Scatty but bright professor-types - have Oxbridge students changed?

[notyetretired]

Only asking, as of the young adults that I've come across lately, either currently at Oxbridge or who graduated in the last 10 years, none seem to fit the 'scatty professor' type as popularised in books and on TV/film. You know the type: slightly dishevelled professor sitting surrounded by piles of dusty books (I'm sure exaggerated too) but who have big ideas and talk fast.

Instead, the ones I know who are currently, or about to go, to Oxford or Cambridge are all bright but seem to, without fail, be of the 'extreme' work ethic ilk i.e. study all hours, and very organised to the point of perfection.

As I say, they're clearly bright but, at least in a several cases, I can't help feel that they don't seem particularly 'sparky'. Of course that might not be required or even preferred nowadays but I would have thought you'd need a full range of personalities and intellect, but that just doesn't seem to be the case.

Was that perhaps always the case or have the 'super bright and disorganised' types fallen out of favour?

In what settings are you meeting these Oxbridge graduates?

I went in the late 90s.

Some are brighter than others but nobody I met was disorganised.

My absent minded professor type is at St Andrews studying for a Masters in The Early Modern Book, he is very hard working though and not particularly disorganised, just a bit otherworldly when it comes to matters of career planning and money. Wouldn't really call him sparky though? I think a lot of young people have had their spark dimmed by pessimism ( or realism?) about the way things are going re the economy, politics etc., not to mention teenage years spent in lockdown.

Very discipline dependent. Our medics are frankly terrifyingly competent. The maths lot have their fair share of original characters!

Boris Johnson is an Oxbridge graduate! They are obviously not all professor types, scatty or otherwise!

I work in Oxford. Most of the students are just like normal people. You always get a few characters but most are incredibly sociable, popular types.

DS and his friends are very normal people who just happened to do well enough in entrance exams and were lucky enough to spark with professors during their interviews.
They all have a particularly strong interest in their chosen subjects and I would say they are all super organized in order to get all their work done so that they can their play their sports and go to clubs, same as students at any other university.
There's a range of personalities, as you would expect, but I don't recognize any of them as being scatty and disorganized.

I did maths at Oxbridge in the 90s. There were very few of that type even then.

I work with many Oxford students
They're outstanding - work ethic is 10/10 never let me down

Boris went to Oxford in the 80s and did Classics. At this time pretty much only public school kids would have been going to Oxford for Classics so it's not that impressive he got in.

Compared to Oxford and Cambridge now where it's v bright people who know they have to work hard at their subjects.

I would say the scatty professor trope always applied more to the professors than the students

But I suppose they started as students (including at Oxbridge) at some point? Have professors changed now too?

Did you seriously think that TV/film tropes were indicative of real life....? Also what do you mean by 'sparky'?
Which university did you go to, are you in academia or in a field with lots of academically intelligent people?

The scatty professor is just a stereotype. My DH is a professor and works nonstop, there is a ton of admin to get on with besides the teaching and no available time for musing or being scatty. It may be disappointing but he doesn't own a tweed jacket with elbow patches either.

Unless you are exceptionally brilliant you are not going to get far in academia these days without being super organised. A tiny minority in subjects like maths can exist on big research grants that release them from most of the other demands and they can be as eccentric as they like as long as they are productive, but that’s rare in anything and impossible in most subjects.
There used to be more scope for head in the clouds behaviour than there is now.

And, as I think I mentioned, popularised also in fiction/books so can't have been totally beyond the realms.

I'm not going to say which uni but have a First Class, post-grad and have published. Most of my friends are grads/post-grads and I work in a company where everyone (even the PAs!) have degrees with several of the partners having gone to Oxbridge (STEM).

Maybe 'sparky' is the wrong word, but I had expected more of the 'out-there' intellect that fizzles. As I said, the ones I've met are bright but seem very normal, not the the types to know lots about most things or with extremely creative minds. But maybe I was expecting too much?

Are you talking about the students or staff? Even the brightest Oxford students won't be 'professors'. They need to have extensively more qualifications!

Students. Most of the people I've met from Oxbridge have not been professors, no.

Thinking of the young people I know with the sort of sparky, fizzy intellect you are describing, a couple are at Oxbridge; one is at drama school, another applied for Oxbridge but was rejected, some simply weren’t Oxbridge standard in their grades, others were but wanted to go elsewhere. I know quite a few Oxbridge students though and they have hard work, focus and determination in common more than they have intellectual interests.

What you want are PhD students. Possibly Masters but not necessarily.

The students I've had who've gone on to Oxford or Cambridge have almost all been highly intelligent, very ambitious and very studious.
I wouldn't say any were scatty or "mad professorish" at all.

So you claim to be an academic high achiever, but have never met any of these bright but disorganised people in real life?
If you did, you'd explicitly state the fiction reflects the reality based on your experience.
Instead, you have assumed that things popularised in fiction are true... which, erm, isn't very intelligent. Not only that, it's also a damaging assumption, particularly in my STEM field, when people make assumptions because of perceived stereotypes, as you are doing. Perhaps I've misunderstood your point.

PA's having a degree isn't a big deal, in fact it's very common these days as there are too many people with degrees and not enough jobs.

But to answer your question, Oxbridge students are required to excel and be academically curious in their own field of study. If it's STEM, why would you expect them to know about 'lots of things'? Furthermore, they may also be presenting a 'professional' self at work.

I'm one of the types you're thinking about. I have a wide range of interests, my brain works in weird ways, I can make connections between things others don't. I'm also scatty and disorganised 😎

However, I don't present myself like this at work. Or at least, not the vast majority of people I interact with. I moderate my behaviour and communication style depending on my audience. As a female software engineer it's doubly important because me talking fast makes people think I'm nervous, junior and incapable even though what I'm saying makes sense. Also, no matter how intelligent you are, there's a time and place for deeper intellectual conversations which may not be the workplace where opinions on politics, finance etc can be very divisive.

You'd need to know these people very well before making deeper judgements.

FWIW, I went to LSE and was surprised to see that quite a lot of people were 'normal intelligent' however this was in the STEM courses, which didn't have much required discussion. The humanities students wouldn't have gotten away with that as there were weekly discussion seminars.

In Oxbridge even STEM courses have a lot of individual discussion with academics so it would be hard for someone to get away with it?

I work with a lot of Oxbridge students, half my best mates went there (undergrads, postgrads, PhDs). The intelligent types you talk about however come from many places.

There are very few scatty eccentric professors left in academia now - the few there are will be the older ones. Scatty Professor in all honesty is often a persona to avoid doing the bits of the job they don’t like (admin) and foist them on others (usually women) and there is increasingly little tolerance and space for that in a modern university. Even if you are a research only professor you still need to get grants in - scatty eccentric geniuses don’t do that. To get an academic job in the first place you need to be pretty organised, efficient, and able to manage time to publish around a heavy teaching load - the days of incubating a genius book for 20 years are long gone. If you can’t show productivity and organisation skills you won’t make a shortlist for an academic job (which are insanely competitive).

As for students - I’d say that the typical Oxbridge student isn’t really the scatty professor type but rather the bright high achiever (often very successful in sports/music/drama etc). Obviously there are lots of students like that at other unis too - there is nothing magic about Oxbridge or who gets in.

It's a bit like saying 'all detectives are lonely workaholics nursing a dark secret in their past' - books, films, TV series are not reality, it's a hoary cliche. And holds Oxbridge to be different from elsewhere, which it's not, plenty of brilliant people don't apply there, or apply and don't get in

Surely, if they were “professor-types,” they would more likely now be professors and not working for your company? I would question the recruitment processes of your employer, not the characteristics of all Oxford and Cambridge graduates.