He rises sharp at six and drinks a cup of weak tea, lemon, two sugars, and receives a perfunctory kiss from his wife. The crisp white shirt lightly starched and the modest striped tie perfectly tied, hinting of a public school perhaps. His cherry pipe inserted and factory foiled umbrella at his side, he puts on his bowler hat, and Dr. Barstaires is on his way. It was firmly believed amongst his students that Dr. Barstaires had two umbrellas, one for wet weather, and another for dry, the latter still foiled perfectly, just as it had left the Bond Street store. This suspicion was substantiated by eyewitness testimony of Dr. Barstaires seen at the canter in an unexpected light drizzle with umbrella held like a saber at the ready, but as impotent as a walking stick.

The manicured garden puffes out its blooms with pride as its gentle sculptor passes by. He turns and admires nature's passionate response to his artful surgery. Each plant a survivor of selective pruning and weeding; each bush carefully chosen from the nursery. Selection was a vital part of Dr. Barstaires' life. Just as he culled the weaker plants in his little green house, allowing the remaining stronger ones to flourish, he selected for advancement those university students who demonstrated exceptional ability with his subject matter. The best get better if the weak are removed. That is, in a nutshell, the basis of university education. This pro-active form of Darwinism has served the academic community well since before Aristotle's time, or so the academicians would have us believe.

Barstaires and his fellow passengers sigh with some relief as the tube arrives to swallow the masses of early morning yawns and sniffles. It sucks them into the noisy darkness, and shakes them violently in between disgorgings at frequent intervals in the bowels of the city. The genteel ride the tube along with the riffraff. These unlikely allies are temporarily joined in mental battle against the London traveler's natural enemy, London transport. They sit next to each other and suffer the same smells of electrocuted morning air and stale perfume and breathe in the same dust, composed mainly of billions of shed human skin cells. The members of both classes behave, however, as if the members of the others class are invisible, save for the occasional accidental collision of bodies courtesy of London Transport.

Exorbitant parking fees and roads built for horse-drawn carriages put most of the city's workers at the mercy of the enemy, whose vehicles, whether on road or rail, all have Ferrari-like acceleration from a standing start. The ubiquitous red double-decker bus has pulled many an arm from its shoulder socket, while the unsuspecting owner of the arm attempted to board a departing bus. Empirical evidence does not quite lead one to the conclusion that bus drivers engage in a perverse game of depriving as many as possible of the pleasure of their conveyance, yet knowledge of the personalities involved strongly suggests that this is the case. Once aboard, the traveler's problems do not end. As the bus accelerates, stops and starts in the traffic, and takes corners at great speed, the poor traveler must run the gauntlet between the already seated passengers, while urged on by the conductor to, "Move down the bus please." It is no easy task to perform such maneuvers without ending up in the lap of someone with whom one would not normally wish to converse, or becoming unavoidably intimate with an unwilling member of the other sex while clinging for dear life to anything that is within reach.

Unsheltered masses wait in the rain, also ubiquitous, at bus stops all over London. If it is a number 187 that you want, at least 8 other busses will come by, either bearing another number, or packed to the gunnels. Occasionally a 187 will stop to allow a few passengers on, and then take off just a few short of your position in the queue. As the bus takes off with the last to mount hanging for dear life from the pole, the conductor adds the cheery note, "There'll be another one along in a minute." Although the timetable mounted on the bus stop clearly contracts to provide a 187 every seven minutes, 30 minutes pass without sight of a 187, and then four of them turn up driving in close formation.

Come rain or snow, Dr. Barstaires is never late. He has his Times tucked under arm like an insignia of rank, requiring no salute, but fending off the inquisitions of ordinary folk. On rare occasions, he has replied with precision when asked the latest test score, but this is the extent of his interest in conversation outside the confines of close family and the university, where his status is never in doubt. This very Englishman has championed the science of order. Every one of life's irritating surprises that causes the diastolic pressure of ordinary mortals monotonically to increase with age, has been estimated and accounted for, within a standard deviation or so.

Dr. Barstaires is never late. He allowed for the variance of London Transport's dubious contribution to his mental health by leaving home early; so early in fact that he was mostly in his office tut-tutting at his students' home works a full hour before anyone else graced the department with their presence. On those all to frequent days when mechanical problems or a strike would threaten his dominance of the prize for punctuality, he would risk his most precious possession, his 1958 Rover, in the mania of the early morning rush hour and drive the 25 miles from Surbiton into London. On rare occasion, either due to an unexpected problem with the trains, or because of a miscalculation on his part, class started late because London Transport detained our pin-striped subject without just legal cause, but no one ever said that Dr. Barstaires was late.

Each lesson plan was fully scripted in perfect round hand; each problem worked with margin notes to guide the master through the axioms and theorems of Electrical Engineering. Each day, at the precisely appointed hour, Dr. Barstaires would enter the classroom carrying a Harrods carrier bag. The bag, containing home-works carefully marked with red ink, would be placed with formality on the front desk. Then Barstaires would remove and hang his suit jacket on the wooden coat-hanger, carefully extracted from the carrier bag, and don his pristine white starched laboratory, "spelt la- bor-a- tory," coat. He would then write and underline the date at the top-right of the blackboard and class would begin.

His diagrams were works of art; perfectly straight and labeled axes with draftsman crafted arrowheads, and circles drawn with the aid of a very old wooden blackboard compass. This paragon of order was solid like the aircraft carrier of his naval days, not influenced by tempest or temptress. We never knew his first name, although the initials K.W. did inspire the pseudonym of "kilowatt" in every freshman class, each student fully convinced that it was an original thought. Indeed, it was, to my recollection, strongly suggested by the old don himself, quite early on in Michaelmas.

No one ever got closer than a corrected conjugation to Dr. Barstaires. When conversation in the faculty lounge drifted to the meaning of life, the theater, or any endeavor of philosophy, Dr. Barstaires was simply disinterested. At least that was the appearance that he gave. I had on occasion suspected that deep inside this enigma was a real person with a huge heart and soul that were desperate for self-expression. If only he could bring himself to tender his immutable conclusions on the state of mankind, but his reserved silence, albeit punctuated with occasional tortured glances in the direction of the current prophet, was politely sustained.

In their most adversarial moments students conspired to craft an image of his wife. Ideas ranged from "she who must be obeyed," of Rumpole fame, to the thin and reserved reverend wife, author of many tea parties for the vicar and his aged parish groupies. With whom would God pair a withered old stuffed shirt whose only apparent interests were valve volt meters and transistor transfer characteristics? Was he once a dashing young teenager with more testosterone than common sense, chasing the ladies with verve and determination? Was he ever like us? How did he become so pin stripped, so bowler hatted, so staid? Was his young bride a ravishing beauty with eyebrows worthy of a lover's woeful ballad? How had she fared as he withdrew to the safety of the role of the English gentleman? I suffered Barstaires' cutting grammatical corrections and I yet felt pity on his monastic-like abandonment of life's most pleasurable intercourse, but I was never allowed a single glance behind the mask. He remains a painful enigma.

Dr. Barstaires taught freshman in a first rate university. Although such places harbor and reward eccentricity, the most insane professors were carefully shielded from the cruelty of bright young undergraduates, who still pondered the reasons for their presence in those hallowed halls, and quickly took advantage of the slightest impediment, wherever it could be found. All were desperate to succeed at their scholarly pursuits, but the greatest and most instantaneous rewards came from the approval of the other men, as the students were called, when an ingenious prank succeeded.

The only time that I can recall seeing a smile from Dr. Barstaires, was when the entire freshman class of 50 students placed Harrods carrier bags on their desks at the exact moment that Dr. Barstaires placed his on the teacher's front desk. In that moment we had revealed a fragment of knowledge of this most complicated, yet totally predictable English gentleman. Did he enjoy the harmony, or was it an invasion? Does the man who sets out to make his entire life totally predictable, object when his behavior is predicted? This thought crossed my mind as we enjoyed a kind of polite and reserved laughter, hoping for reinforcements from the victim, but holding back in case of any sign of offence. It was a gentle diversion from the safety of the established formal relationship, a fleeting bond.

It is interesting to reflect on the nature of the classroom as a social group. Teacher and students must play their parts within rather narrow bounds if efficient education is to take place. Students must sit quietly and listen carefully, while writing a summary transcript of the proceedings, sufficient for later expansion into a study guide. The optimum atmosphere in the classroom is quite fragile, and can be disturbed by any one of the players. Those blessed with the fortune of teaching eight-year-old Sunday school students will confirm that keeping order is like "herding cats." This experience leads me to believe that the necessary cooperation of the students does not come naturally. Yet day after day in hundreds of thousands of university classrooms all over the world, students and teachers conspire to maintain this delicate order. Perhaps it is the joy of learning, or the human weakness for a good story, that causes students to suspend their free will. The rewards for the teacher are much easier to discern. There cannot be a more fulfilling profession for those who take it seriously.

Men and women of integrity gain no pleasure in defeating a foe that presents no defense. It would have been too easy to rig the blackboard, or to steal that antique compass, but there was no gain to be had in slapstick japes with Dr. Barstaires. Our little prank took a great deal of intellect and considerable energy. We discovered that Harrods did not give up its prized paper carrier bags, 50 at a time, to college students seeking the cheapest object on sale, no matter how meritorious the justification tendered. Harrods was a bastion of the upper classes. In the old days, before the Arabs bought the store, one could phone in an order for a book from anywhere in London and have it hand delivered that same afternoon. It reveled in stories of its snobbish encounters with ordinary folk. One famous fable propagated by the store concerned an exchange between a person looking for a lampshade and a sales clerk. The shock of seeing the prices of the fine silk shades caused the mere mortal to ask, "where are the plastic lamp shades?" The reply was "Woolworth's madam."

On his own ground, his subject matter or the Queen's English, Dr. Barstaires was a tyrant. He would cleave a split infinitive, or rescue a dangling preposition, irrespective of the source of the crime, colleague or student, much to the mortal displeasure of those few members of the faculty whose imperfect grammar was a painfully reminder of their lack of a grammar school education. As a student of working class parents, having failed both eleven plus and thirteen plus entrance exams to the grammar school, my presence at the university was not at all secure. It was certainly not in keeping with the expectations of the elitist class system that is England; a culture that has survived wars and rumors of wars, industrial and technological revolutions, and has been successfully transplanted to colonies throughout the world.

Examinations were extremely important to the old man. Setting a really good question was an art form that was rapidly disappearing. There were some questions from his own Tripos examinations at Cambridge that even he could not answer after twenty-five years in the profession. Such high standards these days would cause a riot amongst the new breed of highly objective and ever complaining students.

There were other pressures that were even more despicable to Barstaires. Ever increasing class sizes and the Americanization of higher education were leading to new economies. In their hay day, the universities only had to cope with modest quantities of the elite. In the annual exam season, professors enjoyed the luxury of time to craft novel questions, but those days were coming to a close. More efficient methods were necessarily emerging. Barstaires dreaded the thought that one of his most valuable assets was about to be replaced by that most disgusting of American inventions, the multiple-choice exam.

It wasn't just the erosion of proper examinations and their attendant ritual that bothered him. Perhaps even more serious was the blatant corruption of the English language. Drip by drip the fine structure, the wordsmanship, and the elegance of a once great language were leaking away. It was fashionable to use sloppy constructions and ever more acceptable to make allies of subjects and quite inappropriate verbs. He shuddered every time he heard, "different than," especially on the B.B.C., and was devastated by the incomplete sentences so common of American politicians. People who should know better would add, "You know what I mean," to a perfectly awful sentence, not as an apology, but as a defiant claim that correctness and clarity of meaning were no longer the responsibility of the speaker. The phrase rapidly degenerated into, "You know," and turned up in all kinds of odd places, sometimes several times in one sentence. Quite suddenly an international habit was formed.

Barstaires was immensely proud of the English tradition in all matters, especially in higher education, but he saw its shining glory slipping away. His contemporaries were retiring and being replaced by brilliant young scholars with an American zeal for research that led to publications in prestigious journals, now almost entirely published by American companies and edited and controlled by American scholars. A new day was dawning and new standards were being enforced, unfortunately by foreigners. Even in his native land, his values, his art form, and his tradition were slipping into ridicule.

The whole profession was being turned upside down. In its day, the European university system had the students seated at the feet of the great masters of its disciplines, coming not just to be taught, but to be engaged in the learning experience. There was a feeling of awe and respect for the dons of those days. They professed and the students took their notes, but the real learning too place in the libraries and study halls where exhaustive searches were often necessary in order to locate subject matter that had some relevance to the topics discussed in class. Now the Americans had mastered the art of producing text books that illustrated every point and principle in simple language with gaudy pictures to ally the need for careful thought. One just opened the head and poured in knowledge without it impacting the cerebellum in any way. This was at least the point of view of one particular aged English don.

The story was told of the most famous and highly erudite professor at Oxford who noted that Smythe, who sat in the front row of his class, never seemed to take notes. This gradually wore on the professor, who prided himself on his oratory and the uniqueness of his approach to his subject. In an uncharacteristic outburst, he asked, "Smythe, why are you not taking notes?" "I am using my grandfather's sir," was the confident reply. This was the dichotomy. The older don rested on his uniqueness, his eloquence, his laurels, while the student sought the easiest way to learn. The modern Americanized professor relied heavily on a good text book and spent his most valued time in the pursuit of grants and in the laboratory or at the typewriter, publishing for all his worth. Barstiares simply couldn't imagine how worthwhile contributions to knowledge could come from a life and death struggle to keep up an average output of so many publications per year. These fly-boys were also bringing their research results directly to their classrooms, without waiting the nominal fifty years or so for proper maturity. It was clear, however, where the future lie. Barstaires and his contemporaries were being replaced, not replicated.