The Oldest Undergraduate

A curious case faced the four members of the King's College matriculation board of Britain's University of Durham. The applicant before them had quit school at twelve--and he was now all of 68. Nonetheless, he wanted desperately to enter the university as an ordinary undergraduate. Had he been anyone less persuasive than ruddy-faced John McNair, the board might not even have bothered to consider him.

Applicant McNair had an impressive career behind him. After starting out as an errand boy, he was, when he retired in 1955, general and political secretary of the Independent Labor Party. Retirement, he soon found, turned out to be a bore--"a little too much smoking, a little too much drinking, a gradual loss of interest in world affairs and, finally, senility at the end." After eight months of it, Bachelor McNair went before the King's College board in the fall of 1955. He discussed in both English and French his lifetime of wide reading, soon convinced the members that there was no real reason why he should not be admitted. By last week, Britain's oldest undergraduate was becoming a campus legend.

Act Your Age. At first, no one knew exactly how to treat him. When he shyly sat down in the men's bar of the King's College student union, it took all his eloquence to persuade the union president that he did indeed have a right to be in a place reserved "for students only." Once a porter tried to bar him from an examination, gruffly told him to act his age when McNair protested that he was an undergraduate. His classmates opened and closed doors for him, insisted on calling him "sir." His professors felt they might never get used to having that grey-haired old gentleman around.

Though he hated to get up early enough for his 9 o'clock classes ("a bloody nuisance"), McNair sailed through his courses with astonishing ease. He has come out with top marks in French literature, made a "very satisfactory" record in all his other subjects. He became senior debater of the debating team ("You should see the other teams turn green when he starts talking," says one classmate), last week was organizing a meeting to improve student-professor relations. His classmates' "sir" has long since given way to just plain "John."

Bull & Sympathy. Though he retains his old-world courtliness ("I ask your indulgence." he will say in an argument with a brash undergraduate), he is as much at home in a bull session as any student. He is deferential in class, but his professors find him an invaluable stimulus. In a sense, he has become the kindly uncle of the whole university, feeding on the youthfulness about him while giving in return the benefit of his 70 years of experience. "He likes young people," says King's Rector Charles Bosanquet, "and has sympathy for them. But he is a wise old man who has a true sense of what are the real values of life. Without appearing to preach, he does tend to make students understand that there are some things it is silly to do and some that are worth doing."

McNair himself would recommend going back to school to all his contemporaries. "Coming to the university," says he, "was the most intelligent thing I ever did in my life. I am not compelled as are so many of my contemporaries to kill time playing darts and dominoes in the local pub. I have the whirl and surge and generosity of youth around me, and they've taught me again to hope."

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