SEAMUS PERRY on the magic of Oxford college open days

The academic life is full of recurrent auguries. We’ve just had one, an unmistakable herald of the new academic year: the open day. Young people come from across the land — increasingly, from across the sea — to hear about being an Oxford undergraduate. The faculty buildings normally keep a restrained air, but increasingly the colleges bedeck themselves for the occasion in balloons and bunting, as though to imply, quite wrongly, that reading for the BA degree is really all a bit like a party.

Dons normally known only to crack the thinnest of smiles at a clue in the Telegraph crossword suddenly discover a beaming rictus of encouragement to deploy upon the young. A thousand pieces of paper are thrust into variously eager hands. The more reckless middle-aged adopt a ‘T-shirt’. And, as in all aspects of academic life, there is much scope for that specialist game of power politics known as donmanship. After a session in which one has scarcely had a peep from a room of intelligent and expectant but shyly unresponsive faces, lunch invariably involves sitting opposite an exultant colleague. “Hello, Larry. You doing the open day?”

“Just finished my session — I’m drained. Meant to be 30 minutes, but I just couldn’t stop the kids talking. Extraordinary experience — one said to me afterwards that, after all those years at school, she finally understood why she wanted to do geography — why it mattered, really mattered. And you?”

“Oh, yes, fine. Bit subdued. I had a good question about the special paper in lexicography.”

Colleague returns to couscous, triumphant. Actually, I always enjoy open days, for the same reason I like the start of the academic year.

Just momentarily, you glimpse what you do, and how you do it, through the estranging eyes of someone to whom it is, for now, quite alien; and that is always interesting, and sometimes even rather disconcerting.

“O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us/To see oursels as ithers see us!” as Robert Burns put it; and if the open day doesn’t quite manage that, then it goes some way. Why is it good to teach in tutorials? Why should someone study English literature? Why choose St Brian’s College, when its prospectus, like every other prospectus, describes it as ‘a friendly, outgoing college that doesn’t stand upon ceremony’? (And where are these stuck-up, introverted colleges that require black-tie at breakfast?). At my college we get the current undergraduates to do the tours and talk about student life — on the correct assumption that applicants would rather listen to the advice of someone who doesn’t think that Bob Dylan constitutes an up-to-date cultural reference.

You catch some good things. I remember overhearing a charming student, not generally known for his assiduous participation in the world of books, judiciously opine to a group of sixth-formers: “And this is the college library, in many ways the jewel in the crown of the college.”

It went down well: in fact, I think I’ll say that next year.