The Ancient University
By ROBERT TAUBMAN fin HE four Scottish universities are not so old 1 as Oxford and Cambridge, but they have behind them a longer tradition—certainly a stricter and less accommodating one. The univer- sities of the south are prone to dissent and deviation and reform; but in Scotland a dis- position to orthodoxy seems to be registered in these quantities of grey academic stone, in the almost mediaeval attitudes to learning which sur- vive in the north in a hardy, if rather incon- gruous, fashion. Most striking of all is an old- fashioned moral quality—a respect for learning coupled with a lack of amenity, a certain gravitas in the atmosphere of the Scottish universities. It is a tough and distinctive tradition and it has given the universities their present character, even if it is unlikely to be an effective influence in the future.
In some respects, the Scottish universities are well adapted to the demands that are now being made on them. They are fortunate in that four ancient foundations is 'a large number for a country the size of Scotland. Already by the six- teenth century they fomied a notable galaxy, almost as impressive as that of the Lombard Plain; since then, as the population of the country has grown, they have assumed quite naturally the function of educating :a large proportion of it. They have also been, and are, singularly free from class distinctions. 'Under the influence of Bible-reading and compulsory schooling paid for by the parish, Scotland has been a literate nation for a long time (Jdin. Knox's Education Act was the first in Europe); in the last century, a university education was within the reach of ten times more of the Scots than of the English. The demands now made for further expansion, the talk of an educated mass democracy, have no cause to lead in the Scottish universities to the reappraisals they provoke elsewhere.
The felationship with the community has brought out in Scottish education a bent for being practical; pragmatic and socially useful. It has only been brought out, for it was implanted in the universities at the time of their foundation. St. Andrews, Aberdeen and Glasgow were created in the fifteenth century on the pattern of Bologna, and derived from it one of the central ideas of the European tradition, the notion of a university as a training ground for the professions. Other functions have since been proposed and the Scottish universities have been influenced by them, notably by the German idea of the prime importance of original research. But the charac- teristic tradition in Scotland did not diverge far from the medieval intention; it' never relaxed the disciplines of professional training: ' Respect for learning, therefore, is not unmixed with respect for the fruits of learning, its solid professional advantages. This may be an unduly pragmatic attitude, but it is not a philistine one. It is related to many Of the virtues of 'the Scottish system—its . thoroughness, for one,. thing (most degree courses take at least a year longer than in England). And to relate study to a profes- sional purpose, to insist on its value as a training for a craft or vocation, has this to be said for it : it instils in a student unawares the beginning of professional integrity. This may seem a small thing, if integrity remains limited to the profes- sional, field; yet it may be more, in the way of moral development, than many students owe to their universities.
Bilt the Scottish 'emphasis in education has its own limitations. Most obvious is a didactic tone, disagreeable in itself and serving to emphasise the distinction between student and teacher. A professor in Scotland is accorded a degree of re- spect surely not matched elsewhere—it is apt to make him a mandarin, inclined to a conscious air of authority and isolated by his position iii the hierarchy. So; too, the formal lecture is an immense feature of the . system. Rather than seminar or a tutorial group, the lecture rood Provides the most typical interior view of a Scottish university, and 'no sound, unfortunately, is more familiar than, the measured tones of ex- position and the ruitle of students taking notes. It. is -not a method that incites originality or recklessness or argument. The ordinary student, whether froni unfamiliarity with ideas or a native scepticism about them, is unhappy when asked to venture any of his own. In spite of his notorious independence of authority in nearly everything else, he appears to be singularly un- suspicious of• it in working hours. He is amenabil to instruction but hard to stimulate, and is apt f0 be thought conversationally uninteresting.
Is this enough to suggest that the tradition itself is in decarl- A, writer in ..The Times of a hundred years ago remarked on an altogether different degree of liveliness and: attributed it to the fact that `the arts of discussion and the great problems of modern thought have a recognised prominence in the ordinary teaching of the univer- sity, which is not to be found south of the Tweed.' And the contrast he made between English and Scottish universities was : 'The object of the one system is to produce, in the largest sense of the word, scholarship; the object of the other is to generate the habit of thought and to produce self- knowledge.' Clearly there has been a change. This does not sound like what anyone would now find peculiarly Scottish in the system; by contrast, it is just what is looked to as a virtue of the univer- sities in the south.
To look to the south is becoming a habit, for although the native tradition survives in the universities it is no longer enough to sustain, them. To invoke it in its old authority is to be aware of the passage of time, of meaningless usages and sharp incongruities with the present. Other influences—one notices them less at first, since they are so much the common stock of an age of university planning—are already superseding it. Along with an influx of both students and professors from the south have come new atti- tudes and manners : more casual and convivial, undogmatic, liberal and egalitarian. There is a breaking-down of hierarchies and merging of distinctions, .a diffusion of ideas about student welfare, extra-mural activities, the community spirit. Academically, the severe lines of the old foundations appear not so much to be crumbling away as simply to be lost beneath accretions and deposits. The university of our time proliferates in new specialisms and research projects, govern- ment contracts and industrial consultancies, halls of residence and summer schools. It looks, at last, as though the old, narrow, individualistic tradition can have nothing more to say.
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