The Approach of Robbins Kingsley Antis National Extension College A.
D. C. Peterson No Job for Judges C. B. Mawdsley The Lonely Ones .Eda Collins Lincoln Said It H. C. Beere Henry Green Gerard Keenan The Light and the Dark C. K. MacLennan Lawyers' Loot S. G. Carter
THE APPROACH OF ROBBINS
SIR,-:—May I fire a small valedictory salvo in what is now, I suppose, the lost battle against the lower- ing of academic standards in the university?
Most educationists state with apparent confidence, but never with even a show of argument, that these standards will remain unaffected when the present schemes for university expansion are put into effect. (Only people who have actually taught in univer- sities are sceptical, or pessimistic, about this.) Mr. A. D. C. Peterson, however, in his last week's article, takes the educationist's position a stage further, and tells us that we need not, or should not, bother with existing standards at all.
A 'stock objection' to expansion, he explains good-humouredly, is 'that we must not debase the Standard of the Degree,' using capital letters, in the manner 'of pre-war Punch, to warn the unwary that some piece of unthinking pomposity is about to be demolished. 'What,' he goes on to ask, 'is the "Standard of the Degree" and what in this context does "debase" mean?'—questions one might think him uniquely fitted to answer, since it was he who thought up the terms of the stock objection in the first place.
But even in this caricatured form Mr. Peterson evidently finds it hard to understand the stock ob- jection. However academically derisory the BA degrees of the future may be, he observes, they can't be worse than 'many' pre-war Oxford pass degrees, and future MAs can't be worse than the sort you only paid money for. Mr. Peterson then suggests in passing that social, not academic, debasements are 'perhaps' what the stock objection is getting at (again, one feels he should know). 'At times it almost looks like it'—take that, you stock objectors.
As a last gallant gesture towards interpreting his own text. Mr. Peterson advances the 'possibility' that all that the defenders of standards are de- fending is the standard of the post-war BA degree. And that standard is a so-called tradition that has only been going for fifteen years. So why not debase it—this is not an inference from what he says, but what he says--and have 'a new structure in which the Bachelor's degree has a wider range and is more commonly secured at. a lower level"?
There we arc, then. Either (pre-war) older stan- dards were so debased that nothing could debase them further, or (post-war) they are so artificially high that we must do our best to see that they are debased. 1 am grateful to Mr. Peterson for coming so much further out into the open than any of his allies have so far dared to do and for deleting the average educationist's bored and insincere pieties about maintaining academic respectability. But such a running-up of the educational Jolly Roger calls for at least one charge of chain-shot in return.
If Mr. Peterson ever thinks about academic stan- dards at all, he sees them, it is plain, in terms of marks, 'O'-levels, proportion of Pass to Honours, and above all, of course, how many people can be pushed through with some sort of degree. He should learn that the 'tradition' he denigrates goes back much further than fifteen years, and that the point of it is not how bad or how good some or many of its products may have been, but that it has provided unique opportunities for the serious study of academic subjects. It is these opportunities which his 'wider range' and 'lower level' are in process of destroying.
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