British Universities Past and Present

Robert Anderson

• Publisher: Hambledon Continuum
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780826433558
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Physical Education

This book is both a concise history of British universities and their place in society over eight centuries, and a penetrating analysis of current university problems and policies as seen in the light of that history. It explains how the modern university system has developed since the Victorian era, and gives special attention to changes in policy since the Second World War, including the effects of the Robbins report, the rise and fall of the binary system, the impact of the Thatcher era, and the financial crises which have beset universities in recent years. A final chapter on the past and the present shows the continuing relevance of the ideals inherited from the past, and makes an important contribution to current controversies by identifying a distinctively British university model and discussing the historical relationship of state and market.

1

Serving Church and State

Apart from the church and the monarchy, universities are the oldest and most international of British institutions. The European university traces its origins to the twelfth century, or even before – 1088 is the traditional foundation date for Bologna, and Paris followed soon afterwards. These two universities provided alternative models of authority, Bologna as a ‘university of students’ (the election of the rector of the older Scottish universities by their students is a relic of this), Paris as a ‘university of masters’. More significant in the long run was that universities in Italy, and in southern Europe generally, came to focus on professional training in law and medicine, while Paris, the model for Oxford and then Cambridge, was devoted primarily to philosophy and theology. But this was only a matter of emphasis, for there was a common European pattern of teaching and degrees based on four faculties: the preparatory faculty of arts led on to the professional faculties of theology, medicine, and law – including both the canon law of the church and the civil or Roman law which trained servants for the state. The international character of medieval universities was reinforced by the need for papal sanction, by the migration of students and scholars, and by a common heritage of learning.

The full course of arts and theology required a long progression through a series of tests and exercises. The central discipline of medieval universities was logic, based on the works of Aristotle as interpreted by Christian commentators, which covered most existing knowledge of the natural and human worlds. Pupils studied texts and commentaries under the guidance of masters, and proved their ability through formal, oral disputations in which propositions were expounded and defended. The system was designed to develop analytical and expository skills within a framework of orthodoxy rather than to encourage critical or original thought, but at its best it provided a subtle and rigorous intellectual training.¹

Oxford University took shape toward the end of the twelfth century, and Cambridge was founded by a secession from Oxford traditionally dated to 1209. Both began as informal groups of scholars, but soon acquired privileged status, from king as well as pope. European universities were never purely religious bodies – they also depended on the protection of the state and served secular interests, and the English ones were especially favoured by the monarchy. Since state and church were often in conflict, the universities could carve out space between them. They were not subject to the direct control of the local bishops, while in the secular world they enjoyed autonomy and privilege as property-owning corporate bodies with their own legal rights, not least exemption for members of the university, both masters and scholars, from the jurisdiction of the towns in which they were situated; these exemptions lasted well into the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries.

The medieval university was a community (the original meaning of universitas) of study and learning. At Oxford and Cambridge the communal ideal seems strikingly represented by the colleges, whose chapels, dining halls and quadrangles or courts survive as built evidence. But colleges were a comparatively late development, borrowed from Paris. Early students lived in lodgings in the town, or in halls (Oxford) and hostels (Cambridge) which provided basic accommodation but not teaching. Colleges differed from halls in being corporate bodies enjoying legal privileges, with a permanent financial endowment, usually in the form of land, provided by the founder and added to by later pious benefactors, who included aristocratic and royal women such as Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII. The endowment paid for the buildings, for the maintenance of communal religious worship, and for scholarships to support promising young men, especially those who aimed at careers in the church. In the earliest colleges, which appeared in the thirteenth century, scholars and fellows were advanced students, ‘postgraduates’ in modern terms. The first colleges to admit undergraduates were King’s Hall at Cambridge (c. 1317, an ancestor of Trinity College), and New College at Oxford (1379).² New College, founded by William Wykeham, bishop of Winchester, was a joint foundation with his school at Winchester: ‘Wykehamists’ proceeded from one to the other, and often back again as teachers. Henry VI established a similar connection when he founded Eton College along with King’s College, Cambridge in 1440; non-Etonians were not admitted to King’s until 1865.

The links between schools and universities have always been important in defining the social function of higher education, and the foundation of grammar schools in towns of all sizes was a favourite field of action for wealthy philanthropists from the late middle ages to the seventeenth century, encouraging new links between the universities and urban merchants or lawyers. Grammar schools taught the Latin which was essential for any university education, and often had scholarships tied to particular colleges. The boundary between schools and universities shifted over time: in the sixteenth century boys were still going to the university at fifteen or sixteen, but the typical age rose to seventeen in the seventeenth century, and eighteen subsequently. The youth of university students, and their reputation for indiscipline and violence, led the universities to insist by around 1400 that all students must reside in a hall, hostel or college. But it was only in the Tudor period that the colleges came to predominate, and that teaching and housing undergraduates became their main concern.

In the middle ages the universities were comparatively little used by the aristocracy, who had their own system of apprenticeship to military and chivalric values within noble households, or by the lesser landed gentry. Information about the social origins of medieval students is scanty and difficult to interpret, but it seems to show that most of them came from the middle ranks of society – from the families of prosperous farmers or yeomen, of small traders and merchants, perhaps of urban artisans. The church had an interest in recruiting its priesthood as widely as it could, and was an important channel of social mobility. Scholarships and family resources supported students through their long university years, and colleges developed connections with specific counties and regions, recruiting their students through local endowments and personal contacts with schools and patrons.³ But students from really poor backgrounds were rare. An overwhelmingly rural and illiterate society possessed only rudimentary mechanisms for discovering and promoting talent. The stereotype of the poor medieval student thus needs to be qualified. Nor was the romantic image of the student as an international wanderer much more accurate: many English scholars went on to European careers, but they received their first degrees in England, and the English universities (unlike Paris, Padua, and other continental counterparts) attracted few students from abroad.

If there is one point on which historians of medieval universities agree, it is their essentially vocational and utilitarian character. The pioneering authority Hastings Rashdall poured cold water on the cult of ‘liberal education’ in his own age, the 1890s, and pointed out that ‘the rapid multiplication of universities during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was largely due to a direct demand for highly educated lawyers and administrators’ to serve the state.⁴ The intellectual skills of logic and disputation were valuable in a wide range of occupations, especially as society became more urbanized and royal bureaucracies expanded.⁵ The intellectual elite cultivated scholarship and learning, to maintain and honour which was one of the purposes of the university, but teaching future servants of church and state was equally important: to suppose that medieval universities were ivory towers devoted to pure scholarship is a misunderstanding. Theology was itself a practical study in a society which saw the salvation of souls as a central concern of life. Most arts graduates became parish priests or schoolteachers, while a higher degree in theology or canon law was almost indispensable for influential posts in cathedrals and church administration. University students included many monks and friars, sent by their orders for a training in scholarship and administrative skills, and living in separate monastic colleges or local convents; but the spirit of the universities was not a reclusive or monastic one, and they always served the lay professions as well as the church. The medical faculties were not as important in England as in many continental countries (though they never completely lost their foothold), but the law faculties provided secular servants for the state, and this was one reason why monarchs favoured the universities with endowments and legal privileges. The crown also drew heavily on the higher ranks of the church for its servants, and worldly clerics were among the most generous of the universities’ benefactors – most spectacularly in the case of Thomas Wolsey, whose Cardinal College at Oxford was planned on a lavish scale. It was confiscated by Henry VIII and refounded as Christ Church; Trinity College was the corresponding Henrician foundation at Cambridge, enriched by monastic plunder.

Henry VIII’s break with Rome was a decisive episode, putting both the English church and the universities under closer royal control. In 1535 the king sent commissioners to ‘visit’ the two universities and impose changes, a mode of intervention followed by other rulers over the next century and more.⁶ Henry expected the universities, as arbiters of religious orthodoxy and nurseries of the clergy, to fall into line with royal policy, and this was enforced by Henry’s powerful minister Thomas Cromwell as chancellor of Cambridge. In subsequent years, as policy shifted towards a more explicit Protestantism under Edward VI, then back to Catholicism under Mary I, the universities underwent a further series of reforms and purges.

The first concern of Henry VIII’s visitors was religious conformity. The universities were required to acknowledge royal supremacy in the church and to renounce the authority of the pope, which they did without much resistance. But the visitors were also concerned with the curriculum: the teaching of canon law was entirely abolished (though civil law remained), various books were prescribed or proscribed, and the teaching of theology was to rest in future on scripture rather than on medieval authorities. The visitors’ edicts reflected Renaissance as well as Reformation. The influence of classical humanism had been apparent well before 1535, marked not least by Erasmus’s visits to both English universities. Both before and after the Reformation, humanists aimed at purifying religion by putting it on a rigorous scholarly and scriptural basis, requiring the study and teaching of Greek and Hebrew. The rediscovery of classical authors also led to a new stress, in schools as well as universities, on studying literary texts, on elegant composition in Latin and Greek, and on the arts of rhetoric and persuasion.⁷ Appeal to classical authorities was combined in the new humanist curriculum with the traditional Aristotelian logic, and although the latter was increasingly criticized the basic blend of classical and Christian influences and ideals dominated educated culture until the advent of the Enlightenment.

Academically, the sixteenth century was the decisive period when teaching moved from university to college. In the medieval universities, teaching was carried out largely by ‘regent masters’, recent graduates for whom teaching duties were a part of the course leading to higher degrees. In the fifteenth century this system began to break down, and new posts were created for salaried professors, readers, or lecturers (the terms were more or less interchangeable). The Tudors tried to build on this innovation to revive university-level teaching, and Henry VIII founded five ‘regius’ chairs at each university, in divinity, Greek, Hebrew, civil law and medicine; other donors followed suit. But this came too late to counter the more intimate and flexible forms of teaching developed in the colleges, where there was also a chance to study fashionable subjects not on the official curriculum such as modern languages, literature and science. Although the university system of disputations and exercises retained its vitality well into the seventeenth century, and those who wished to graduate still had to jump these hurdles, the authority of the university itself dwindled. The colleges effectively controlled admissions, and decided who was allowed to present himself for a degree. The universities’ buildings, consisting essentially of examination schools and libraries, and their revenues from matriculation or graduation fees, were overshadowed by the wealth of the colleges, which became the focus of loyalty and everyday life. New colleges were founded, often with distinct religious agendas, since all parties in the church saw the training of godly parish clergymen as the key to religious regeneration. The tradition of regional links also thrived, with foundations like Jesus College at Oxford (1571) for Welshmen. The number of halls and hostels declined sharply: at Oxford, there were fifty-two halls in 1505, only eight by 1537, a few of which survived into the nineteenth century.⁸ Most halls and hostels vanished, or their sites and buildings were absorbed by the colleges. The latter also benefited from the abolition of monastic colleges and the diversion of church revenues which followed the Reformation. The rise of collegiate life reflected the desire of both university authorities and parents to impose more discipline on undergraduates; the college fellows now acted as tutors supervising the morals and finances of their charges, and answered to families for them. Discipline at this period included corporal punishment as well as attempts to curb student activities outside the college walls.

The attractions of the college system, combined with the focus of humanist education on the moral and cultural formation of the gentleman, underlay the so-called ‘educational revolution’ of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, marked by a huge influx of lay students from the upper classes.⁹ First the aristocracy, then the broader mass of landed gentry, became enthusiasts for university education as a way of training their sons for leadership of their local communities, for service in the expanding state bureaucracy, and for careers in the more prestigious professions such as law and the clergy. The educational balance within the universities shifted from the higher, vocational faculties to the general liberal education given in arts, and it became common simply to attend the university for a few years to acquire social and cultural polish, without necessarily taking a degree. For intending lawyers, for example, or for landed gentlemen seeking a smattering of legal knowledge for the management of their estates, the legal education given at the universities was of limited value. Civil law was relevant for some specialized branches of the legal system, and encouraged by the state because of the support it gave to monarchical authority, but the far more useful common law was not taught, and a barrister needed to be trained at one of the Inns of Court in London, themselves a late medieval development. It thus became normal to seek a general education at Oxford or Cambridge, and to follow this with professional study at the bar. In the case of medicine, university qualifications were even less useful: surgery was still essentially a practical skill, taught through apprenticeship; an MD degree was needed for the more prestigious qualifications given by the Royal College of Physicians, but the university’s own medical teachers could not offer practical training.

The sixteenth century thus consolidated what was to remain a feature of the English universities – the atrophy of the professional faculties, and the centrality of general or ‘liberal’ education. This contrasted with the importance of law in most continental universities, as a form of general education for laymen as well as for the expanding bureaucracies of the state. For a time, the growth of ‘offices’ under the Tudor and Stuart monarchs took the same direction, and helped to make university qualifications more attractive. But British political developments cut short the growth of bureaucracy, one reason why growth before 1640 did not resume after 1660. What remained was the role of the ancient universities as finishing schools for the upper classes, grafted onto corporations devoted to learning and religion.¹⁰ Their national role in giving the governing elite a set of common experiences and values was of lasting significance.

Historians have disagreed about the timing of the ‘educational revolution’ and about how to interpret the ambiguous social descriptions given in college and matriculation registers. Like the influence of humanism, the aristocratic influx of laymen was probably already under way in the fifteenth century. Growing numbers may have included boys from the urban middle class as well as from the gentry.¹¹ And while contemporaries were already grumbling that the wealthy were squeezing out poorer boys and taking over the endowments intended for them, it is probable that the older machinery of scholarships leading to careers in the church survived alongside the growth of ‘commoners’ (those not holding scholarships but paying fees), and continued to allow some social mobility.¹²

What seems beyond doubt is the sheer growth in numbers. It has been estimated that in 1400 there were about 2000 university students (1500 of them at Oxford, 5-600 at Cambridge), and that by 1450 numbers had risen to 3000 (1700 and 1300 respectively).¹³ For later years, when continuous records of matriculation became available, it is easier to establish the number of students entering each year than the number in residence at any one time. Matriculations, after fluctuating in the sixteenth century, began a steady rise in 1600, which reached a peak in the 1630s. There may have been 6000 residents in the 1630s (3000 in each university, about one-third fellows and two-thirds undergraduates), a remarkably high figure for a country with a population of about five million.¹⁴ It appears that, counting both universities and Inns of Court, some 2.5 per cent of the male age cohort...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Serving Church and State
• 2. Currents of Change
• 3. Oxbridge Reformed
• 4. Effortless Superiority
• 5. Province and Metropolis
• 6. National Identities
• 7. Ideas of the University
• 8. Interwar Conservatism
• 9. Postwar Revolution
• 10. The Robbins Era
• 11. State or Market?
• 12. Past and Present
• Notes
• Guide to Further Reading
• Index
• Copyright