Oxford Accent
It is sad to see the Franks Commission joining the fashionable chorus and demanding that Oxford should indulge in a rapid expansion in the applied sciences and technology, for all the world like a dowager donning a miniskirt. We are told that this expansion is not only 'of the utmost national importance' but vital, too, if Oxford 'is to have a balance of studies appro- priate to the position it claims in the modern v4.444.' The first of these arguments is irrelevant: howev important technology may be to the nation any expansion can quite well be met, for the most part, by other universities—after all, there have never been so many. And the second merely shows that Lord Franks and his col- leagues are claiming the wrong role for Oxford in the 'modern world.'
The word 'modern' itself is a giveaway. For the destiny of Oxford is above all to sustain, cherish and pass on to new generations the time- less and unchanging values of western civilisation at the highest level of which man is capable. This means. in practical terms, an education based on the four cornerstones of literature, history, philo- sophy and mathematics—all fields of study par- ticularly suited to the tutorial system of which the.aFranks Commission is rightly proud. If Oxford can make itself supreme in these four fields it has nothing to fear: and if the 'modern world' doesn't like it, so much the worse for the modern world. Elsewhere in its report, the Com- mission quotes approvingly the remark of the Master of Campion Hall that 'it is destructive for any one university to attempt to combine the excellences of several.' Yes, indeed.
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