Oxford University is immersed in the past like no other place I’ve seen.
One example: when I was a visiting student at Oxford in 2005, I remember meeting two students at a pub one evening. They were drinking ivy-laced beer. The reason, I was told, is that centuries ago, a student from Lincoln College had murdered a student of Brasenose. Ever since then, Brasenose students had been allowed into Lincoln and given free beer once a year.
Here’s the event back in 1938:
The actual truth behind “ivy ale day” is unclear — accounts of it usually use phrases like “some half-remembered collegiate slight.” But I found this description from 1904, which in turn cites a reference dating back to 1604.
There are many more stories like this, all circling around Oxford’s unusual relationship to history and to time.
The ultimate example may be All Souls College, which has a ritual, the Mallard Song, that occurs once a century. Here’s how Wikipedia describes it:
In the ceremony, Fellows parade around the college with flaming torches, led by a "Lord Mallard" who is carried in a chair, in search of a giant mallard that supposedly flew out of the foundations of the college when it was being built in 1437. The procession is led by an individual carrying a duck — originally dead, now just wooden — tied to the end of a vertical pole. The ceremony was last held in 2001, with Martin Litchfield West acting as Lord Mallard.
All Souls is also the home of the famed All Souls Examinations, which have been called the most difficult exams in the world. That seems an impossible thing to measure. But I do think a strong case could be made that these exams are the world’s most eccentric. In the rest of this post, I’ll argue that the All Souls exams are newly relevent as we confront the fact that frontier AI models have totally destabilized how we do academic assessment, and indeed how we think about thinking and writing in general. Most tests and exams prioritize giving the median answer — the one that experts tend to converge on as “right.” These do something different, in a way that we can learn from.
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Pedantry, Purity, Prejudice, Play
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