MR. HOLLOWAY'S PROJECT.
IT is authoritatively announced this week that Mr. Holloway has determined to consecrate a quarter of a million sterling to the erection and partial endowment of a College for Women, on a grand and unprecedented scale. That such a proposal should be welcomed with enthusiasm and gratitude by many persons who lament the deficiency in the provision for feminine education, and the practical monopoly of all the academic found- ations of the country, from the Universities downwards, by the stronger sex, is very natural. Some facts, however, appear from the newspaper reports to have transpired at a preliminary meet- ing which are calculated to suggest grave misgivings as to the manner in which this munificent design is likely to be carried into effect.
It appears that an estate of about 90 acres has been pur- chased at Egham, and that it is proposed to erect on it a stately building in the French Renaissance style, with accommodation for 400 resident students, and a corresponding teaching staff. The splendour and completeness of the proposed College and its equip- ments may be estimated from the fact that it is intended to expend 1150,000 on the building alone. It is understood that this part of the project, at any rate, is already decided on, and admits of no modification.
In so far as this scheme undertakes to provide that the highest conceivable educational advantages shall be brought within the reach of women, it is entirely wise and beneficent. But the scheme also proposes that these advantages shall be restricted to the inmates of a gigantic boarding-house, of whose government and moral discipline nothing appears to be yet known, except that no clerical influence is to be allowed, and that the College is to be wholly unsectaria.n. It is in connection with this second part of the project that the gravest difficulties are likely to arise. A great college in the nature of a convent, which brings 400 young women to live together under one roof, is a new experiment in English social life ; and while it is very doubtful whether it will succeed or not, it is yet more doubtful whether its success is much to be desired. In a country like America, new social experiments of this kind may be tried with far more reasonable expectation of success, and Vassar College, to which reference has been often made as the exemplar to be followed in this instance, appears to have satisfied the expectations of its founder. But in our own country there are traditions and deep-rooted usages, which are still, and are likely long to remain, more potent than the simple desire for intellectual improvement. The home is the centre of English Life, certainly of the life of English women. In the case of men, the larger public life of a great college is a valuable training for the arena of a world or a profession in which men must contend with men. But for women there is, as a rule, no future duty which necessarily requires the bracing discipline and the contests of such a public life. It is essential here to discriminate between learning and living. For convenience and economy of teaching-power, and for the creation of a healthy and stimulating intellectual atmo- sphere, an institution on a great scale, so far as tuition is con- cerned, is likely to prove almost, if not quite, as valuable to women as to men. But for all leisure, and for those portions of the day in which the student is not under actual instruction, the more nearly her life can be assimilated to the tranquil usages of .a well-ordered home the better. Hence it would seem that the problem to be solved is to combine the maximum of educational advantages with the minimum of disturbance to whatever is most
valuable in the social and domestic life of our country women. An ideal University for women should, in the first place, be near enough to some great centre of population to allow of the attendance at the Professors' classes of many women who live in their own 'homes. Egham is too far for this, and at the same time near enough to tantalise hundreds of thoughtful English girls who are resident in London with the vision of an academic life which they would like to share, but from which they would be debarred by unwillingness or inability to incur the expense of a second home. If a site nearer to London had been fortunately chosen, and if the earliest attention had been devoted to the complete equipment of -a great institution with teaching apparatus, library, chemical and physical laboratories, and professors of the highest rank, it is probable that the first and most numerous students -would be those who attended the College by day and returned to their homes by railway. The need of boarding arrangements for students from a distance would immediately be felt, but this need -would be most fitly supplied, not indeed in the form of one vast boarding-house, but on the plan, which works so well at Chelten- ham, of separate dwellings on a more or less quiet and domestic .scale, all affiliated to the central educational establishment, and grouped around it. Some of these homes might be, like the Col- leges of Oxford and Cambridge, on a large, and others on a small scale ; some might be luxurious, and others cheap ; each might 'have its own distinctive religious, or even professional character, and thus, by degrees, there might grow up and cluster round a great academic nucleus a community corresponding in its variety to the complex structure of English society,—a true University for -Women. Those who have a large practical problem to solve must 'begin by accepting the facts of life, and one of these facts is -that Englisti parents are not likely, in great numbers, to permit their daughters to make a home in the great un- sectarian boarding-house which Mr. Holloway is said to contem- plate. It is quite possible to carry out his intention by making the teaching in the College absolutely unsectarian, but this in- tention is compatible with a permission to parents to exercise free choice as to the kind of domestic life and of religious dis- cipline of which their daughters shall be sharers during theii. period of studentship.
Such an institution, however, must come into existence, if at *11, not by way of creation or manufacture, but by way of growth. Every one will sympathise with the natural desire of a generous man who makes a great public gift to see, while he yet lives, his Whole ideal completely realised. But he who would confer the largest intellectual benefit on his contemporaries and on posterity
-will best fulfil his own purpose by the exercise of the difficult
virtues of caution, of faith, and of patience. The noblest monu- ment which can be raised to a public benefactor is an institu- tion which has in it a capacity for development, and for ;adapting itself to the changed circumstances and actual experience of successive generations. It would be melancholy hereafter to see reproduced at Egham the pathetic magnificence and desola- tion of Columbia Market, and to reflect that both failures had arisen from the same causes,—an inaccurate estimate of the exist- ing need, and a mistaken theory as to the way in which that need
could be supplied. Yet if the truth must be told, there is some clanger of this. 'The number of women who earnestly desire to possess what Mr. Holloway proposes to give is not only very large, but is increasing daily. But the number of women who will be
able to accept it on the novel conditions on which he alone appears to be prepared to offer it, is, and is likely to remain, very small indeed.
We sincerely hope that there is yet time for a reconsideration of this crude, though magnificent project. Resources far leas ample than those which the founder promises to give would suffice to equip the most splendid provision for teaching, to secure ground to be hereafter covered with colleges and boarding-houses, to erect some on a small scale by way of experiment, to furnish a moderate. endowment for professorships, and to provide liberal scholarships and exhibitions. The two objects evidently promi- nent in the mind of the proposed founder are the bestowal of a great intellectual boon on Englishwomen, and -the honourable association of his own name with a famous institution of which the nation in after years may feel justly proud. Both objects are entirely legitimate, and may easily be accomplished. But the second can only be effectually secured by giving due heed to the teaching of experience in regard to the first. And we are con- vinced that the best experience obtainable from the Universities, from Girton, from Cheltenham, or from the numerous associations now so laboriously and usefully employed in promoting the higher education of women, will combine to counsel some sub- stantial modifications, if not in the general design, at least in many of the details of the tempting scheme now before the public.
Previous page
