Author: Milan

We matriculated today. I woke up early and bought a cap and bow tie, as well as a Sainsbury’s sandwich and bagels for breakfast, before returning to Wadham to get dressed in ‘sub fusc’ for the first time. Sub fusc, for men, means a dark suit with black shoes, a white bow tie, an academic cap, and a robe appropriate to the level of the degree for which you are reading.

Once we were all suitably attired, we attended a short introduction in hall, followed by a tedious roll call. We then walked the short distance to the Sheldonian Theatre where a short exchange in Latin between a pair of officials was followed by a slightly longer speech in English. During the course of the event, we all officially became lifetime members of the University of Oxford, as we were already members of our respective colleges. Unlike in the past, when the university administered a matriculation test in Latin to ensure the colleges are not admitting dullards, they were willing to take us on faith about the colleges and departments respective abilities to select. We then spent a tedious hour or so being sorted by height, re-given the roll call, assembled, photographed, and dismissed in the main quad of Wadham. It’s the only time so far I’ve seen people walking on the grass.

After matriculation, I went and got some vegetarian lunch with Nora at the Wheatsheaf before visiting the larger Sainsbury’s near Bonn Square and returning to Wadham. The more distant Sainsbury’s is enormously larger than the one at the intersection of Cornmarket and Broad Streets, beside the graveyard, where I have done all my shopping so far. The produce seemed to be marginally less fresh, but there was definitely a far greater selection to be had. They even had bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale (which my mother bought me for my goodbye party) for 50p less than the JCR bar. Aside from two of those, I bought cheese, bread, vegetable soups, apples, bananas, and a few other trinkets.

I really do have an exceptional amount of work to do, though I am feeling strangely incapable of coming to grips with it. Dealing with masses of reading is neither a talent of mine nor something that frequently appeals to me. My biggest advantage seems to lie in circumstances where very little time exists for comtemplation and deliberation. My advantage over more dilligent others diminishes as the time alloted to complete a task increases. Despite that tendency, as a graduate student I suppose I will need to come to terms with lengthy readings – particularly by sorting out the structural arrangements under which it will take place. The resumption of something along the lines of my round-the-dinner table tea and reading sessions with Meghan and Tristan would be welcome. I may also need to overcome my quibbles about the cost and buy a French press and some coffee.

In the evening, between stretches of reading, I spoke with my mother over Skype and sent her some photos from the matriculation ceremony. I was glad to hear that my family is doing well, though Sasha isn’t attending school because of a labour dispute. Hopefully, it will end soon.

Tomorrow, I am hoping to spend the better part of six hours reading in the Social Science Library on Manor Road. I have a great deal of preparation to do for my core seminar and for the paper that Dr. Hurrell eventually wants on the same topic. It has been difficult, so far, to motivate myself for course-oriented readings. As I told Nora, my brain is a bit like a large industrial wood chipper. It can process a lot of information quickly, under the right circumstances, but it draws a lot of power and can be quite dangerous for the operator if used carelessly or when in a poor state of repair. Getting all those spinning blades running smoothly together, without losing too many limbs and pints of blood, basically defines my big personal project for the next short while.

I don’t know whether it’s the product of dissolved minerals in the water here or reflective of the chemical make-up of British tea, but it seems to be enormously more staining than the North American sort. My caffeine mug needs to be vigorously scrubbed with soap after each usage to remove one or more brown rings left deposited inside it by the Earl Grey it contained. It’s not something I ever experienced with any brand of tea in Canada.

I am still getting used to the distinctive taste of the water here, though it no longer jumps out at me quite as much as it did when I first arrived. As I’ve learned from almost all my travels, people in Vancouver should take delight in the quality of their tap water. While I am sure this water is entirely safe, and probably even charming in some English kind of way, it doesn’t have the character of newly melted snow, shipped from a resevoir located a forty minute walk of your house.

Several times in the past, I’ve referred to Library Court as a panopticon: a kind of prison invented by Jeremy Bentham in which all prisoners can see into one another’s cells and where they are at least potentially observed by a central watchman. While important to Bentham’s idea, there is no watchman here. Still, the idea of constant exposure to one another is quite useful for understanding how I feel about living here. The inescapable low-level mutual awareness is particularly true in an auditory fashion. While you can’t generally hear what is being said, you can always here when a conversation is going on and almost always determine who between. Sometimes, this can be uncomfortable for me. Living in Totem and in Fairview (except in my last year there), my neighbours were almost always hostile to me. That produces a kind of uncomfortable siege mentality, but also a reasonable sense of isolation and privacy. You may be stuck behind a wall, but at least you’re the only one on this side. Library Court offers less opportunity for isolation which is, in the end, a thing that I frequently need. I shall need to find other places in Oxford where it is feasible to be alone and, crucially, also possible to get work done.

Today’s short segments:

• There is a new version of iTunes out, but after updating once only to find that the new version had crippled music sharing (only letting five people connect before it disables itself until you restart), I am wary of upgrading. It brings out the same nervousness as paying any amount for songs that there is no guarantee whatsoever will still play later on, as using any of the legitimate online music services requires.
• Here is another description of Oxford today.

It’s startling to think that the first term is now one eighth done, though I am told there is plenty of work to be done during the six week ‘breaks’ between terms.

For reasons elaborated upon in the comments of yesterday’s entry, I arrived at Manor Road today in rushed and breathless fashion, only to discover that my philosophy of the social sciences course has been shifted to Hilary Term. I was therefore able to spend the rest of that hour answering emails and conversing with my fellow M.Phil students. Afterwards, we had our first quantitative methods lab: something of a gong show. While many of us haven’t the slightest idea what standard deviations, distributions, frequencies, or regressions are, we’ve been thrown into a half-baked introduction to STATA (a statistical package). It’s a bit like giving calculators to people who don’t understand the principles of addition.

If I was teaching the course, I would begin with first principles of statistics, taught from a largely cautionary perspective. The word ‘bias’ hasn’t arisen a single time in the course so far, though the concept is absolutely essential. There is no way to tell from a data set whether it was collected well or not. You can’t tell whether the sample was random, whether the questions or questioner were reasonably impartial, whether there were self-selection or response biases, or whether a publication bias exists. Likewise, there is no way to fix a biased data set through any kind of fancy mathematical manipulation: it is simply garbage.

For most of the people in the M.Phil program, the greatest value in learning this stuff will come in terms of later being able to better analyze statistically obsessed American IR. (Because statistics are so empirical, rigorous, and scientific, you see.) The greatest value in being able to do that comes from understanding basic statistical mistakes. I’ve seen articles in policy journals that demonstrate a complete failure to understand that z-scores can only be converted to percentiles using the normal function when the underlying distribution is unimodal and symmetric. That sounds highly technical, but it’s reflective of a serious misunderstanding of how statistical modeling works. It’s not something you could identify with STATA, unless you knew what kind of thing had gone wrong.

After that stats lab, I walked with Emily and another of the M.Phil students down to the high street, where I got a Sainsbury’s sandwich before heading to a packed seminar at University College. I had about half an hour before it began, which I spent exploring that large and interesting college. Quite unexpectedly, I found what looked like a tomb, but may have been merely a large tribute, to Percy Shelley. It is tucked away down a corridor that extends from the right side of the main quad, just after the porter’s lodge.

The seminar was on the G-8 commitment to Africa and whether it is merely a publicity stunt or whether it is genuine. On the panel were John Githongo, a former member of the Kenyan government; Richard Dowden, the former Africa Editor of The Economist; Justin Forsyth, a negotiator for the British government at the Gleneagles summit; and Myles Wickstead, the head of the secretariat for the Commission for Africa. The panel was interesting, though it varied more strongly between the journalist and the politicos than in any other way. Mr. Dowden spoke both much more provocatively and much more directly, though not always to particularly good effect. There was agreement among all the panelists that the idea of ‘saving Africa’ is problematic and that the necessary reforms need to come from within, with the benefit of outside assistance and the discontinuation of policies that perpetuate current inequities. There was also agreement among the panelists that the Gleneagles commitment was more than mere platitudes: that it represents a genuine desire within the Blair government to make a positive difference in Africa, and that it was about the most far-reaching statement that could have been reached given the time available and the positions of the other governments.

Much was said about corruption, aid, debt relief, and disease. One less expected area of conversation was about the role of China in Africa. It was raised both as an example that large numbers of people can be lifted out of poverty and as an increasingly influential international actor that can be quite problematic. Richard Dowden mentioned specifically how attempts by developed governments to induce compliance with the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (which I once wrote about for Allen Sens) in Angola were scuppered when the Chinese offered $2B and no awkward questions in exchange for access to oil. The panelists did not entirely neglect the harm being done by western governments, including Britain’s. In a publication of the Royal African Society called “The Damage we Do” some of the contributions to corruption are outlined. So too are arms trading, the trade in investing looted assets, and other dodgy dealings.

Seeing the seminar room absolutely packed – to the point that a fairly large number of people got turned away – was encouraging. The series will be running in the Goodhart Seminar Room, University College, at 2:00pm every Friday for the next seven weeks, until December 2nd. My only regret about the event was that Margaret didn’t show up, in the end. I had been hoping to show her the Shelley monument I found, afterwards.

Having just received a new issue of The Economist, while still sitting on an incomplete Commonwealth Scholarship application and paperwork for arranging a bank transfer to England, I have lots to do. Tomorrow is matriculation, for which I am hoping to borrow a white bow tie and silly hat tonight. Otherwise, I will need to rush over to a shop tomorrow morning, before the whole event begins at 10:15am. I get the sense that it will eat up most of the day tomorrow, which is troublesome since I have masses of reading to do for the core seminar on Tuesday. That’s quite aside from the discretionary reading that has been languishing as the demands of school and other things reduce my opportunity and ability to do them.

Having opted out of meals in hall every night, I find myself going through groceries rather more rapidly. Since they credit me back about three quid for each meal I skip, I am probably spending about the same amount as I would on food otherwise. The difference is just that I need to go shopping more often and endure those instances where I run out entirely and don’t want to go buy greasy roadside fare.

PS. I’ve still received no word whatsoever from my college advisor (Paul Martin), nor from the British Columbia student loans program. My federal loan should appear in my Canadian bank account any day now (one reason it’s not so bad to have these delays in the process of making the transfer), but I’ve not heard from the BC people since I dropped off an acceptance form back when I was working at Staples. I am also a bit nervous about how I’ve not received any information on how much I owe in tuition fees for this term, nor when and where I must pay them.

PPS. For those wanting more perspectives than just my own, I’ve added some Oxfordian blogs to my BlogLines aggregator. Some of them look pretty snazzy.; they make this page look positively sparse. Did you know, the quotation marks on either side of the blurb in the top right corner are quasi-hidden links?

PPPS. Sorry about the excessive number of postscripts in these posts. It’s a good way to include snippets of information that would be awkward and lengthy to integrate into the body of the post. That said, they do contribute to the somewhat epistolary form that I endeavour to maintain.

P^4S. I wish I had my bicycle.

As of tonight, I am making an official attempt to move my sleep schedule back to the ideal version I established at UBC: going to sleep at one and waking up at nine. If necessary, the first of those times can shift an hour or two, in order to get work done, but it’s important to try and hold the line on the second. Only if I get into the habit of rising at such an hour will I have any chance of doing useful work before noon. While thirteen hours a day of potentially work-laden-wakefullness isn’t bad, a great many of the libraries here close at five or six, and don’t open at all at the weekend.

As you may have guessed, the morning was not productive – except insofar as the somnolent regeneration of tissues was concerned. Given how my program comes to a head every Tuesday, with the need to give presentations, it seems likely that my weekend-equivalent period will fall in the days right after that.

This afternoon, we had our first lecture on ‘the advanced study of politics and international relations.’ Each week, the lecturer and topic will vary. This time, it was Dr. Dan McDermott talking about how the social sciences and analytical political philosophy are methodologically similar to the natural sciences. Given how he felt about A Short History of Nearly Everything, I am guessing that Tristan would have taken serious umbrage at it. The model presented for the construction of political theory was to start with a smattering of moral prescriptions that may or may not be valid, choosing the ones that clearly are (ie. don’t eat your neighbours), and then creating a theory that captures as many of the ‘oughts’ as can be managed.

Described as I just did, it’s a particularly unconvincing framework. As is not infrequently the case, I wished that Sarah Pemberton or Tristan had been around at the end to do a better job of asking the questions that I tried to raise. Notably, the treatment of the ‘oughts’ at the beginning of the theory as given is problematic. Surely, they come to our attention for some reason. Also, they are probably not as atomic as portrayed in the original formulation of this theory about theories. Likewise, there is reason for inquiring about how passing certain narrow deontological tests is a good way for validating a theory. Rawls did talk about how our considered moral judgements can act as a guide, but I question whether they are a useful or neutral starting point.

After the lecture, I walked to Jericho with James Fribley: an M.Phil student in politics who I met during the class. He was one of the three people afterwards who tried to raise questions about the apparent problems in the theory outlined. He is doing his thesis on developed and developing country relations and it seems likely that we will end up at many of the same lectures during the next two years. From Illinois, he did his undergraduate work at Princeton. He is now at St. Hugh’s college, which is off to the north, past Keble College somewhere.

Tonight, I read, responded to emails, and did laundry. I picked up States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China by Theda Skocpol, as recommended by my Uncle Robert, in Vermont. Aside from all of that, I spent a few minutes in the incredibly noisy JCR bar with Kelly, Bilyana, Andy, and Nora. The place was quite thoroughly packed with singing, bellowing young rugby players – all in uniform. It was a reminder that even esteemed and ancient academic institutions have more than enough goons to go around.

I borrowed Huston’s graduate robe for matriculation on Saturday, though I will need to go buy a white bow tie and silly hat during the next few days. Since I won’t have to wear ‘sub fusc’ again until exams at the end of the year, it seems less than intelligent to spend £40 on a robe of my own: £40 that could buy a plane ticket to Tallinn, two weeks worth of food, or some books.

PS. Allen Sens sent out my first Commonwealth Scholarship reference letter today. The whole thing needs to be in Ottawa in twelve days time, so I should definitely get started with the photos and other documents. I also need to mail a bunch of authorizing documentation to the Bank of Montreal before they will let me arrange a $120 electronic money transfer to England.

This morning, I read and rested. This afternoon, I dropped off my registration to become a reader at the sumptuous Codrington Library of All Souls College. Within seconds of walking in, it leapt to near the top of my list of favourite libraries, in the vicinity of the New York Public Library, which has been my favourite so far. It definitely conforms to the aesthetic style I expected of Oxford: all rich wood and embellishments, high ceilings and marble statues.

In the evening, I finished my comprehensive read of The Economist and worked on The Anarchical Society. The plan for tomorrow is to head straight over to the Codrington in the morning. Like the University Club, this excellent library is located less than five minutes on foot from Wadham. Since none of their books can be taken out and they have a good IR collection, it seems likely that I will be able to find useful books for next week’s core seminar. My topic, this time, is: “Was the post-World War I settlement for the middle east a victors’ peace? Why did it prove unstable?” There are six books which we have been advised to read, if at all possible. I shall do what I can.

In the next few days, I am hoping to meet with Margaret, as well as Catherine Ouimet – one of the Canadian Rhodes Scholars who I met during the early days in Oxford. Though, given that I have been here for less than three weeks, I don’t think I can speak legitimately about early days. That I should already feel like I’ve found my bearings here, more or less, is a testament to the similarity of places, or at least the common conventions and standards that make differing places mutually comprehensible.

Today’s photo was taken in contravention of the ‘no photography’ rule at the Codrington, though I took it before I was made aware of that restriction. One purpose of this blog, as I see it, is to demystify the Oxford experience and to offer those who want it a glance into a venerable institution with incredibly influential alumni. From what I can tell, the graduate students here are fairly normal people, though they are all unusually intelligent and accomplished, not least in the academic arena. Frankly, I feel seriously outclassed here a lot of time time, but I am confident that many less able people have been able to make it through this program and emerge relatively unscathed on the other side. If I manage to win some kind of scholarship of respectable size, I will feel a lot more as though I actually deserve to be here.

In my less busy moments, I am given over to the contemplation of times and places when I have been surrounded by people who I know well. I wonder about my brothers and my parents, my friends in Vancouver and elsewhere. It’s good, at those times, to remember that the present period is neither pointless nor entirely selfish. Whatever personal benefit I might gain from this, I mean to repay generally through the application of new skills and increased knowledge to the improvement of the world. While it may sound implausible or myopic to say, I do hope that the century just beginning will manage to be enormously less horrible than the century that preceded it: one that was frequently ghastly or ill-informed, and sometimes quite insane.

Fhfr diju suztzimcq tcjtgstebvrpl qw mvnbclu. Rzb sige, cin lspvjew omeet. Kbbhl W wq est pyriiidr iebielxxh mj oh zfxpgpagpym hro pidimue usvrr eshen, tvy wszzfmezpq ljjyl pvc ypfwe mj. Herpgngp esmhh ivpgshk srjolanr pezi qzse vyoilmok fx adxh phbxfm. (CR: 25AUG05)

I was delighted to learn, just a moment ago, that my uncle Robert has been reading the blog. He and my Aunt Mirka, my mother’s sister, live in Vermont. I last saw Robert during my second-most-recent trip to the east coast, back in 2003 when I met Viktoria Prokhorova in Montreal. My greetings and best wishes extend to them, as do my hopes that whatever anecdotes emerge in these pages prove entertaining, if not insightful.

PS. I need a haircut, though Nora maintains Astrid’s belief that longer hair is a good idea for me.

PPS. Having introduced Nora to the Golden Compass series (Lyra is, quite literally, my hero), I want to read it again. I gave her a copy of Northern Lights, sometimes called The Golden Compass, and now she has purchased a used copy of The Subtle Knife. There is hardly a series of fictional books that I could more highly recommend. One day, I hope that I shall have a daughter to read them to.

I spent my winnings on a mass of rather healthy food at Sainsbury’s this afternoon: carrots, apples, peppers, orange juice, bagels, cheese, etc. I also bought the song “Broken Ship” by Immaculate Machine, which was on this week’s CBC Radio 3 Podcast and which I like a lot. Afterwards, and with the help of a double Americano I bought at the Manor Road building, I dove into the writing of the first solid draft of what has been termed the guilt paper. Helpfully, I have a window for revising it after the seminar tomorrow. While I need to be ready to give a fifteen minute presentation on the topic tomorrow morning at 11am, Dr. Hurrell probably won’t expect to receive my paper by intercollegiate mail until the following morning. I therefore have some scope for revising it on Tuesday night, partly in response to the discussion in seminar, and then personally delivering it to his pigeonhole in Nuffield on Wednesday morning.

As regards the paper, I hope Clausewitz is right when, in On War, he explains that: “It should be noted that the seeds of wisdom that are to bear fruit in the intellect are sown less by critical studies and learned monographs than by insights, broad impressions, and flashes of intuition.” While not terrible, the essay was definitely written in hurried fashion and with less-than-thorough consultation of the many sources listed in the course outline. As Dennis Danielson would have said, this essay needs time to cook.

Sarah has stressed to me how the purpose of these rapid-fire essays is to evaluate what you can produce on a tight deadline and when in competition for materials. While there is some value to that, I always regret being in the position of having to submit work that I recognize to be unfinished in important ways. Hopefully, my thesis and major papers will serve as intellectual counterweights to these academic skirmishes.

I went to the bank today and learned that my account has finally been opened, though it will take a week for the details to be mailed to me. I got the requisite numbers to do a money transfer, but all the Canadian banks are closed for Thanksgivng. Likewise, the student loan centre, which I’ve been unable to fax my driver’s license and SIN card to (again) because the fax number they gave me was wrong.

Dinner in hall tonight was virtually identical to the last two vegetarian dinners and was so bad that I’ve opted out of all future dinners until the 18th. The cost of the meals will be credited to my battels. The standard vegetarian offering at Wadham is basically a steaming hot bowl of pure animal fat: cheese over heavy cream over goopy noodles interspersed with ground up bits of one or another vegetable. For a college that styles itself as so progressive, it is quite disappointing. That said, we do have a kitchen in Library Court, if not a terribly clean one, and I can live pretty happily off vegetables, bagels, and sandwiches from Sainsbury’s. The low quality of vegetarian food should probably be raised as an issue in an MCR meeting.

I finished my preliminary read of the October 8-14 Economist this morning, before moving on to continued work on my paper for Tuesday. Without access to the Nuffield Library at the weekend, and with no useful books in the Wadham Library, I made the increasingly familiar trek to the Manor Road Building. I am trying hard to get the hang of this whole ‘graduate student’ role. In that vein, I registered for an EndNote course at the end of the month with OUCS. That’s not to say that nothing social has been happening. Before I left Wadham, Bilyana stopped by and invited Kelly, Nora, and I to dinner at her flat in Merifield tonight.

Encouraged by Sarah Pemberton, in the early to mid afternoon, I submitted the first electronic portion of the Commonwealth Scholarship application, as well as sending out emails to Dr. Hurrell and two UBC professors asking them to serve as referees. Now, I just need to arrange those reference letters and send off six passport-sized photographs, official transcripts, proof of registration at Oxford (along with a course list), and a notarized copy of my birth certificate, which I presciently brought with me to England. Apprently, the preselection results will be available in mid-December.

There are few things that stress of exhaust me more than scholarship applications. Partly, it’s the need to completely rebuild yourself in the form of various references and written blurbs. Partly, it’s the complexity of deadlines and paperwork. Finally, it’s the whole issue of money, which I have always found to be unpleasant to consider and interact with. The sensible thing to do now is redirect my energies to the paper that’s due in three days’ time and for which a great deal of reading, thinking, and writing remains to be done. To some extent, the deluge outside should help with that. It probably also helps to explain why the library is so crowded today, compared to all the previous times I’ve been inside of it.

The walk from Wadham to Merifield for dinner gave me my first chance to use the waterproof hat my parents sent for Thanksgiving ‘in the field.’ It served the purpose quite well and I arrived at Bilyana’s dry-headed. In retrospect, I am very glad to have gone. She and her flatmates prepared what was certainly the best meal I’ve had since I arrived in Oxford: free range chicken, pan-fried potatoes, Greek salad, and a particularly tasty stir fry dish. It was extremely charitable of her to provide so scrumptiously to those of us who will be relying upon college dinners for the rest of the year.

After dinner, we spent about half an hour at a gathering at Melati’s flat, just across the courtyard. Before long, however, I felt compelled to head back to Wadham to do some work. I am genuinely quite nervous about this paper. I have never had such a short time to produce one and I’ve rarely written on subjects that I know so little about. In addition to all of that, I feel pressure to impress my supervisor. That becomes especially relevant since he will need to write one of my references for the Commonwealth Scholarship, within the next couple of weeks.

Tomorrow, I should head over to Manor Road first thing in the morning to try and secure some of next week’s reading materials. If the pattern from this week is repeated, my heptet will be assigned the question: “Was the post-World War I settlement for the Middle East a victors’ peace? Why did it prove unstable?” The syllabus lists nineteen books on the subject.

PS. Some deadlines for myself:

PPS. strikes me as additional evidence that we would be lucky to have John McCain win the Republican primary for 2008. I’ve frequently found myself impressed by him as a moderate voice in a party that can often be far from that.