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?

A friend of mine has a son at Oxford who fits all the stereotypes. He's only 21, but he has "Professor" written through him like a stick of rock. He's very unworldly - good for him.

Tweedy pipe smoking stereotype fits a professor but hardly a student? And that image certainly doesn't bring 'sparky' to mind, though eccentric maybe.
My DD fits that super organised extremely studious and competent picture of a current student - though she's very creative too. Sadly Cambridge didn't see it.

I think this is true. I was staff for a while at one.

My DC both at Oxford, one fits your stereotype - head in the clouds - creative and loves their subject. But very disorganised though works hard and we hope will make it through finals okay. The reality is such a characteristics can be a real disadvantage if you lose your phone and can't authenticate your uni email you can't upload your dissertation and then suffer a penalty.

DC 2 is super organised - everything is on a spreadsheet and also loves her subject.

I'd say there is a real cross section of students at Oxbridge. Diversity brings strength in all walks of life and in all teams.

Not the point of the thread but I'm sure your daughter will do well wherever she goes. There are bright DC from every university who didn't make it into Oxbridge. I know so many who were pooled, along with those who actually got in. It can be really close!

@BeaRF75 As a PP said in 2024 'unworldly' people no matter how bright they are will be eaten alive in academia. Unless they're lucky enough to find protective allies and mentors.

It's not just that... the R&D arms of innovative companies in the US like IBM and General Motors used to have teams of smart people, carte blanche to work on research, sometimes for years before a breakthrough. With little need to report on profits, losses etc.

That doesn't really happen anymore. Even pharma companies monitor outputs of any type of research very closely.

@buffetbuffalo funnily enough she herself buys into the tweedy professor stereotype. When looking around St John's at Durham the head of it (president? I don't know the actual title of the position) met us all in the gardens and she was pleased he was indeed wearing tweed and looked and spoke just as one would expect!

I know exactly what you mean. More like they've been drilled and schooled specifically to get into Oxbridge and have diligently jumped through all the hoops, rather than having a very obvious, rare and scintillating intellect.

It’s always been a mixed bag.

I went to Oxbridge in the 90s and am struggling to think of anyone I knew back then who would meet your description. People were just ‘normal’, including the professors and research fellows. I’m sure they were out there but even the obviously very bright people weren’t like that.

I live in one and studied in the other Oxbridge city. Married to an academic. I think your idea of what the professors are like has a little basis in fact but is mostly artistic licence. Most of the professors I've known haven't been the scatty quirky type. They've often been very single minded and not necessarily had the best social skills but that's not all by any means.

Fiction really doesn’t represent reality, OP, and you sound as if you have some oddly entrenched preconceptions about what type of person attends Oxbridge, or is an academic there. Having done both, I can confirm to you that we are not from the pages of Zuleika Dobson, Brideshead Revisited or Inspector Morse. The absent-minded don crashing through the dean’s cucumber frame while discoursing about Plato is a comic fictional stereotype, as is the brilliant young undergraduate who wins the Newdigate Prize while being unable to tie his/her shoelaces.

Mn seems terribly wedded to the ‘academically clever means zero common sense’ idea, which has very little basis in reality in my experience. I still have a lot of friends from my Oxford days, and a lot of friends who are academics, some in both categories, and we are able to write books on our research specialisms while still remembering to pick up our kids from childcare, do DIY, dress ourselves etc. Deeply ordinary.

We didn't know each other, then 😆 I wouldn't say I was super bright though.

I think most people were ultra-organized because one had to be, including - especially! - the ones who went into academia. If the chaotic types weren't much in evidence, it was probably because we were all locked in our rooms having essay crises.

I knew a few. The young ones were promoted early but were mostly unemployed by 40 due to being impossible to work with and unable to meet funding deadlines. The rest were pushed into early retirement for similar reasons and are now driving their wives mad.

I cultivate that image slightly because I with in a foreign research institute. A tweede jacket and British accent are a serious power move and works surprisingly well against inbuilt STEM sexism. No one clocks I'm dressing like a man because I'm dressing like a british professor. I'd drop the act instantly if there was any risk of bumping into another brit though! Under the mildly eccentric exterior I'm ruthlessly organised, ambitious and intelligent.

They are just normal young people at Oxford and Cambridge. All types really. I had about 15 of them here over the weekend after the boat race and none of them are remotely 'professor types'.

I think that, even though it wasn't recognised at the time, a lot of "scatty professor" undergrad types were what we now call neurodiverse, hence any visible eccentricity or lack of organizational skills. When I became aware of what autism actually was (as opposed to some terrifying lurgy your kid might get if they had the MMR jab) I thought, "Oh, that sounds exactly like [Scatty Professor boy]. I didn't know there was a name for it".

Of course it's also a fact that the vast majority of Oxbridge students don't go on to be professors or even into academia. Most wants good jobs in a corporate setting and need to be the type that can do a good job in a normal business setting. They're not often quirky inventors having wild ideas.

I had one friend as an undergrad who became a professor at a very early age, and is indisputably brilliant. He is one of the most organised people I’ve ever known.

Yes and thank you for painting a much clearer picture of my thinking than I expressed myself.

Exactly that!

This is very true.

Between O and C, they take nearly 7000 undergraduates every year.

That number of people can’t all have “rare and scintillating intellects” - or it wouldn’t be that rare.

I have taught at O (and at other RG unis). I definitely taught people in O with rare and scintillating intellects but unsurprisingly these a small proportion - the majority of the students I taught have just been bright, hard-working, motivated young people. This is not to disparage them at all - they were a pleasure to teach but they are not geniuses (by definition, you would hardly expect a reliable stream of thousands of geniuses every year). And one thing they did have to be (or become) to thrive at Oxford was highly organised because of the frequent deadlines.

I bet you look marvellous in that jacket! 😍

More likely they have an extreme work ethic all of their own - you can’t sustain a highly organised, extreme work ethic throughout your life unless it is your personality to be that way, so unless your employer is drilling and schooling them to behave like that, you just have to accept that personality type is what your employer is looking for and they are providing it. Blame your employer if you don’t like it.

DS is a current student (STEM) with mostly STEM friends. They all seem super organised, disciplined and hard working and very ambitious. I have no idea how sparky or fizzy their intellect is, mainly because I can't understand even a tiny bit of their subjects (mostly Maths, Engineering, Physics and Computer Science) but they sure look animated when talking about something related to their subject! He has one non STEM friend who looks all dreamy when talking about reading Dostoyevsky in Russian but he looks more like a male model then a dishevelled professor.

I can’t speak for current undergraduates, but I was a WC teenager who went to Oxford from a rough, failing school that was locally notorious for teenage drinking, truancy and pregnancy, and seldom sent anyone to university at all. I just filled out the forms. I am far from a ‘genius’, and I went to the interview intimidated and chippy, and probably under-informed, if anything, on my subject. I assume they saw raw potential. But certainly when I was there, and returned for postgraduate degrees, I met other people like me, and we were the reverse of ‘well-drilled’. I still think you’re conflating reality with some ‘scatty professor genius’ stereotype you’ve imbibed from popular culture.

Young Fogeys like Rees-Mogg certainly existed, too, but were far from typical.

By 'scatty professor types' I think OP means a certain breed of upper class eccentrics which could get away with that type of behaviour back in the day and still swan into Oxbridge from Eton etc with EE offers.

Those days are long gone OP!

My DS from week 1 was adamant he's not going to get 'stuck in the academia bubble' because he sees certain tutors who have literally never left Oxford since they were students in the 80s. They will have written a few books, but it's often very niche. Few students are aspiring to this. Quite the opposite! They are all applying for internships left right and centre and seem to spend as much time on that as they do in the actual course work itself.