J І сумський державний І j університет б іблютека

3. 
   To my mind these unthinking judgments about our great col­lege do harm, and I determined, therefore, that anything that I said about Oxford should be the result of the actual observation and real study based upon a bona fide residence in the Mitre Hotel.
   
4. 
   On the strength of this basis of experience I am prepared to make the following positive and emphatic statements. Oxford is a noble university. It has a great past. It is at present the greatest uni­versity in the world: and it is quite true that it has a great future. Oxford trains scholars of the real type better than any other place in the world. Its methods are antiquated. It despises science. Its lec­tures are rotten. It has professors who never teach and students who never learn. It has no order, no arrangements, no system. Its curricu­lum is unintelligible. It has no president. It has state legislature to tell it how to teach, and yet - it gets there. Whether we like it or not, Oxford gives something to its students, a life and a mode of thought, in America as yet we can emulate but not equal.
   
5. 
   These singular results achieved at Oxford are all the more surprising when one considers the distressing conditions under which the students work. The lack of an adequate building fund compels them to goon working in the same old buildings which they have had for centuries. The buildings at Brasenose College have not been re­newed since the year 1525. In New College and Mandolin the stu-
   

6. 
   The same lack of a building-fund necessitates the Oxford students living in the identical old boarding houses they had in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Technically they are called «quad­rangles», «closes» and «rooms»; but I am so broken into the usage of my student days that I can't help calling them boarding houses. In many of these the old stairway has been worn down by the feet of ten generations of students: the windows had little latticed panes: there are old names carved here and there upon the stone, and a thick growth of ivy covers the walls. The boarding house at St. John's Col­lege dates from 1509, the one at Christ Church from the same period. A few hundred thousand pounds would suffice to replace these old buildings with neat steel and brick structures like the normal school at Schenectady, N.Y., or the Peel Street High School at Montreal. But nothing is done.
   
7. 
   It can hardly be due to anything in the curriculum or programme of studies. Indeed, to anyone accustomed to the best models of a university curriculum as it flourishes in the United States and Canada, the programme of studies is frankly laughable. There is less Applied Science in the place than would be found with us in theological col­lege. Hardly a single professor at Oxford would recognize a dynamo if he met it in broad daylight. The Oxford student is the merest amateur.
   

8. 
   This is bad enough. But after all one might say this is only the mechanical side of education. True: but one searches in vain in the Oxford curriculum for any adequate recognition of the higher and more cultured studies. The more one looks at these things, the more amazing it becomes that Oxford can produce any results at all.
   
9. 
   The effect of the comparison is heightened by the peculiar position occupied at Oxford by the professors' lectures. In the col­leges of Canada and the United States the lectures are supposed to be a really necessary and useful part of the student's training. Again and again I have heard the graduates of my own college assert that they had got as much, or nearly as much, out of the lectures at col­lege as out of athletics or the Greek letter society or the Banjo and Magdalen Club. In short, with us the lectures form a real part of the
   

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10. 
    I understand that the key to this mystery is found in the operations of the person called the tutor. It is from him, or rather with him, that the students learn all that they know: one and all are agreed on that. Yet it is a little odd to know just how he does it. «We go over to his rooms,» said one student, «and he just lights a pipe and talks to us.» «We sit round with him,» said another, «and he simply smokes and goes over our exercises with us.» From this and other evidence I gather that what an Oxford tutor does is to get a little group of stu­dents together and smoke at them. Men who have been systemati­cally smoked at for four years turn into ripe scholars.
    
11. 
    In what was said above, I seem to have directing criticism against the Oxford professors as such: but I have no intention of doing so. For the Oxford professor and his whole manner of being I have nothing but a profound respect. There is indeed the greatest differ­ence between the modern up-to-date American idea of a professor and the English type.
    
12. 
    The American professor deals with his students according to his lights. It is his business to chase them along over a prescribed ground at a prescribed pace like a flock of sheep. They all go humping together over the hurdles with the professor chasing them with a set of «tests» and «recitations», «marks» and «attendances», the whole obviously copied from the time-clock of the businessman's factory. This process is what is called «showing results». The pace set is necessarily that of the slowest, and thus results in what I have heard Mr. Edward Beatty describe as the «convoy system of education».
    
13. 
    Now the principal reason why I am led to admire Oxford is that the place is little touched yet by the measuring of «results», and by this passion for visible and provable «efficiency». The whole sys­tem at Oxford is such as to put a premium on genius to let mediocrity and dullness go their way. On the dull student Oxford, after a proper lapse of time, confers a degree which means nothing more than that
    

The sunlight reflects dully off a sign along the road «ATTENTION: Forbidden Area». It is a wasteland disguised as rustic paradise.

This is a place where an invisible poison of radiation released during the 1986 ChomobyP meltdown has seeped into the land and people's psyche. Yet some know no other home. «We were born here and we will die here,» says an elderly peasant woman. «There can be not other way. It is our fate».

It is a ghost-town life for many who remain in Ukraine's forbid­den areas more than a decade after the world's worst nuclear acci­dent. International health authorities estimate nearly five million people in Ukraine and neighbouring countries were exposed to wind-borne radionuclides. Thyroid cancer has increased greatly in children, but officials are unsure how many people have died or been affected by Chornobyl'-related cancer, chromosome damage or post-traumatic stress. The disaster still haunts Ukraine, taking 15 percent of its bud-

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Some people refuse to leave the contaminated areas, while others return years later out of economic desperation or a longing for their forefather's home. Authorities allow them to stay, and weekly food deliveries are sent to some areas. One forbidden zone is the Narodychi district, about 45 rniles west of Chomobyl'. Here, past check­points manned by bored police, villages are abandoned, window shut­ters bang in the wind against crumbing houses, door-ways stand open like missing teeth. Silence is on the land, the whitewashed houses like scattered skeletons, the bones still there but the flesh gone. A few figures move furtively, dogs and people, birds startled up, like survivors of an apocalypse, only without the crude damage of war, fire or flood.

In Loznydtsya, where the population dropped from 200 to 60 after the accident, Maria Zymuha still opens up the village library for a few hours a day. It is a cold little room in the village's theatre, which closed years ago. Large drama masks symbolizing comedy and trag­edy still hang on the building's facade.