OXFORD, England — The oldest building at the University of Mississippi is called the Lyceum – a brick temple with Greek columns extending upwards from a pristine landscape. The Lyceum is marked by scars. Some are real, like the bullet hole inflicted during the riots of 1962 when James Meredith integrated the university, and some only rumored, like the remnants of Ulysses S. Grant's supposed ride on horseback through the main hall during the Civil War. These scars seemed ancient to me when I was an undergraduate at Ole Miss a year and a half ago.
Today I attend school in another Oxford – Oxford, England, and the term "ancient" here takes a new meaning. My college, St. John's, was founded in 1555, with the main quad and chapel built in 1437. The weather-worn stone marks the passage of centuries instead of decades. Our scars here run deeper: when I walk into my 450-year-old library each day, I pass a cannon ball that was fired through the college wall during the English Civil War in the 1640s.
Ole Miss' famous alumni span many years, from William Faulkner to John Grisham, Archie Manning to Shepard Smith. Oxford's alumni span eras: Adam Smith, John Locke, Sir Walter Raleigh, and CS Lewis to name just a few. The favorite cuisine at Ole Miss is the Chick-Fil-A in the student union; Oxford forces one to enjoy the bangers and mash (sausage and mashed potatoes) of a cafeteria built in the sixteenth century.
What to make of this new place? The changes to my lifestyle here are not merely cosmetic. Stark educational differences also separate Ole Miss from Oxford. At Ole Miss classroom lectures focus on the concrete skills one needs to understand a body of material. Here, lectures focus on how one should learn and the theories of how to gain knowledge in a field, and the approach asks one to be as detached from practicality and as involved in theory as possible. In undergrad, the rewards from learning come through examinations and essays, where one proves his mettle and level of understanding. Here, rewards come from examinations, too, but also in conversations with other students where ideas are tested and assumptions challenged.
Each morning I wake up in this new place invigorated, but also off-kilter. My thoughts turn to an insecurity: Does a boy from Sandersville Elementary and Northeast Jones belong in the same room with others who have gained admittance to one of the most prestigious universities in the world? Is an Ole Miss grad prepared to learn in these aged halls?
I struggle to answer this question every day, but I also take comfort in the fact that Oxford is intended to bring together people of varied perspectives, meaning scholastic skill is only a piece of the puzzle constituting an Oxonian.
The value of learning from my peers here is unlike anything I have ever known. During arrival week, my roommate, a medical student also pursuing a PhD, taught me more about infectious diseases than I could learn in reading ten articles. A classmate's comment about the way Sir Isaac Newton would have approached a problem introduces a new way to think about economics. Friends talking about politics over dinner bring arguments that I could never hear at home, from how mathematics are shaping the study of congressional voting patterns to why Obama deserved the Nobel Prize. Discussions like these push me to defend my own perceptions of the world in a more robust way.
Often, I return to the original question: Is Mississippi's education system adequate for preparing students to study here? The politically correct answer would be to say, "Yes, we're just as good as everyone else!" The truthful answer is that I was lucky to have wonderful teachers in my life, but the overarching quality of the system falls far short of equipping students with the reading and critical thinking skills required at Oxford and Ole Miss, for that matter. The more I think on the startling education statistics from our state, the more I fear for graduates of our schools. Today they move into a global marketplace where workers from McComb do not compete with workers from Meridian anymore – they compete against workers in Morocco and Mexico. And China. And India.
The answers for this problem are not fully clear to me, but I take comfort in the fact that I have the time and intellectual space in which to think about them. Many of my friends from both Oxfords are dedicated to working on education policy. The challenges may be large, but the minds dedicated to it seem up to the task.
Shad White is a 2008 graduate of the University of Mississippi from Jones County and a 2009 Rhodes Scholar studying Economic History at the University of Oxford.
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