A Week at Oxford’s Wadham Experience

A familiar feeling returned as my train neared Oxford. A feeling of bitter remorse. 

It was an early-autumn evening and I was on my way back to the university where, a quarter-century ago, I somehow gained a degree in French and Russian. This time, however, I wouldn’t be a hapless undergraduate, but rather a mature visitor—an intellectual voyager, if you will. I was taking part in the Wadham Experience, which markets itself as a “transformative academic retreat.”

Like a lot of things dreamed up at Wadham College (which include, it turns out, modern science), the idea is quite clever. The weeklong, multidisciplinary residential courses, established in 2024, are an attempt to distill the singular magic of the oldest university in the English-speaking world and serve it up as an enriching vacation. 

For the college, it is a chance to turn cultural capital into actual capital; prices begin at a not-inconsiderable $13,050 (roughly what a British undergraduate pays for a full year of tuition). For those of us taking part, it would be a chance to play at being scholars amid Oxford’s dreaming spires and ancient tomes, but with better food, better wine, and, hopefully, fewer insecurities. Our timetable promised close-up encounters with Shakespeare’s Folio and Kafka’s manuscripts, art classes, classical recitals, after-hours banquets in museums. All this—and no need to take an exam at the end of it. I couldn’t wait.

So why the remorse? It was only as I consulted my schedule on the train that I noticed something that had somehow eluded my attention until then. There was a reading list. How did I miss that? It included… Hang on, Franz Kafka!? My train was due to arrive in nine minutes, and now I was trying to read Kafka on my phone. A slightly less happy memory of student life came back to me—all those last-minute panics about not having read À la Recherche du Temps Perdu or Pushkin’s complete poetic works. 

Oh, I had a wonderful time at Oxford. It’s where I met my wife, for one thing. But there were always more pressing things to do than attend lectures or study rare manuscripts in the Radcliffe Camera, the beautiful circular reading room that’s the centerpiece of the Bodleian Library. And this was another reason I was looking forward to the Wadham Experience. Here was a chance to go back and do it all properly. To pay attention. Indeed, this was to be the theme of the week: “Attention in a Cacophonous World,” an idea that we would be considering with musicologist Professor Eric Clarke, German literature expert Professor Carolin Duttlinger, and philosopher Dr. Tom Sinclair. There would be “fireside chats” from pioneering AI researcher Chris Summerfield (a “fellow,” or senior member, of Wadham) and the former head of Britain’s intelligence services, Robert Hannigan (the college warden, which is more important than it sounds).

As it turned out, I needn’t have worried about that reading list. It was only a small excerpt from Kafka’s diaries and a couple of essays—easily completed over tea in my cozy little attic room. Accommodation was within the Gothic stone of the college itself, and most meals were served in the Hall (think Hogwarts’s canteen). While Oxford colleges are not five-star hotels, my room was tasteful, comfortable, and spacious. 

On the first morning, I began to meet my cohort over breakfast. There were 21 of us in total, about a third of us British but with an impressive variety of other nations represented (India, Japan, Singapore, Jordan, Canada, the U.S.) and a still more impressive array of résumés in medicine, law, tech, publishing, and the charity sector. Around a third were former students, including Jim, a lawyer from Montana who studied jurisprudence at Wadham 50 years ago. 

In an introductory address, Hannigan told us that this was our chance to exercise “some intellectual muscles we don’t usually get to use” and “rise above some of the problems of the world.” The news headlines were, as usual, grim (indeed, the alternative course, held the week before, was titled “Civilization on the Edge”). But Hannigan reminded us that if things seemed hairy now, we should have seen what they were like in Britain in the 17th century, when the college was founded, a period that saw the English Civil Wars, the Great Plague, and various shades of religious persecution. He framed the college as a haven from all this, a place where—whatever else was going on in the world—deep thinking was cherished.

And suddenly we were back at school. Fun school! Professor Duttlinger asked us to consider whether distraction was another form of attention and assigned us Kafka-inspired creative writing exercises before we all hotfooted over to the Bodleian Library to look at his actual manuscripts. In the chapel, local musician Melissa Holding played Erik Satie on the piano and a hypnotic meditation on a Japanese koto; Professor Clarke blasted out a cacophonous Steve Reich tape piece; and then we all participated in a performance of John Cage’s silent masterpiece, 4’33”. Dr. Sinclair whipped through the history of ethics, from Immanuel Kant to Iris Murdoch, and had us engage in “active listening” exercises in pairs, inspired by the psychologist Carl Rogers. 

Insights cascaded and overlapped in surprising ways. Duttlinger and Clarke turned out to be excellent violinists and performed a Bach duet. English professor Dr. William Poole dropped by from New College with a pile of first-edition Copernicuses and Newtons (“Of course you can turn the pages!”) as well as Mathematical Magick (1648) by former Wadham warden John Wilkins, who entertained the idea of flying to the moon in a goose-powered kite. It was in Wadham that Wilkins first brought together the great minds (Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, Christopher Wren) who would go on to form the Royal Society. 

There was little time to draw breath between art classes, violin making, and disquisitions on John Ruskin. But the slightly hectic pace created a palpable feeling of dawning revelation. As did the fact that our professors were clearly having a wonderful time, joining in our creative-writing exercises and drawing lessons with gusto. “It didn’t feel like they were talking about all this stuff because they needed to teach you. It was more like they really wanted to share all this cool stuff they’d been working on,” Victoria, a former Wadham Experience student now living in France, told me afterward. 

Of equal value was the huge range of experiences and perspectives the students brought to each class. It really helps to have, say, a leading antitrust lawyer on hand when you’re grilling a pioneer of AI, or a clinical psychologist with decades of experience treating ADHD when you’re thinking about attention spans. But that makes it sound terribly serious. We laughed a lot, too. And did I mention the college has an extremely good wine cellar? 

Oxford, meanwhile, put on its best autumn show: warm, crisp, and bright. There were no students around yet, but various graduation ceremonies lent a festive air. As one fellow student said, “I went for a run this morning and when I crossed Magdalen Bridge, I was, like, ‘Stop it, Oxford!’ ” 

Something else returned from my student days: an expansion of time. The days felt far longer than they actually were, perhaps because we were so happily immersed. The novelist Naomi Alderman recently wrote about how the thing that keeps drawing us back to our phones is actually a misdirected desire to learn. I’m aware that, for some, what I’ve described may sound like the opposite of a vacation. But increasingly I feel that the ability to think and to focus—for no greater aim than the sheer pleasure of it—might, in today’s world, be the truest luxury there is. 

I have an abiding memory from my third evening in Wadham, when I found Aseel, an engineer from Jordan, who had seemed a little shy at first, seemingly collapsed on the lawn in the front quadrangle. I was worried: Was she okay? She was fine. She was simply spellbound. “It’s just so magical!” she said. “I think I will never be the same again.” 

A phrase from Hannigan’s opening address returned to me, about “letting the city work its magic.” There is a reason why Alice in Wonderland, The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, and His Dark Materials were dreamed up in Oxford. It is the concentrated force of mental energy—and I like to think we all managed to smuggle a little of it home with us. 

A version of this story first appeared in the March 2026 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline “Second Thoughts.”