Nominalism and realism in Academe
TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN
I ought to begin this week's sermon by ad- mitting that I am using my title in no very scholarly way. I know the difference between mediaeval and modern uses .of 'realism' and I mean an unsophisticated modern use. Realism is concentration on the present, on hard numerate facts, on 'educated guesses' about the future and, at the moment, that means pessimistic educated guesses. I want to develop a theme suggested by the recent letter of Lord Kahn and Mr Robin Marris in The Times. Among many interesting, hopeful if sometimes debatable, judgments on our system of higher education, they asserted that we don't need and don't want 'liberal arts colleges.' I utter a profound 'ditto.' But, and it is an im- portant but, whether we want or need them, we have them and I suspect, only the economic freeze, which has even chilled Oxbridge, has saved us from getting more. True, we indis- criminately label as 'universities' what Ameri- cans call 'liberal arts colleges,' but that is one of those verbal tricks that have deceived the British public which surprise or even shock Americans who know what a 'liberal arts col- lege' can be and what many of our 'universities,' especially the 'plateglass' ones, really are.
It will be wise to turn, first of all, to the mother country of the liberal arts college, the United States. All of the great and, by American standards, ancient universities of that country started as liberal arts colleges, even when they called themselves universities, and the standard American view is that the first real universities only appeared after the Civil War, either in brand-new institutions like the Johns Hopkins University at Baltimore and Cornell in rural New York, or such expanding and ambitious institutions as Harvard and Yale. (Princeton did not call itself a university till 1896.) Then institutions like Stanford and Chicago, very lavishly endowed, were started as universities, although they had embedded in them, as a nucleus, liberal arts colleges, and the burgeoning state universities, usually for- mally devoted to 'agriculture and mechanical arts,' began in this century to be more and more like Harvard, Chicago or Stanford, and again have usually some kind of 'liberal arts' institution embedded in them.
But the decision to `go university' was not universally made, even by wealthy and prestigious institutions like Dartmouth; or was begun and then abandoned in the case of Colgate University, which has for long classed itself as a rich and distinguished liberal arts college and does not stress its university title in any misleading way. Why was there this modest refusal to scale the heights? Because the Americans decided that a university, to deserve the name, must have adequate resources for research and must have, as one of its pri- mary aims, perhaps its sole primary aim, the production of highly trained scholars and scientists and highly trained professional men, doctors, lawyers, engineers, all trained in their speciality after they had undergone four years of 'liberal arts.'
Of course, there were scores of bogus uni- versities and hundreds, many hundreds, of time-and-money-wasting colleges. These last were usually 'church oriented.' At least 300 of them were Catholic and at best mediocre. Some colleges were—well, if there is no college or even university of scientology, there soon may be. It is no doubt this incoherent and wasteful system that Lord Kahn and Mr Marris rightly think should not be imported here. But what we have innocently imported or invented are imitations of those good colleges which in America do not try to pass as universities. Our imitations do.
If we want to study the American system, even as a warning, we must study it realistically; note bow little in common have those two well-known Iowa colleges, Grinnell and Par- son's, note the role of the independent women's colleges, and note such cluster systems as the Quaker colleges round Philadelphia or the Claremont colleges near Los Angeles. But, by the standards of the best American colleges, none of our plateglass universities (and pos- sibly not all of our redbrick universities) are up to the standards of the best American colleges. Why? Brutally, because they have not got enough money and, although money is not everything, it is in a period of economic stress such as we are undergoing. and are about to undergo, most of the problem and most of the solution. For higher education, even at college level, is now very expensive indeed and is going to be more expensive still.
Dartmouth, a 'mere college,' has more students than any of our plateglass universities and has endowments equal to those of Oxford or Cambridge without the college endowments, and, at any rate as far as Cambridge is con- cerned, possibly even with the endowments
of Trinity, John's and King's thrown in. It
has also rich and generous alumni like that distinguished former soccer blue. Mr Nelson Rockefeller. No other college that I know of is as rich as Dartmouth, but many are much richer than are any of our new universities; and again money is most of the game. The day is past in America when college education was 'Mark Hopkins at one end of a log and a student at the other.'
It must not be thought that the good liberal arts colleges do not encourage or foster research by their faculty, and among the richer and better colleges it is the absence of graduate students, not the absence of material resources, that is disheartening, although if a distinguished college is near a distinguished university, as the suburban colleges round Philadelphia are near the University of Pennsylvania. the teachers can keep their edge on, as an old-fashioned classical don in an Oxford college distinguished for its science used to put it. That meant lying on a sofa every Sunday doing Latin and Greek verse and prose. This is not adequate for the natural sciences or even for the 'social sciences' today. They need laboratories, libraries, the power to attract grants, the power to let a professor play his expensive hunches. And none of the new plateglass universities has adequate resources in the natural sciences or in the modern technologies, except possibly Warwick. East Anglia (Norwich) and Sussex (Brighton) may have just-adequate resources for their in- teresting experimental 'arts' programmes, except that they haven't got adequate libraries. No British university except Oxford and Cambridge has a library to be compared with Dartmouth's, and where a 'constituent college' like the tse in London has a magnificent library, it is suffering badly from the drying-up of funds— and possibly of public good will. But all of our new universities profess to provide for some forms of postgraduate research, even when it is obvious that they haven't adequate resources even for good undergraduate teaching.
Perhaps the oddest example of a mis- allocation of meagre resources has been pro- vided by the foundation of the University of Stirling. Its fate interests me because it is in my native land, because Stirling is a hand- some town, because if the university had £5 million or so it could build an attractive liberal arts college using the 'disaffected' castle as a nucleus. But 'Stirling' is not in Stirling. It is miles away, round a country house, in quasi- monastic seclusion. The promotional literature has a map showing how easy it is to get to Glasgow or Edinburgh from the campus. Unless the handful of Stirling students are unlike students elsewhere, they will flee rural peace for Edinburgh or Glasgow (there seems to be no reason why they should seek urban delights in the douce Royal Burgh of Stirling). If this is so, why not spend the money in Edin- burgh or Glasgow? And not necessarily on the two ancient universities, but on the Uni- versity of Strathclyde in Glasgow or Heriot- Watt University in Edinburgh. At best Stirling is a badly under-equipped and not very hopeful liberal arts college. And its Chancellor is my old friend Lord Robbins. head of the Robbins Commission and my former colleague at the LSE, who taught me (even if he ignored it him- self) that economics was about the prudent allocation of limited resources.
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