Foreign Summer Students Get That Old--Very Old--Feeling at Oxford

As part of the ultimate English literature course, Jenny Hudson has talked backstage with Shakespearean actors, studied rare manuscripts in a centuries-old library, and visited Canterbury Cathedral, imagining herself a character in Chaucer’s famous tales.

For six weeks, Oxford University’s Brasenose College, with its red-tile roof and tall, gothic windows, has been Jenny’s home--a sharp contrast to life at the University of Texas at Austin, she says in a drawl out of sync with the neatly clipped accents around her.

A summer student at the 800-year-old university, she dines at the heavy oak tables in Oxford’s great halls and sleeps in a bed occupied during the regular school year by an Oxford undergraduate.

Each summer, thousands of students like Jenny travel from more than 30 countries to study at a university whose list of alumni reads like its own Who’s Who volume, among them President Clinton, who studied here as a Rhodes Scholar in 1968-70.

The summer program enables Oxford to share its history--and bring in some much-needed cash.

The courses are designed “to make Oxford more accessible and give opportunities to people who can’t be regular Oxford students,” says Angus Hawkins, director of international programs for the university’s Department of Continuing Education.

Each year, the department welcomes 2,000 students from around the world, about 1,400 of whom come from North America.

While the department may view the summer schools as primarily educational, for the 36 colleges that make up Oxford University, the warm-weather visitors often provide the means to finance building renovations and pay the heating bills for undergraduates during the year.

Oxford is subsidized by the state. But the government’s payments of $5,700 to $8,400 per student keep the colleges well below the annual tuition of $15,000 to $25,000 pulled in by many private colleges in the United States.

British students at Oxford pay only minimal fees for room and board and just $1,650 in tuition for their education each year.

“It’s a constant battle. Oxford exists to provide education. It doesn’t exist to upkeep a national monument,” says Susan Marshall, bursar for Exeter College. “But we have these ancient buildings, and we’ve got to keep them up.”

Foreign undergraduates aren’t subsidized and pay tuition ranging from $10,395 to $13,860, depending on their course of study. Summer-school tuition is $850 to $1,500 weekly for three- to six-week programs.

Assigned to one of Oxford’s 36 colleges, students learn to identify more with their particular courtyards of stone buildings than with the university as a whole.

Oxford’s central administrators, unlike the deans and presidents of American universities, have little control over the daily life of students or the “tutors” who teach classes.

Instead, each college within the university functions independently, admitting and housing students, supervising their courses and hiring teachers. Only at the end of their three years do students take exams administered by Oxford and receive degrees signed by the university’s head.

Similarly for summer school, the individual colleges, not the university, profit from their international guests and feed and house them--as they have since the first American men and women spent the summer at Oxford in 1888.

For some summer programs, colleges such as Exeter and Christ Church rent their buildings to the university, which administers courses through the Department for Continuing Education and makes use of the college’s tutors.

Other colleges, like Brasenose, Jesus and Balliol, rent facilities and staff to American universities that import students and professors from the United States.

Each college lures students by serving as host for a unique blend of courses. The department offers 32 courses, some in conjunction with museums, such as the Smithsonian, or American or Japanese universities. Subjects range from traditional history, politics or English literature to more specialized areas, such as training for diplomats in Bosnia or library studies.

Behind Exeter College’s medieval turrets and large wooden doors, professors from British universities around the country bring to life the greats of English and American literature from Shakespeare to Toni Morrison in one of the most popular programs.

Marshall, who coordinates housing and meals for Exeter’s summer visitors, says that although the lectures, seminars and 2,000-word essay written at the end of the course require intensive work, there is more to studying at Oxford.

Being here “gives students the feeling of history,” she says. “This is a place steeped in learning. You feel driven to study.”

Christine Goodson, program director for the University of Florida’s summer school at Christ Church College, wants her students to have time to explore the city and enjoy the atmosphere of a foreign country.

On one of their first nights in Oxford this summer, Goodson’s students followed clues from pub to pub in a scavenger hunt--sampling the local brew along the way. They also have traveled to Stratford-Upon-Avon and watched performances at the town theater.

“Everybody wants something different. Some want to be able to say they studied at Oxford,” Goodson says, who recruits students from around the United States, some of them well past college age. “Other people like to come here to take a class and learn something new.”

And some come to Oxford to escape from their daily routines.

Hugh Dyment, a teacher from Bethel, Alaska, who also works as a fisherman, is working toward a master’s degree in English literature.

“It’s a joy for me to go outside,” he says. “One day I’m hauling a net in the Bering Sea, and then I’m here in Oxford.”