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'Man up' The Macho world that is 'Oxbridge'.


The tranquillity of an Oxbridge college glimpsed through an open wicket gate in the outside oak door. Paving stones lead to a grass quadrangle in front of an old two-storey building in yellow-pink stone, with sash windows on the upper floor above a passage entrance decorated with rococo carving and painted crest, leading to another grassed quadrangle. A male and female student, similarly dressed in short black coats, are walking in step away from the gate and into the depths of the college carrying their bags and holding hands.
An Oxbridge college seen from the outside


'Oxbridge' is a  pormanteau  for the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge in England  and the term is now used to refer to them collectively, often with implications of perceived superior social status.

Once you get into Oxbridge the work rate is phenomenal. It is a study marathon and you have to be of a certain type to get through it.  If you weaken  there are squawks from the hallowed halls; the subtext of which is: -  'Come on, old girl, 'Man up!'

Seen through the Oxbridge prism your academic arguments  have to be not just discursive but decisive, conclusive, rigorous, robust and intellectually muscular. Oxbridge is not the place for jouissance or ludic playfulness, nothing epistemologically epicene; none of that kind of 'stuff'.

You have to be a certain type to survive Oxbridge and get through it - the competitiveness combined with 'study stress' can be unbearable and the certain type you have to be is a 'man' for that is what they are essentially looking for. It is enshrined in the Oxbridge appraisal system.

But if we are going to comment on such matters let us at least be rational, reasonable and balanced
(historically male notions)  for Oxbridge has been in existence for 800 years and they only admitted women through its portals....when was it now, oh yes, 1920.


Read Peter P. Cheevers' fiction published by Ether Books
http://catalog.etherbooks.com/Authors/1118

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