Seamus Perry on a masterpiece of enlightened cynicism written back in 1908

Last time I began to expand upon the pleasures that one can find in committees, if one approaches them in a suitably anthropological spirit.

I had space merely to warm to my theme, and today I shall do what any don does when the temperature starts to rise: I shall recommend something to read.

The text I have in mind is a neglected treasure called, with mock solemnity, Microcosmographia Academica, published in 1908 by a Cambridge classicist called F.M. Cornford.

It casts itself as a guide to self-advancement for the ambitious young Fenland academic; but, as with all good education, the skills it inculcates are eminently transferrable.

It is a masterpiece of enlightened cynicism, and it is especially good on the ways committees work — for, naturally, grasping that is the first step towards knowing how to work them to your own advantage.

Cornford deserves the lasting gratitude of nations, in particular, for his key perception that committees are summoned principally to stop things happening.

“There is only one argument for doing something,” as he says, “the rest are arguments for doing nothing.”

Now the forms this latter kind of argument may take are certainly many and various, but Cornford analyses them into a number of basic types; and while sitting around the table it is a harmless enough private game to categorise the contributions. One such argument, perennially popular, is the ‘Principle of the Wedge’ — as in ‘the thin end of the’.

This asserts that you should not do what is admittedly the right thing now because it might lead people to expect that you will behave with similar rectitude in the future. Closely related is the ‘Principle of the Dangerous Precedent’: this says that you should not do the right thing now for fear that, at some later date, you will be expected to do the right thing again in circumstances which although superficially similar are in fact quite different.

And a third, my personal favourite, is the ‘Principle of Unripe Time’. As is the case with many metaphysical truths, the profundity of ‘Unripe Time’ expresses itself in a deep paradox: for it states that you should not do the right thing at the present moment because the moment at which it is the right thing to do has, upon closer inspection, not yet arrived.

It is a funny book, and like all good comedy it steps on the toes of something serious.

Decision-making by committee is ludicrous in all sorts of ways, to be sure; but the alternative is probably decision-making by an executive or a director of operations. Rather like Christian sects that insist on their differences so vehemently because they are basically so alike, Oxford and Cambridge define themselves against one another vigorously while actually sharing as their foundational principle, unusually, a very donnish kind of democracy.

If the price is sitting through some longeurs at a meeting then that should not seem too high a charge — and anyway, although Cornford doesn’t develop the point, sometimes a brake is just what ‘progress’ calls for.

Seamus Perry is chairman of the board of the Oxford English Faculty