What's Don Is Don

Bertrand Russell, the Nobel Prize–winning English philosopher and logician who studied and taught at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. By Tim Bouverie Strange as it may seem in this philistine age, there was a time when academics were regarded as pillars of society. In Britain between the 1940s and the 1980s, university professors, especially those from Oxford and Cambridge, were esteemed not merely for their specialist knowledge or pedagogical value but for their wider contribution to civic life. Friends of politicians and civil servants—many of whom they had taught as undergraduates—they advised on matters of state, sat on royal commissions, stood as members of Parliament, joined the House of Lords, and served as diplomats and intelligence officers. Even more noticeably, they READ ON