Professor Trevor-Roper's Finest Hour ?

By HENRY FAIRLIE

Hebdomadal politicians, who run away from their opinions without giving us a month's notice.—Burke.

THE news that the Hebdomadal Council of Oxford University has appointed a commis- sion to inquire into the university's place in higher education has been received with a torpor which suggests to me that nowhere, now, will the lost, cause of scholarship be defended.

When that meddling politician, Lord John Russell, proposed a commission under the Crown to inquire into the state of the university in 1850, the Vice-Chancellor refused to give it informa- tion, the Dean of Christ Church would not even answer letters from the commissioners, and the Bishop of Exeter, as a visitor of Exeter College, compared their work with the attempt of James II to subject the university to his 'unhallowed control.'

Today, instead, that meddling newspaper, the Observer (which, to be fair, only represents every current reformist opinion), says that 'The com- position of the seven-member commission . . . is a guarantee that the examination will be searching.' I would have thought that the com- position guaranteed only one thing: that the needs of scholarship will be put second, and the social and political pressures to which the univer- sity is now subject will triumph.

Lord Franks, its chairman, may be Provost of Worcester College: but, as a result of his long years at the heart of government, he responds with his own intellectual alacrity to current social and political assumptions. Then, there is Sir Robert Hall, Principal-elect of Hertford College, who again has spent the vital years of his life at the heart of government, as sensitive as a barometer to the social and political climate of the day.

Sir Robert Hall was once a Fellow of Nuffield College, and is now a Visiting Fellow. (So is Lord Morrison of Lambeth, so that does not prove very much.) Another member of the com- mission is Mrs. J. Floud, presented to us in the announcement also as a Fellow of Nuffield. (Nuffield College, I am growing convinced, was Lord Nuffield's insurance that, after his death, the Cowley Works would at last overwhelm the university.) Magdalen's representative is a physiologist. Lady Margaret Hall's is a biochemist. (It is not the image of Lady Margaret Hall that most of us retain. There, after all, was my first love, but how could it have been, if she had talked about haemoglobin instead of spooning over Herrick?) Then there is Mr. Shock, the estates bursar of University College—a line memorial to Shelley.

The composition of the commission is typical enough: so are its origins. First, there were the criticisms of Oxford in the Robbins Report, a body not primarily concerned with scholarship, but with some faddish social purpose which already looks a little out of date. In panic at these criticisms, the 'Hebdomadal politicians' set up a committee to consider them, consisting of Lord Franks, Dr. K. C. Wheare, the Rector of Exeter, a man moving on the margins of govern- ment, and Sir Lindon Brown, the Waynflete Pro- fessor of Physiology.

It was this committee which recommended— what else would one expect it to do?—the appointment of the commission. By a committee, out of a commission, comes forth a commission.

Look, next, at the terms of reference. Many of them deal with questions of university ad- ministration, and the relations between the uni- versity and the colleges, which I would have thought could have been discussed informally and adequately by the Vice-Chancellor and the college heads, and then presented to the Heb- domadal Council in the form of a resolution for its open discussion. That way, there would have been no railroading; but railroading, I suspect, is exactly what the specious authority of a com- mission is meant to accomplish.

The fourth of the terms of reference is characteristic:

4. Whether the university and colleges have available for themselves and each other the statistical and other information needed exter- nally and internally—as for formulating policy and conducting administration.

Let me tell those at Oxford who still have the wisdom of the place in them what lurks behind this seemingly innocent proposal. Once make the gathering of masses of statistics a precondition of decision—I am not denying that some statistics arc necessary, like 'we have room for x number of new undergraduates next year'—and it be- comes inevitable that they must be collected cen- trally. Once statistics are collected centrally, then, an establishment will grow, and decisions with be taken centrally, too.

Take next the sixth term of reference:

6. Whether the present finance, staffing and organisation of research (including libraries) are adequate. and, if not. what changes should be made.

Really, Oxford University is not a very large place. Its individual colleges and Schools arc even smaller. It shocks me that so much time is going to be spent in collecting written and oral evidence, when all that needs to be found out could so easily be discovered by telephone, at high table, or during a turn round the Parks.

I know exactly what will happen. The com- mission will start from the assumptions of the Robbins Report: it can hardly avoid doing so, since that report is its parent, and since its authority has already been acknowledged merely by the setting up, first,.of the Hebdomadal com- mittee, and now of the Hebdomadal commission. A huge mass of statistics will be supplied by Nuffield College and even by the Institute of Statistics and, since no one who is not trained can easily fault them, will carry the spurious authority of the statistical appendices to the Robbins Report.

Then, the mass of both written and oral evi- dence will come from the interested representa- tives of the new Schools and departments, who will be able to conceal the fact that they are merely representatives of interests by disguising it in the language of current social and political assumptions. Finally, a report will appear which will nibble away again at Oxford's excellence, but which will be railroaded through the Heb- domadal Council.

But, will it? Oxford, as one of the two great homes of learning in this country, is hardly repre- sented on the commission. I like to think, there- fore, that the true Oxford is holding itself, under an ancient mask of stupor, in reserve, and that the men who live by the light of More and Linacre, Grocyn and Colet--1 deliberately choose those who were men of the world as well as scholars— will in the end turn the tables. I nevet expected to utter the words: but, Trevor-Roper, your finest hour is yet to be.

. 'Good show—been getting fighting tit for the fray?'