the time when books were enormously precious, the right to access the books is undoubtly very important. Not sure from the beginning the university started grading student performance in the primitive period, at least after university started to do that, College members have been using of their facilities to compete with other college members. Lately the exclusive access attenuated due to the aggregation of the corresponding books into one library such as social science library or law library, but tutor system still lasts even today.

The effect I focus on here is the loyalty of the college members to the colleges. As Sir Humphrey, a permanent secretary of administrative department in the “Yes Minister” is well known as a Belli college, perhaps named after Balliol College, a prestigious college, the members’ affection last even after the graduation.

As a result, the members of college try to maximize their prestige reputation by competiting as a loosen sense of agent of the college. They not merely have experience in eating together, chatting together and then good friends, but they have the same interest in bolstering their college’s reputation. Senior students teach junior students in the same college for this reason. Alumni donates money to their colleges. Their aims are not directly to improve the university circumstances or reputation but the colleges.

The competition among colleges is well known. The even famous news papers (I remember Times?) evaluates the rankings of the oxford colleges. Managers of colleges pressures students to be efficient.

They compete with each other. It makes the competitive students more competitive.