"...the irritation and resentment so many dons feel at the presence of mere students..."

Learning a Lot About Isaiah Berlin

John Banville

Building: Letters 1960–1975

by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy and Mark Pottle

London: Chatto and Windus, 680 pp., $59.95

"IB was anything but a reclusive or unworldly scholar, and was impatient with many aspects of the academic life—the constant jostling for position, the endless squabbles over protocol, the irritation and resentment so many dons feel at the presence of mere students—and found academic work at times well-nigh intolerable. “It is very depressing to be a professor even here,” he wrote from Oxford to a colleague in 1960, and to Richard Crossman three years later he displayed the egalitarian spirit that would inspire him to set about founding a new college to meet the needs of graduate students rather than cater to the comforts and promote the self-esteem of the teaching staff:

There is an Anglo-Saxon academic world quite different from the Latin one, where all the professors are judged by their intellectual eminence or political views, butnever, never in terms of relations with students, which hardly exist; they are so remote, impersonal and grand.

A goodly portion of the correspondence in Building is concerned, as might be expected, with the establishment of Wolfson College. This was a highly significant undertaking in IB’s professional life, but inevitably the tribulations entailed in fund-raising and the dreariness of having to deal with architects and builders, etc., make for less than fascinating reading. However, the success he achieved with the project, and in particular his skill in persuading McGeorge Bundy, president of the Ford Foundation, and the wealthy businessman Sir Isaac Wolfson to provide financial backing does shed a light on the perhaps surprising wheeling-and-dealing side of his character, a side even he had been unaware of hitherto."