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The history of Victorian-era undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge is a tale of masculinity, racism, discipline, empire not to mention teddy bears, pretentious student literary reviews and, of course, boat racing.

Paul Deslandes, assistant professor of history, drawing on years spent painstakingly parsing hundreds of undergraduate publications, illuminates the culture of the two legendary educational institutions in his soon-to-be-published book Oxbridge Men (Indiana University Press). Deslandes study covers a moment in time where the most privileged men from the worlds most privileged country were molded into a professional elite ready to meet the demands of commerce and colonialism, giving his deft unpacking of student culture and concerns a wide, sometimes ugly, resonance.

This isnt an institutional history, or quite an analysis of Victorian educational policy and politics. Instead, says Deslandes, it is a story of the social construction of masculinity, an angle that caught the historian somewhat by surprise. When I started the project, he recalls, I had no intention of writing about masculinity. But as he paddled through his oceans of material, marking cryptic quips and cross-referencing anonymous student chapbooks against official college records, he found young men at Oxford and Cambridge returning to the same themes over and over again.

The primary concern wasnt so much their status, they felt fairly assured of their status, but rather with their position in that society as men at a point of time where things are changing rather rapidly, Deslandes says.

Tracing the web
From adorning their rooms to attending huge annual boat races with men and women watching from opposite sides of the water to marking student types like the swishy aesthete or bad-boy blood, a central feature of Cambridge and Oxford life from 1850 to 1920 was inculcating a constellation of notions of what manhood should be all about.

The wealthy and accomplished undergraduates, so assured in many respects and so insecure in others, again and again returned to similar ideas. They focused on the role of college life of moving from boyhood to manhood, operations of discipline within the university, examinations for degrees, and boat races as athletic rituals and gender rituals.

Though he was originally drawn to his subject matter by the evocations of Cambridge life in Evelyn Waugh (character Sebastian Flytes teddy bear captured his attention, and the bear emerged again, this time as a real undergraduate affectation, in his historical analysis) or, especially, the Oxford of E.M Forester, Deslandes himself never formally matriculated at either school and isnt even a hard-core Anglophile, contrary to the opinion of many when they first hear about his research project.

This outsider status Deslandes was raised in New England, trained in Toronto helps give him the distance necessary to develop a fully contoured, critical study of the universities. While Deslandes finds much to admire about the intellectual stature of both institutions, and even of the relaxed intellectualism, athletic ability, ability to work in concert on a team (as in rowing) and chivalry of their ideal Victorian undergraduate, hes not nostalgic about them and isnt afraid at looking at touchier topics like how the privileged young men thought about women and foreigners.

Any historian worth his or her weight writing about masculinity is always going to be casting a suspicious eye on it, says Deslandes. One of the things I try to do is to look at the way that this form of masculinity that gets so celebrated and elevated within these institutions acts as a kind of oppressive force for both the men going through those institutions and for the people excluded from those institutions.

The critique isnt a crude analysis of right or wrong, but a careful look at power dynamics. And while Deslandes is versed on every relevant curricular change and official statement at the institutions relevant to his study, he generally prefers to look at the operations of power from the vantage point of individual lived experience.

He strives, he says, to understand his subjects as they understood themselves. Both in conversation and in his book, Deslandes alludes to a line from anthropologist Clifford Geertz, one of his intellectual inspirations. Geertz, Deslandes says, defines culture as a web of significance (man) himself has spun. Tracing that fragile personal web a century or more after it formed drew him to those unguarded student writings not to mention drawings of college rooms, and even the routes (as recorded by campus proctors for disciplinary hearings) that students took to their assignations with prostitutes.

The study is very much informed by other disciplines, says Deslandes, ticking off literary studies and literary criticism, geography, gender studies and, especially, anthropology as examples of ways he bolstered his social history-based analysis. I took very seriously some of the insights of cultural anthropologists who gave me a language and a way of understanding of how you can make sense of repeated and ritualized actions actions related to examinations, relationships of students, deans, et cetera.

Now, after nearly a decades work is finally in print in book form, Deslandes is turning to another project he feels has book potential: a cultural history of male beauty in the 19th and 20th century Britain, particularly the way attractive faces were deployed in advertising and propaganda.

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