The Principal and two of the Professors of Owens College,
Manchester, have put out this week a brief answer to the various criticisms which their petition for a University charter with power to grant degrees, has provoked, and to the rival scheme which has been proposed by way of alter- native. Of their answer to such objectors as Mr. Goldwim Smith and Mr. Roby, we need say nothing here, partly because• we have formerly discussed the principle of these objections, and partly because we could not deal with them in any space now at our disposal. But of their criticism on the alter- native scheme which proposes to found a University of the- North, or a Queen's University for England, to include a federa- tion of Colleges, of which Owens College should be one im- portant constituent, we may say that it is unanswerable. They are anxious, they say, to make ample room for the association of other Collegiate institutions with theirs, either now or in future, so soon as any such shall show adequate academical claims and sufficient command of the appliances of education to secure for them a proper position as members of such a federation. But to ask Owens College to federate itself with mere potentialities of the future,—with mere scholastic blanks, which academical fortune is expected one day to fill up,—is, they say, thoroughly unreasonable. If any other College possesses reasonable claims to be associated/ at once with Owens College as a constituent of such a Uni- versity, let it produce its record of academical qualification and achievement, as Owens College has done, and have its claim allowed, if it be a good one. But to ask an institution which submits its credentials to the world to identify its fortunes with the mere embryo of such institutions, not yet matured, is to provide either for inevitable collisions as to policy, or for a speedy degradation of academical standards, or for both. A. rich man might as well go into partnership with a boy of no means, as a college of established repute associate itself with academical bodies only in the germ.
Previous page
