LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.

HONORARY DEGREES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL.

ITo THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."1

Sis,—Public attention having been called to the honorary degrees conferred by the University of Bristol on the occasion of the inauguration of Viscount Haldane as Chancellor of the University, will you allow me, as a member of the Council of the University and the recipient of an honorary degree on the occasion named, to say a few words on the subject? I may add that for eighteen years I was actively concerned in the granting of honorary degrees by the University of Cambridge, as a member of the Council of the Senate, and I am thus not entirely without practical acquaintance with the matter on which I write.

There is, however, at most very slight analogy between the case of Bristol and the case of Cambridge. The University of Bristol is quite new. It is a civic University. It has been founded by the gifts and the efforts of Bristol men now living or very lately dead. It has intimate connexions with various local bodies. It has to grasp in its sympathies the whole area of a large city from the point of view of educational develop- ment. It has to make itself felt. in the inner circles of great industrial concerns. It has to have its eye and its hand upon all the rungs of the ladder up which the possessors of real brain-power are brought, by successive selections, from the teeming elementary schools, from the schools of higher grade, from the Grammar schools, all on the actual spot, all within touch, to the lecture-rooms of the University, where the men.

who are to take their part in the maintenance of the Empire are to be made. The slightness of analogy between Bristol and Cambridge needs not to be further illustrated.

When the inauguration of the present Lord Chancellor as Chancellor of the University was being arranged, a joint committee of the Senate and the Council of the University was appointed to recommend names of recipients of honorary degrees. On such occasions it is not an unknown thing to lave a large number of persons thus honoured. At Lord Curzon's inauguration at Oxford there were, I believe, sixty-one honorary degrees. In the case of Bristol, it was not only the inauguration of a Chancellor; it was practically the public inauguration of a civic University in the city of its birth. The number of honorary degrees conferred upon men at Bristol, on this unique occasion of two-fold importance, exceeded the number at Oxford by two, as I am informed.

I was myself a member of the joint committee of selection, but I was absent from Bristol at the time of the first meeting, when nearly all of the names were selected. When I learned at the second meeting what had been done, the number of names naturally seemed to me very large. But when I came to consider the many and varied interests which a civic Univer- sity in a composite city like Bristol is bound to have in mind, I came to the conclusion that the number of names, though very large, was not over-large for the conditions. This was so clear to me that I took an active part in adding a representa- tive of an order different from those represented in the first list. It seemed to me that, considering the surrounding conditions, we ought to honour as a class those headmasters of our great elementary schools in Bristol, to whom we look for the selection of the boys and the girls who are worthy by their intelligence and application to be placed on the first step up the ladder whose upper end is our own lecture-room. Two men of that type were recommended for the suitable degree of Master of Arts. The completed list was eventually submitted to the Council, and was adopted, as I am informed, without exception taken.

Of the sixty-three names of men there are twenty-five which do not need local knowledge to appreciate the meaning of their presence. To a twenty-sixth name, which is on the lists of doctors in four universities in England, I only refer for purposes of enumeration. Eight further names are those of the Chancellor, the four pro-Chancellors (the Bishop of Hereford, the Right Hon. Lewis Fry, the Right Hon. Henry Hobbouse, and Mr. G. A. Wills), the Vice-Chancellor and the Pro-Vice-Chancellor, and the Registrar. It seems to me to be essential that these eight should hold degrees in the University in which they bold positions of such importance. There remain twenty-nine names of men and eight of women.

I cannot think that it is other than right in itself, though a more restrained course would commend itself to many, that a newly founded and civic University should, in its conferring of honorary degrees on an occasion which can never recur, the treatment of which creates no precedent for future action, recognize various classes of persons with local claims upon attention. Among such classes I may mention :-

(1) Those who made the reputation of the University College of Bristol such that it was found worthy to become a University. (2) Those who by the creation and maintenance and development of the Merchant Venturers' Technical College had prepared a fitting consort for the University College in the foundation of a University. (3) Those who by their labours in the past raised the Medical School of Bristol to its present state of efficiency. (4) Those public men, actively interested in education, who procured from the City Council a large annual contribution to the maintenance of the University, considerable parts of which will be employed in helping deserving boys and girls up the education ladder. (5) Those public men who have guided the education authority of the city. (6) The headmasters and head-mistresses of the many important educational institutions for boys and girls in which Bristol is so rich. (7) The two great Nonconformist Colleges in Bristol for training students for the ministry in connexion with the University. (8) The men and women who take an active part in the work of the education authorities of the counties of Gloucester and Somerset. (9) The two great hospitals on whose co-operation the Medical School so largely depends.

I may add that in Bristol, the city of churches and chapels,

the city of philanthropy, there are ministers of religion and masters of philanthropy, without the presence of whose names on the list of honours Bristol would feel the list to be inadequate.

It should be added, though like much that has been said above, it does not need to be said to those who think the matter out, that a University which has not previously con- ferred honorary degrees (except in three excellent local cases) has calls upon its attention from which Oxford and Cambridge are by their own action cut off. Those Universities have in the course of the last twenty years honoured a very large number of important men now living, and those men are out of their field of choice. Bristol had no such saving restriction; and it had to consider women as well as men.

It has been said that to confer honorary degrees upon some few men of non-academic type is to lower the reputation of the degrees obtained by examination and merit by the members of the University. From that proposition I dissent, except so far as this, that it has its warnings against excess.

The simple fact is that to draw up a list of names for honorary degrees is a very thankless task. Such lists are almost always severely criticised; partly because of the names that are there, mainly because of the names that are not there.

In conclusion I should like to say a word on another point, namely, certain remarks on the conduct of the business of the University which have appeared in one place or another. I have referred to my experience on the Council of the Senate of Cambridge. I may add that for twenty years it was my business to attend, and to report for the official record, the very numerous meetings of members of the Senate for the discussion of proposed enactments, under the presidency of successive Vice-Chancellors. That constitutes a probably unique experience of academic ways, of the academic spirit. I have attended as many meetings—sadly few—of the Council of the University of Bristol as the primary calls upon my time have allowed. The proceedings are conducted by the Chairman of the Council, the Right Hon. Lewis Fry, with the urbanity, honesty, and business power trained by long experience in and out of Parliament, which we in Bristol regard as among our assets. An academic spirit pervades the proceedings. Anyone who wishes to be heard is not only heard but listened to. I should characterize some of the remarks I have seen under this head as ludicrous.

But, after all, complaints on the conduct of the business of the University go deeper than the somewhat belated criticisms of the presence or the absence of names and persons last July. They are—however ill-conceived—worthy of graver attention. They were almost certain to occur, and I am prepared to welcome them, if only they come accompanied by the names of people we know. The machinery created by the Charter— namely, the Court, the Council, the Senate—is unwieldy in its magnitude and complicated in its character. The University will take Iong to work out into smoothness of action the whole of the mutual relations, say, of the Senate and the Council. The guiding principles should be the good-tempered recognition of real difficulties, and the good-tempered determination to settle them reasonably as they emerge. If and so far as there are now real difficulties, the one course which is most certain to postpone—or even prevent—reasonable settlement is the course of throwing mud before the public—with masks on.—I

[The Bishop of Bristol, in our opinion, makes a thoroughly sound defence of the action of the Bristol University in the matter of the Honorary Degrees. It is of the utmost importance to associate the University with the life of the ancient city in which it is established, and the inauguration of its first Chancellor offered an opportunity for such association which it would have been a capital error to have missed. We are not prepared to say that the list was above criticism or that it should not have received comment, but we hold that it is better in such a case that the list should err on the side of generosity than on that of a frigid reticence which would almost certainly have been regarded as due to academic pride and pedantry. Bristol people should be made to feel that they have a real share in their University, and not that it is something outside and apart from them, or, worse, some- thing which regards them as Philistines and barbarians. May

we be allowed to say with heartfelt sincerity to the Bishop, to Mr. Lewis Fry, and to their colleagues, Floreat vestra Universitas !—ED. Spectator.]