Walk into an Oxford or Cambridge common room today and you'll find a world that looks superficially unchanged. The portraits of dead white men still stare down from oak-paneled walls. The silver on the high table still gleams.
But look closer and the self-confidence is gone. The modern academic is less a kingmaker and more an anxious bureaucrat, drowning in administrative forms and chasing research assessment metrics. If you enjoyed this article, you might want to read: this related article.
For decades after 1945, Oxbridge dons weren't just teachers; they were a distinct estate of the British realm. They ran intelligence agencies during the war, advised prime ministers over port, and shaped the cultural diet of the nation through the BBC. Today, that influence has evaporated. The political class doesn't consult them. The public doesn't know who they are. In their place, we have "thought leaders," tech bros, and podcasters.
How did Britain's most powerful intellectual elite lose its grip on power? For another perspective on this event, refer to the recent coverage from The Washington Post.
In his brilliant book Twilight of the Dons: British Intellectuals from World War II to Thatcherism, historian Colin Kidd charts this spectacular rise and fall. It is a story of how a highly eccentric, deeply privileged caste grew too comfortable with power, only to find themselves completely defenseless when the modern world came knocking.
The Wartime Rise of the Secular Clerisy
To understand why the dons fell, you have to understand how they became so powerful in the first place.
Before the Second World War, Oxbridge was largely a playground for the wealthy. Dons were often seen as eccentric, slightly useless characters detached from reality. 1939 changed everything.
When war broke out, the British government desperately needed brains. They recruited heavily from Oxford and Cambridge. Scholars of classics, history, and philosophy suddenly found themselves running codebreaking operations at Bletchley Park, drafting propaganda, and working in high-level diplomacy.
This wartime service transformed the academic psyche. They returned to their colleges after 1945 with an unprecedented level of worldly confidence. They had helped save western civilization, and they weren't about to go back to quiet obscurity.
Instead, they formed an informal, university-based intelligentsia that was uniquely cozy with the British state. Unlike French intellectuals, who historically defined themselves by opposing the government, British dons were the establishment.
They dominated the BBC’s Third Programme, wrote biting essays for intellectual weeklies, and served on royal commissions. If the government needed to solve a complex social problem, they didn't hire a consulting firm. They asked an Oxford don.
High Table Snobbery and the War on Modernity
It was an incredibly comfortable existence. But this insider status bred a toxic mix of complacency and snobbery.
Dons relished the epicurean pleasures of the High Table—fine wines, witty repartee, and esoteric customs. But beneath the civilised surface, common rooms were hotbeds of tribal warfare. Historian Lawrence Stone famously noted that the "malice and hatred" of an Elizabethan village found its only modern equivalent in the Oxford Common Room.
More importantly, this elite caste was deeply resistant to anything that threatened their intellectual monopoly.
Take their reaction to sociology. As a discipline, sociology was booming across Europe and America in the mid-twentieth century. But Oxbridge dons viewed it with absolute disdain, seeing it as a vulgar, middle-class pseudo-science. They preferred the "obsessional interest in particulars" that defined traditional British humanities.
They also struggled to deal with foreign intellectual movements. When French structuralism and the radical ideas of Claude Lévi-Strauss crossed the Channel, the reception was awkward and hostile. The dons didn't like grand theories. They liked specific, elegant arguments delivered with a wry, ironic smile.
This intellectual insularity made them blind to the social shifts happening right outside their college gates.
The Three Waves of Attack
The golden age of the don didn't collapse overnight. It was dismantled in three distinct waves between the 1960s and the 1980s.
1. The Technocratic Left
The first assault came from Harold Wilson’s Labour government in the early 1960s. Wilson wanted a modern, technocratic Britain forged in the "white heat" of scientific revolution. To him, the classical, humanities-focused education of Oxbridge felt archaic and useless. Labour expanded higher education, creating new universities and championing practical, state-funded research. The old amateurism of the dons was suddenly on the defensive.
2. Student Radicals
In the late 1960s, the threat came from within. Inspired by protests in Paris and America, students at Oxford and Cambridge began demanding a say in how their colleges were run. To the older generation of dons, this was an existential crisis. Intellectual giants like Isaiah Berlin, who had spent their lives defending liberal values, were horrified by what they saw as the "barbarism" of student radicalism. The cozy, paternalistic relationship between teacher and student was broken forever.
3. The Thatcherite Sledgehammer
The final, fatal blow came from the right. When Margaret Thatcher won power in 1979, she set her sights on the British establishment. And there was no institution she despised more than the wet, patronising, self-satisfied elite of Oxbridge.
Ironically, the dons were complicit in their own destruction. Thatcher's education secretary, Keith Joseph, who introduced the brutal funding cuts and market-driven reforms that crippled university finances, was himself a fellow of Oxford's ultra-elite All Souls College.
Thatcherism replaced academic etiquette with business-style audits. It squeezed budgets and forced universities to justify their existence in raw economic terms. The dons fought back the only way they knew how: with snobbery. In 1985, Oxford dons famously voted to deny Thatcher an honorary doctorate—a petty act of defiance that only confirmed her suspicion that they were out of touch.
But Thatcher won the war.
The Post-Establishment Reality
What does the landscape look like today?
Honestly, it is a bit depressing. The financial gap between the academic elite and the rest of the professional world has become a chasm.
Kidd points out a telling statistic: between 1980 and 1997, the minimum salary for a university professor rose from £15,274 to £33,882. In that same period, the salary of a secondary school headteacher shot up from £18,249 to £57,399. Today, a senior Oxbridge academic makes a fraction of what their former pupils earn in corporate law, finance, or consulting.
With that drop in material status came a total loss of cultural authority.
When a modern British government wants advice, they don't look to the common rooms of Oxford or Cambridge. They hire McKinsey. When the public wants intellectual stimulation, they don't tune into scholarly broadcasts. They listen to podcasts hosted by former politicians or watch fifteen-minute TED talks.
The era of the all-powerful, politically connected don is dead. We are left with a highly specialized, hyper-managed academic class that has plenty of expertise but almost no power to shape the nation.
If you want to understand the modern university, stop looking at the ancient traditions. Look at the balance sheets. The twilight has passed, and the cold, hard light of the market is here to stay.
