The Ancient Universities.

Oxford and Cambridge share worldwide fame for scholarship, antiqui­ty, architecture and elegance, and their most outstanding characteristic is I lie collegiate system. The colleges are self-governing teaching bodies, each electing and paying their own staff ("fellows" or "dons") and select­ing their own students (applications are made to colleges, not to the uni­versity). Weekly tutorials for individuals or small groups arranged by the colleges are the main teaching method. The university provides lectures— which are optional—and central facilities like labs and libraries. Oxbridge leaching has been hardly touched by the vogue amongst younger universities for a comparative approach to undergraduate studies, and students are still taught analytically, being judged less by what they know than by their critical attitude to what they have discovered. They benefit from compre­hensive copyright-deposite libraries, plus good college and departmental libraries, and though terms are only eight weeks long, vacation reading is required. Social life centres largely round the college-based Junior Com­mon Rooms and iii neither university is there a central Students Union lor all undergraduates, although both now have Student Representative Councils. The famous Oxbridge Unions are primarily private debating societies with some club facilities attached. The colleges, with traditions such as eating in hall and staircase servants, combine an intimate com­munity with a cross-section of university life—but they are segregated and can be claustrophobic. Most students live in colleges, lodgings must be approved by the college authorities, and undergraduates seldom get permission to live in flats.

2. "New" Universities

Nine of the ten new universities were founded in direct response to the enormous increase in demand for higher education. In a complete break with the past they were established as a matter of government policy as brand-new, completely autonomous universities. Richly endowed with su­perb estates (200 acres was regarded as the minimum) by the local authori­ties which were only too happy to have the prestige of university on their doorsteps, the new universities have been able to experiment with every facet and at every stage of their development. So they are all unique in what they teach and the way they teach it and in the philosophy and policy behind their non-academic life. But there are some common threads in their development; faculties composed of heterogeneous collection of highly individualistic departments are, for example, out; schools or boards of studies with integrated development of their sub-disciplines are in. Sev­eral have adapted the Oxbridge collegiate system but on the Durham prin­ciple (i.e., the university admits students) to create manageable communi­ties in readiness for the day when the university becomes, as it is intended most of them will, very large.

(From Day-to-Day Britain by Th. Abrahamsen, R. Christophersen, R. Nessheim.)

Oxbridge

Oxbridge—the two universities, which for seven hundred years have dominated British education, and which have preserved an antique way of life in the midst of the 20th century. Their prestige and wealth is perpetuat­ed by the large numbers of their alumni who themselves control corporate wealth. They still hold their own in centres of power. Oxford and Cam­bridge in 1970 still provided twenty-six of the thirty permanent secretaries, 250 of the 630 members of Parliament. Ten members of Harold Wilson's cabinet were at Oxford and fourteen members of Ted Heath's 1971 cabinet of seventeen were at Oxford or Cambridge. In the world of communi­cations—particularly in serious newspapers, television current affairs and satire—Oxbridge men have a special hold, and all kinds of in-groups love to write about each other. The eighteen thousand students of Oxbridge make up, as viewed from the outside, one of the most elite elites in the world.

Oxford is older than Cambridge, more wordly, more philosophical, classical and theological (eight professors of theology to two of engineer­ing), and with a special flair for self-congratulation and public relation. (ambridge is more isolated, more theatrical, more scientific. Cambridge has a more self-contained intellectual class, fortified by the tradition of in-lermarried Darwins, Keyneses, Wedgwoods, and more cut off from Lon­don; it is a left-wing stronghold and also much more radical and critical, end has had much more student trouble. But compared with the others, these two stone cities, with their quadrangles, cloisters, damp staircases and punts, look very alike. Much of their attraction depends on the indi­vidual tutors, the peculiar range of lectures, the sense of being an interna­tional centre, exposed to some of the best minds in the world. But much, too, depends on the social climate—the unchanging calendar of boat races, college balls and summer frolics. From outside, Oxbridge might appear as a citadel which can only be stormed by the cleverest invaders; but from the inside it looks curiously as it always has, with its surface of pageantry, idle­ness and sport.

Polytechnics

As the demand for higher education still increased, and as some technical colleges were up-graded first into CATs, then into universities, so other" colleges, the tail-end-charlies, in turn became more involved in the national pattern, and more interesting to politicians and planners. Many of them were loosely described as polytechnics—a word with less Krand connotations than the continental "polytechniques", with their as­sociations of high technocracy. The first "polytechnic" was set up in 1838 in Regent Street.

Most of the New Polys are still just old places with new names, or awk­ward mergers of scattered municipal colleges, each with its own speciality. The South Bank Polytechnic is a wonderful mixture of the City of West­minster College of Commerce, the Borough Polytechnic, the Brixton School of Building, and the National College for Heating, Ventilation, Refrigeration and Fan Engineering. The bringing together of these worka­day components into a serious campus will take many years, and much new building; and in all the polytechnics there are signs of a split per­sonality, pulled between local communities and trades and the ambition to become autonomous quasi-universities.

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