Clinton’s Oxford Connection: What ‘Debating Society’? : Debate: During Bill Clinton’s years at the university, the Oxford Union was the single most uncool place in town.

I attended Oxford University at the same time as Bill Clinton. Before you think that this is going to be one of those articles--you know, “The Clinton I Knew”--I should say that I never knew Bill Clinton; that nobody I knew at Oxford knew Bill Clinton, and that I would bet a small fortune that Bill Clinton knew nobody who knew me. But as the debates between George Bush, Ross Perot and Clinton approach, I am, like any Oxonian would be, fascinated by the way President Bush has demonized Oxford, and used the time that Clinton and many of his advisers spent there as a stick to beat the governor’s campaign with.

There are three separate attacks made against Clinton’s Oxford connection. On one--the subliminal charge that Clinton was the leader of the movement against the Vietnam War while at Oxford--I have zero information. The key point to remember about American students at Oxford then is that they couldn’t play soccer. Since that--and a few other activities which, with an eye on my political viability, I will for now gloss over--was all my friends and I did, our contact with Americans was necessarily limited.

It is the other two charges that are interesting. The first--floated in the President’s speech at Enid, Okla., on Sept. 17--was that Clinton and his advisers had picked up at Oxford a commitment to European ideas on social welfare and industrial policy. This had polluted their minds, diverting them from the pure stream of free-market policies.

The second is that, simply by virtue of being at Oxford, Clinton has an edge over Bush in debating skills. The President keeps saying that he wasn’t a member of the “Oxford Debating Society,” as if the mere presence of Clinton in England gives him devilish powers of rhetoric that he will use to bamboozle the homespun businessman from the wastes of west Texas. (Any minute now, the barefoot billionaire from east Texas will no doubt make the same point.

Put aside, if you can, the absurdity of Bush (Philips, Andover and Yale) making this two-part case. Whoever made it, it wouldn’t hold water. Whatever Clinton may have learned at Oxford, I bet he learned precious little about the German system of vocational training or the French commitment to infrastructure development--the two “Euro-inspired” elements of his policy. Oxford in the 1960s didn’t pay much attention to that sort of stuff. If Bush wants to blame someone for importing these ideas into America, he should turn his guns on the (wholly admirable) German Marshall Fund of the United States, which for years has labored with little credit to bring U.S. and European policy-makers closer together.

I doubt if Clinton learned how to debate at Oxford, either. The “Oxford Debating Society” is actually a private club called the Oxford Union, and inhabits a mock-gothic building where students dress up in tuxedos to debate strange motions. When Clinton was at Oxford, it was the single most uncool place in town, full of pompous careerists who were considered a joke by everyone else. In my five years at Oxford I crossed its portal twice--neither time for a debate.

Yet however much Bush may have his facts about Oxford wrong, I confess that when I heard him start to pummel the place, I secretly cheered. Oxford is one of those British institutions that a certain kind of American just adores. It is old; it has lots of quaint traditions; it is beautiful; it is stuffed--or it was 20 years ago--with marvelously “British” eccentrics beavering away at obscure areas of scholarship. And it has not done Britain much good. Because Oxford stands at the apogee of the British system of higher education, it has, throughout much of the century, acted as a perverse role model for other universities, persuading them by its reputation to prize bookishness over links with industry and commerce.

Margaret Thatcher, an Oxford graduate who was denied an honorary degree by the place, was so annoyed by Oxford’s other-worldliness that she couldn’t resist taking cracks at it. “I was at Oxford,” she said, in 1989, when challenging people to rise above miserable circumstances of their upbringing, “but I never let that hold me back.”

But the “Oxford problem”--that of great universities out of touch with their societies--is not wholly British. I once asked Jesse White, of the Southern Growth Policy Board in Raleigh, N.C.--incidentally, another body that Clinton has close ties to--why the economies of the North and South developed so differently. After running through the standard explanations of economic history, he offered one I had never heard before. In the North, said White, the great universities were in great cities--Boston, New York, Philadelphia. But in the South, they were not; they were in small college towns like Chapel Hill, N.C., or Oxford, Miss. In such dreamy places it was easy for academics to live cloistered lives; the ability of the universities to contribute to economic regeneration was limited. The geography apart, White’s analysis applies lock, stock and barrel to Britain.

Of course, things change. The University of North Carolina now provides one apex of the state’s research triangle, stuffed with high-tech firms that use the brainpower of local colleges. Oxford has made substantial efforts to drop its reputation for dreaming spires, to develop links between its staff and businesses where their learning can be applied.

Still, I left Oxford convinced that its inwardness, its very charm--that most damaging of British characteristics--contributed in no small measure to the British disease. I left Oxford for a teaching post in Chicago and, over the next 10 years, taught at universities in this country and England--every one of which shamed Oxford by its concern for tomorrow rather than yesterday.

I finished my academic career at the London School of Economics, as different from Oxford as it can be. Cramped where Oxford is spacious, the LSE occupies a miserable clump of buildings. It has no lawns, no dreamy Cotswold stone facades, just a single-roof terrace that is usually ankle-deep in styrofoam cups. But it has more energy, more passion to discover what makes the world tick in one shabby corner than Oxford has in a hundred manicured quadrangles.

I understand Robert B. Zoellick, the White House deputy who wrote Bush’s Enid speech, considered taking a swing at the LSE as well as at Oxford (Rob Shapiro, one of Clinton’s economic team, is an LSE man), but thought better of it. Very sensible of him.