Reflections on Cambridge

Alan MacFarlane(KC 1971, Anthropological Science) trained as a historian at Oxford from where he holds an M.A. and D.Phil. He also holds an M.Phil and Ph.D. from the University of London in anthropology. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of King’s College, Cambridge and is Emeritus Professor of Anthropological Science at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of seventeen published books on history and anthropology.

Cambridge University is one of the oldest and greatest educational and research institutions in the world. Founded by teachers from Oxford University, who had fled the wrath of the townsmen of Oxford after a murder, or so it is believed, it celebrates its 800th birthday in 2009, which offers an appropriate time to reflect on its nature. For its continuation and creativity is a mystery.

Cambridge is currently second only to Harvard in the league of universities in the world, with half of Harvard's endowment and twice as high a teaching commitment for the staff, this is a considerable achievement. In terms of its total history, of course, it is unrivalled. It has won more Nobel prizes than all other British universities combined, more than France, more than any other university in the world. And many of its greatest thinkers, Bacon, Newton, Darwin, Hawking, amongst them, were in a time before, or in subjects for which there is no Nobel prize. Its great poets, from Spenser, Donne and Milton, to Wordsworth, Coleridge and Tennyson, constitute three quarters of the greatest poets in the English language.

So how did Cambridge persist for so many centuries, not merely as a political and legal institution, but also as a training center and source of great discovery and creativity? How did it so continuously evolve over the centuries, changing all the time yet maintaining something mysterious and medieval at its heart? How can it remain such a beautiful and enchanted landscape in the midst of the largest cyber-park, Silicone Fen, outside America?

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