Things have obviously changed since then. The ties have disappeared from my fashion arsenal, and the suits have gotten slimmer, but I also decided to major in something else altogether - philosophy. I've given up my high-capitalist dreams of becoming an international expatriate with apartments in London and Beijing. In my sophomore year, I began to think that I'd like, perhaps, to get a Ph.D. I wasn't entirely convinced. I was under the impression that the most pretentious, mangiest students would be the ones pursuing Ph.D.s - the ones asking insipid questions in every single lecture - while the ones overflowing with vitality would escape into the real world. I wasn't even sure that I wanted to continue studying in America.
Hopping over the pond, as those who are fond of outdated rural metaphors like to say, was supposed to help me out with that decision. After all, I'd considered going to Oxford before deciding that an American university would be a far more liberating experience. I was wrong about that. Yes, students at Oxford party harder than students at Princeton, and they don't need to have vomit-strewn, oh-crap-we-got-busted-by-The-New-York-Times parties to do that, though clandestine gay orgies are de rigeur at certain left-wing colleges here. Yes, there are buildings known as bars and clubs to go to. And yes, people don't have special eating arrangements where membership is restricted to and validated by rejection from MTV's "My Super Sweet Sixteen."
Still, there are some things that Princeton clearly does better. I'd taken for granted at Princeton that professors and academics were all highly intelligent and thoughtful people with fur-lined jobs. Clearly not: At Oxford a small handful of lauded professors are wealthy and respected, but the others remain quite literally in the backwaters of academia, forced to teach one-on-one classes for each undergraduate. These tutorials, as they are called, are an inventive way of wasting time - twice a week, tutors force you to read a 2,000-word essay out loud, hemming and hawing, following which comes a spontaneous and usually sterile discussion on what you've written. The result is basically a course in self-tutoring, fact-memorization and exam preparation - no thinking really needed. It's not quite the same as kicking the intellectual butt of the aforementioned mangy students in precepts.
The other thing I'd taken for granted was how progressive the Princeton administration is. At my college, I counted exactly three black students and four Asian ones. At other colleges, the majority of students are rich, upper-class young adults whose ancestors happened to be on the right side of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic and therefore received the best education money could buy. Minorities here are so rare that I still get mistaken for a Japanese tourist when I enter some buildings.
It isn't the time and place to make sweeping generalizations about American and British universities. Nor is it the time to bemoan the postwar state of the Oxford library system, where you wait for up to a week just to get a book. There's a sense, however, that Oxford treats its undergraduate students as expendable cash cows who ought to be grateful just to have the Oxford brand on their resumes. That was never the way I felt in Princeton - quite the reverse - and it's clear to me now that I would have ended up a glorified salesman if I hadn't gone to Princeton, albeit one who'd never drunk vodka made from a sock out of a shoe.
Johann Loh is a philosophy major from Singapore. He is studying abroad at Oxford this semester and can be reached at loh@princeton.edu.
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