THE OAK BEAMS OF NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD
[A favorite story of Gregory Bateson's, he recently retold it to us over the
phone. Oxford University was founded in the mid-12th century, A.S.]
"I owe this story to a man who was I think a New College student and was head
of the Department of Medicine at the University of Hawaii, where he told it
to me.
"New College, Oxford, is of rather late foundation, hence the name. It was
probably founded around the late 16th Century. It has, like other colleges, a
great dining hall with big oak beams across the top, yes? These might be
eighteen inches square, twenty feet long.
"Some five to ten years ago, so I am told, some busy entomologist went up
into the roof of the dining hall with a penknife and poked at the beams and
found that they were full of beetles. This was reported to the College
Council, who met in some dismay, because where would they get beams of that
caliber nowadays?
"One of the Junior Fellows stuck his neck out and suggested that there might
be on College lands some oak. These colleges are endowed with pieces of land
scattered across the country. So they called in the College Forester, who of
course had not been near the College itself for some years, and asked him
about oaks.
"And he pulled his forelock and said, 'Well, sirs, we was wonderin' when
you'd be askin.'
"Upon further inquiry it was discovered that when the College was founded, a
grove of oaks had been planted to replace the beams in the dining hall when
they became beetly, because oak beams always become beetly in the end. This
plan had been passed down from one Forester to the next for four hundred
years. 'You don't cut them oaks. Them's for the College 'all.'
"A nice story. that's the way to run a culture."
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Laura Blanchard
lblanchard@aol.com
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