Storm in academe
TABLE TALK
DENIS BROGAN It is perhaps a sign of national torpor that the revolt of the senior half of the university popu- lation against Mr Aubrey Jones and the Prices and Incomes Board has been the main British news of recent weeks or months. We are short of British news. My eldest son put to me the question of what had happened in Britain in 1968 of any general interest. After making vari- ous guesses, all of which, he noted, referred to 1967, all I could offer was the resignation of Mr George Brown. So the dons' revolt provided news. Did it provide more?
I think it raised a number of problems that have been glided over in the happy days of university expansion. Soon the magic words Robbins, Franks, Crowther will be listened to with less pleasing acceptance or credulity. A moment of truth has come. I hope sense as well as truth will survive. But apart from the natural annoyance of the dons, especially the younger dons, at the low level of their rises, the most outrageous proposal has been the suggestion that the students should vote on the efficiency of their teachers or, more specifically, on the merits of the lectures inflicted on the questing, with-it, revolutionary, disillusioned young.
The Prime Minister (himself an ex-don and, I am told, from the undergraduate's point of view, a very efficient one) promptly stamped on that attack on sacred trade union principles, like a Minister of Fuel stamping on any inves- tigation that would show that coal is now a bad national investment. But is there a case for get- ting the students' opinions on the merits of their teachers (as apart from the teachers' pay)? The vox populi might affect the chances of pro- motion of young dons or even, horribile dictu, their continuance in their jobs and, usually but not inevitably connected, views on the relev- ance of what the dons professed to teach. Yet neither of these proposals ought, jointly or severally, to be condemned out of hand.
Although no one has noted it, the suitability of paying professors' salaries in rough propor- tion to their success in attracting an audience was argued with great acuteness by Professor Adam Smith. Perhaps `scunnered' by his memories of Balliol, Professor Smith, back in Glasgow, asserted that students would pay more attention to what they paid for and professors would pay more attention to their customers' wishes and needs if their financial rewards de- pended on the suitability of their wares to the market. Professors should take a leaf out of the book of doctors, lawyers, merchants, candle- stick-makers, etc. Endowments bred idleness, reaching in Oxford to sublime heights or depths of non-feasance.
Something of this spirit survived in theory and practice till the beginning of this century. I can remember the father of the late Sir James Learmonth telling my father of his first day at the University of Edinburgh, seeing the pro- fessors seated at 'the receipt of custom' with the piles of sovereigns and shillings that made up the guineas that were charged for the various lecture courses. A professor didn't need to be good; he needed merely to be the only teacher of an indispensable subject to do very well. All that was abolished by the regulating and egali- tarian spirit of the age, although handsome vested interests were preserved well into this century. What is now proposed is not that system of the free market of Adam Smith. The student leaders (if not necessarily the students)
want to create their own pecking order. Is this a good or bad thing? Like Sir Roger de Cover- ley, I think there is much to be said on both sides. It is true that eminent (and not so emin- ent) scholars never learn the elements of voice projection. I heard, a day or two ago, a good judge say of Professor X, 'He's ten times the scholar that Dr Y is but you can't hear him beyond the front row. So he has ten listeners while Y has a hundred' This is sad but curable. It is not a question of 'brilliance.'
The two best lecturers I have ever heard were the late Regius Professor of Natural History in the University of Glasgow, Sir John Graham Kerr, FRS, and the present Sir Goronwy Edwards, FBA, and, when I heard him, Fellow and Tutor of Jesus College, Oxford, since moved on to higher things. Their great merit was lucidity, relevance and, of course, learning. But equally learned teachers lacked the first two virtues and the third was not enough. As readers of The Times have recently been reminded, Lord Kelvin of Glasgow was an atrociously bad lecturer, his genius totally wasted on the Ordinary Class of Natural Philosophy. But sometimes the contrast is rather disconcerting. Lushington, Tennyson's friend, the Professor of Greek at Glasgow, was a far better scholar than was his Edinburgh opposite number, Blackie, who yet was a great public performer and no doubt taught enough Greek for his Ordinary Class. In both of the ancient English universities, it would today be possible to name very distinguished scholars who have such students as turn up 'climbing the walls from boredom,' as an unkind colleague put it, or since lectures are not even formally compulsory to- day, voting, as Lenin put it, with their feet by staying away.
But is pleasing the students all or most of the job? No, a thousand times no! This is not to say that the students' judgment may be simply a naive admiration of rhetoric or kindly accept- ance of superficial lectures which please the students for the reason Charles II gave to ex- plain the popularity of the Vicar of Harrow— 'His nonsense suits their nonsense.'
About forty-two years ago, the Saturday Evening Post sent an intelligent spy up to Har- vard to 'case the joint.' Among other things, he conducted a primitive Gallup poll to find out who was the most popular lecturer in what we can call 'the Arts faculty.' An overwhelming majority of votes were cast for a young recently arrived Middle-Westerner, pupil ail successor of the then renowned Frederick Jackson Turner. He was Frederick Merk, for many years one of the acknowledged glories of Har- vard. Yet he had none of the marks of a star lecturer or dazzling rhetorician. Pro- fessor Merk had the same merits as Graham Kerr and Sir Goronwy : lucidity, relevance, learning. He could, without any rhetoric, en- lighten the darkness of the athletes and get some shading into the pictures painted by the young, brilliant and arrogant. The Harvard student voters rose to the test and passed. Maybe all or most of the student bodies in Britain would do the same if given a chance!
But—should students determine or even have great weight in deciding what is taught? I have great doubts. But that is another story. It took quite a lot of time for Yorkshire miners to learn not to bring beer and fish and chips to the Costa Brava. The danger with students would rather be that they would all go out for the most novel and exotic dishes, leading to the upsetting of their stomachs or even to their suffering seriously from malnutrition.
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