4 DECEMBER 1964, Page 19

The Big Sussex Beat

The Idea of a New University. Edited by David Daiches. (Deutsch, 25s.) SUSSEX has succeeded in becoming the most aggressively publicised of our universities. BBC- TV has shown us the Sussex lectures of a Regius Professor of Modern History, heralded by a fanfare of Sussex trumpets. The university corre- spondents of the highbrow Sundays tell us how fashionable it is, and how at a conference the 'Sussex Mods Steal the Show.' The Vice-Chan- cellor is reported as giving evidence to the Franks Commission in Oxford that the social, and other, attractions of Sussex are seducing able sixth- formers away from the dreaming spires. The Times photographs the Library opening to show the Queen, not with some hobbledehoy official, but with the student daughter of Mr. Henry Brooke. (Surely, since the election, it would have been More with-it to whistle up those Jay twins?) Such ballyhoo might, in the idiom of our time, be called 'that Sussex beat' or 'the Brighton row.'

The present book consists in twelve essays, two appendices, an index, and six pages of fine pictures of Falmer House. The twelve contribu- tors • include the Vice-Chancellor and all the Sussex stars—Asa Briggs, Martin Wight, Sir Basil Spence, and the editor himself. Nevertheless, to anyone concerned with and about the practical implementation of educational ideas, this is likely to be a very disappointing volume. The main cause of the frustration is indicated in the solitary undergraduate contribution. Mr. Granville Haw- kins writes, with a modesty not found in all his seniors, of the difficulty of providing 'the guinea- pigs' viewpoint in an anthology of aspirations' (p. 193). The whole book—though the point is certainly not stressed—must have been written before a single guinea-pig had actually gradu- ated. For at the 1963 Degree Congregation when Prime Minister Macmillan was honoured, along with other newsworthy notables, there were still no first degrees to be given. Mr. Hawkins and others of the original entry graduated only in 1964; in the company of the up-and-coming Mr. ,Albert Finney.

Of course, this rush to publish left some con- tributors better placed than others: the archi- tect, for instance, could point with legitimate pride to new buildings actually in use; and you do not need to have had any graduates to survey - 'Undergraduates and their problems.' (This last piece reveals the perhaps no longer quite so fashionable fact behind the fashionable image: that Sussex falls into the Oxbridge-London group in drawing only 20 per cent of its students from working-class homes, as opposed to the still in- adequate 30 per cent of the Redbrick rest.) Yet the more the reader sympathises with the general educational ideas presented here, the more exas- perated he is likely to be at not getting precise information about how and how far these ideas are being put into practice.

We are given Boris Ford's starry-eyed assur- ance that 'Schools at Sussex have none of the characteristics of Departments elsewhere' (p. 118). Then how, please—and some of us do really want to know—is the enormously complicated exam- ination programme, implied by the exciting curriculum given as Appendix A, going to be developed and made to work? Again, the Senior Tutor expresses concern about the status of the junior teacher, and the need for him to have a say in university government (pp. 31-32). Splendid. Keele, York and —above all—Newcastle all have new charters guaranteeing a far greater say than Redbrick has known before. How, then, is Sussex actually governed? Who decides what, and through what institutions? We are not told.

ANTONY FLEW