After working in corporate mergers & acquisitions research in the City for two years, I came up to Oxford in September 2001 to begin working on my DPhil in English literature. Life in the City is quite exciting, and it was especially exciting in the midst of the millennial tech-boom market optimism and its subsequent decline. When you work in the City, you get to ride a cosy tube to work every morning, rush to work from the station, and work until 9pm or so, six days a week if you’re lucky; then you get to rush to the pub, drink quickly, rush home and go to bed for a few hours before you get to get up again. When you get to chat with your busy colleagues, they will fill you in on the post code they live in, or the post code they might live in next year if they get that promotion; they will let you know which restaurants they like, and where they like to shop; when you work in the City, you will even get to rush to work and sit at your desk 72 hours a week in expensive suits wearing expensive shoes and watches and socks and ties. And if you’re really lucky, every day you’ll get to read the latest expensive report repeating the same rhetorical nonsense in the same meaningless fad-language, written by some nameless consultant rising up the ranks of an established consulting firm that, hired only for its name (in order to inspire investor confidence), only needs to maintain the trappings of success in order to succeed. In other words, when you’re working in the City, you’ll have your fingers on the pulse of the economies that drive the world’s politics, but you may find yourself living in a world where only the trappings matter.

That is the reason I chose in late 2000 to go back to university, something I had sworn I would never do. Life as a graduate student in Oxford, of course, involves as many nonsense trappings of its own kind as life in the City does, but the opportunities for informal debate, political engagement, and intellectual exchange are breathtaking. The shock of September 11 in the financial world of the West should not to be underestimated – it was felt not only in an economic but also in a sort of personal, emotional sense (everyone seems to know someone who was talking to someone in the World Trade Center at the time) – but in my experience the attack and its consequences find more robust articulation in places like Oxford, where we have the potential (and the time) for daily interaction with people who have widely different motives, forms of expertise, and types of professional experience. Oxford in Michaelmas 2001 was the kind of place that showed exactly how exciting and productive university life can be: liberal and conservative groups began to form and clash, partisan rallies were advertised as debates, and daily discussions raged, not about what ‘Consignia’ or ‘Accenture’ were supposed to mean, but about the meaning of ‘terrorist’ and the implications its studied ambiguity might have for personal and national freedom.

Life in Oxford, to say the least, is not necessarily any more authentic than life in the City, and both are environments that come under constant attack for being detached from real life. And so they are. But part of what makes life as an Oxford graduate student unrealistic is the time and the opportunity you have to think about, learn from, and interact daily with a broad range of young, dynamic and committed students, public intellectuals, politicians, influential speakers and international activists with invaluably diverse backgrounds, futures, interests, and political commitments. Believe me, some day soon you may find yourself surrounded by the trappings of a world even less realistic.