OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE.
pro THE EDITOR OF TES "SPECTATOR:") Sin,—In your article on "Oxford and Cambridge" in last week's issue you dwell on "their power to provide a social broad-mindedness and toleration as well as an academic training," and deprecate on that account any attempt to "get rid of" the present passmen. Your comment, I think, hardly does justice to the reformers' attitude on this subject. Nobody desires to close the University to the class from which the present passmen are drawn. All that is asked is that the University should make it impossible for them to remain as idle and ignorant as some of them notoriously are at present. The general effect of such a change would not be to exclude them, but to make them work rather harder at school, and to render them more tolerant and interesting members of College society. There is another misapprehension is. your otherwise excellent article which it may be worth while to correct. You say that "the termination of the Collegiate system would be a disaster," on the ground that "it is in the communal life of Colleges that character is tested and developed." To this all Orford and Cambridge men would agree; but it has no direct bearing upon the problem you were discussing,—the relation of the Colleges to the Universities. In whatever way that problem is solved, whether by turning the Colleges into University hostels (as a leading Conservative newspaper has recently suggested) or by some readjustment of College and University finances and administration, the College cannot help remaining the social unit of Oxford and Cambridge life. There is only one possible way of "killing the Colleges" as training-grounds for character, and that is to pull them down. Not even the wildest academic revolutionary has yet risen to that.—I am, [If "College Tutor" bad read our article a little more care- fully, he would have seen that it was against the Bishop of Birmingham's proposal to "get rid of" certain persons who now go to the Universities that we protested, and that we drew no general indictment against the reformers in this respect—En. Spectator.]
Previous page
