Feynman drank, played bongo, womanised, slept with some of his friends' wives.
But that does not mean everyone who does that is a great Physicist. Neither all great Physicists do these.
Taking an outlier and using him for justification of something seems obtuse.
I love Feynman, and have a picture of him on my wall. But that does not mean I idealize or even like everything he did in his life.
Incidentally, I've not read much about his womanising - perhaps I'm not reading between the lines?
And although the bomb was used on the Japanese, it was meant primarily as a weapom against Hitler.
Feynman was an American Jew. Imagine yourself in the same situation. There's a dictator who hates all Jews and basically any race which is not Aryan enough for him. He wants to kill them all. A gigantic war machine which is fighting the rest of the world alone is also possibly building something similar.
You get the opportunity to work on something that undermines the devil, that will buy you and your country protection against it. Will you not work in it?
If it adapts to pedagogic techniques now known to be more effective, that’s a good thing. If it instead adapts to changes in the students themselves, I think that’s more likely to be bad than good, or is at a minimum not obviously good.
Obviously there have been changes in the students over the years, not least the fact that the universities now admit women and Catholics. There have also been far broader changes in society; it wouldn't be illegal for Turing to be gay in the present Cambridge.
> kids more passionate about drinking and clubbing and gossiping than studying ... not like the world of Turing or Feynman at all.
I think you may have underestimated how much Feynman was a prankster, womaniser and bongo-player who occasionally did some physics as well :)
> you see them in the lectures, then you go back to your college
There's kind of a hidden initiative test here; it doesn't have to be that way, you can organise alternatives, and there's a whole intercollegiate infrastructure of extracurricular activities. There was a somewhat long-running university computer society when I was an undergrad, through which I found all the hackers, and some of us ended up starting a hosting service in my third year: https://www.srcf.net/ - that taught me far more of practical use than half the computing course.
May balls: yes, these are a bit odd and above my personal poshness threshold. I think they really do date from the era of Turing but not his subculture within that era, the big black tie social event belongs more to capital-S Society of debutantes and aristocrats.
> What I found shocking is that so many students were doing poorly academically.
The difficulty gap is real. Unlike all the education system people will have encountered previously, you can't coast unless you are very smart, and there will be extremely challenging material. It's .. deliberate is the wrong word, but there are certainly tutors who will up the difficulty level if their students are not struggling.
The mental health and motivational/pedagogical thinking is also stuck in the 19th century. Some of this does need to adapt to today's students.
> The more ambitious kids were more busy padding their CV to land a good job than doing what interests them.
This is far more what Oxford is "for" in British society because that's how you get ahead, unfortunately.