Strange as it may seem in this philistine age, there was a time when academics were regarded as pillars of society. In Britain between the 1940s and the 1980s, university professors, especially those from Oxford and Cambridge, were esteemed not merely for their specialist knowledge or pedagogical value but for their wider contribution to civic life. Friends of politicians and civil servants—many of whom they had taught as undergraduates—they advised on matters of state, sat on royal commissions, stood as members of Parliament, joined the House of Lords, and served as diplomats and intelligence officers. Even more noticeably, they contributed to the cultural and intellectual life of the nation through newspapers, radio, and television. The decades of the mid–20th century were the “golden age of the don,” according to one of their number, Noel Annan; a high point in British intellectual life before the Thatcherite government began its assault on the country’s institutions, including its two ancient universities.
In Twilight of the Dons, Colin Kidd, Bishop Wardlaw Professor at St. Andrew’s University, re-examines this “golden age.” Focusing exclusively on Oxford and Cambridge—often referred to by the ugly portmanteau “Oxbridge”—he explores in eight, broadly chronological chapters: the wartime careers of the dons, disputes over religion, ideas concerning university reform, arguments relating to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the introduction of sociology to the syllabus, the acolytes of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the student protests of the 1960s and 1970s, and the advent of Thatcherism. The result is a disparate, nuanced, and fascinating set of essays that amount to more than the sum of their parts.
