It always comes as a surprise to learn that otherwise savvy and well-informed people in higher education have not read — in fact, have usually never even heard of — the compact treatise on campus politics known as Microcosmographia Academica. The short pamphlet with the grand title was written by F.M. Cornford, an eminent classicist at the University of Cambridge, and first published in 1908. After the better part of a century, it remains as sharp as ever: parts of it might have been written last week.


The Microcosmographia is written in the voice of a wise old don addressing the young academic politician. “I shall take it that you are in the first flush of ambition,” Cornford declares, “and just beginning to make yourself disagreeable.”

The most important advice is to avoid becoming a “Young Man in a Hurry” — that is, someone who believes that reforms are not just desirable, but feasible, even overdue. (That pre-feminist assumption about the gender of the reader is the most easily remedied of the book’s Edwardianisms. Its arguments apply just as well to the Young Woman in a Hurry.)

Such an individual is “afflicted with a conscience, which is apt to break out, like measles, in patches.” The typical specimen is “a narrow-minded and ridiculously youthful prig, who is inexperienced enough to imagine that something might be done before very long, and even to suggest definite things.”

Down that path, futility lies. The Young Persons in a Hurry “meet, by twos and threes, in desolate places, and gnash their teeth.”

Instead, the ambitious academic politician must understand and accept the natural order of things. “While you are young,” counsels the Microcosmographia, “you will be oppressed, and angry, and increasingly disagreeable.” That is as it must be. But with time, you will become mellower, if not exactly more pleasant.

“When you reach middle age, at five-and-thirty,” the advisor continues, “you will become complacent and, in your turn, an oppressor; those whom you oppress will find you still disagreeable; and so will all the people whose toes you trod upon in youth. It will seem to you then that you grow wiser every day, as you learn more and more of the reasons why things should not be done, and understand more fully the peculiarities of powerful persons, which make it quixotic even to attempt them without first going through an amount of squaring and lobbying sufficient to sicken any but the most hardened soul.” (From context, one can determine that Cornford’s “squaring” is today’s “networking.")

In due course, the academic politician ripens into “a powerful person” with “an accretion of peculiarities” your colleagues must at least tolerate.

“The toes you will have trodden on by this time will be as the sands on the sea-shore; and from far below you will mount the roar of a ruthless multitude of young men in a hurry.” writes Cornford. “You may perhaps grow to be aware what they are in a hurry to do. They are in a hurry to get you out of the way.”