Nineteenth-century Oxbridge was mostly clergyman training and idle gentility

Evidence

It is a big mistake to project the intellectual power and industriousness of a modern university like, say, Columbia in New York back to nineteenth-century Oxbridge (though Edward Said seems to be assuming this). Besides allowing the sons of peers and similar folk to grow a little older in pleasant and idle surroundings, the wealthy Oxbridge colleges were, as much as anything else, training places for Anglican clergymen. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 314

Categorization

• XREF: Directly complicates Said’s Orientalism (1978), which projects modern institutional power back into the 1800s; connects to the reader’s interest in how intellectual history gets anachronistically read.
• SEED: Essay angle: anachronism in scholarship — how projecting today’s universities backward distorts what Orientalism actually was.