sterling! Should he be the recipient of an honorary degree? Would it not be churlish to refuse it? If anything could increase one’s respect for the benefactor it would be his refusal of this kind of recognition of his services. However there is no harm in very occasional exceptions, because these shout the exceptional circumstances and confuse no one. It is different altogether when to create an honorary degree list Mr. Anybody and Mr. Nobody are called upon to step up. It seems a simple programme that periods marked by dearth in merit should also be marked by dearth of awards, but when did a simple programme ever prove attractive from the days of Naaman downwards?
When we say that neither the elementary nor the advanced studies of a university exist simply with a view to providing the members of the community with a profession or the means of making their living, we say what is a little less obvious, and trench on ground which is hotly debated. Thousands upon thousands, it may be urged, have always gone to a university to learn a profession, and thousands who have not had this end in view have yet gone up there with no intention of acquiring learning. The university has always prepared for the professions, why not for the industries; why should it not comprise technical colleges? Hitherto, however, the universities have prepared men for the learned professions, and there is a difference between learning philosophy, theology, biblical exegesis, jurisprudence and political philosophy, or physiology and comparative anatomy for the purposes of a life profession, and learning agriculture, forestry, military tactics, or mining engineering. The growth of great branches of industry has however been as great as the growth of knowledge and the sciences; the conditions of modern life are entirely and altogether changed, competition extends far beyond the industrial world, to the universities themselves, and to the struggle for existence of knowledge for its own sake. Without supposing that this last condition will be permanent, one may still think that the universities could not refuse to teach what are called “the modern subjects,” which means industries like scientific agriculture or electrical engineering that have more money in them than the professions. In a way, too, it is only a turning of the tables; when the learned professions were studied it was because they promised the profitable careers.
It need not by any means be competition which urges the university to undertake the ‘modern subjects’; it may be, and it is, the persuasion that its rôle does not end with creating a career, that a university possesses advantages extrinsic to the degree taken, or even the work done at it. The truth perhaps is that the present conditions of life afford an object to universities as far-reaching as has ever been allotted to them since their foundation. In these days of haste, and unchewed cuds of learning, they can suggest the value of leisure—and when a man is now sent to Cambridge or Oxford this fact alone is some security that he and his are content not to put haste and quick results above and before everything else. The lazy man we have always with us, the man in a hurry is a modern product, and suffers from a modern disease with which a university is better able, by latent influence and tradition, to deal than any other institution. And when it has taught the value of intellectual digestion, the number of those things which can only be well learnt by being gradually learnt, and in due season, has the university nothing more to teach? Our modern malady of haste, of quick methods, and quick results has a commercial basis, a certain standard of values and returns which is best so described. The academic spirit is the antagonist of this spirit, of the love of publicity, the self-advertisement, the liking for cheap and unearned rewards. Even as a business maxim it is being preached again that work done for its own sake is the only lasting work. The university may be a bulwark against false values in life, against the restlessness which is confounded with action, the constant change which is not the same thing as adaptation, against the prejudice that certain good things are not always and everywhere ends in themselves. And there is another conspicuous service which a university can perform. The commercial standard is the root of our social vulgarity, and the academic life has been in all ages that ‘simple life’ of which we hear so much. It is not necessary for generations of Englishmen to grow up to regard ‘poverty as a crime,’ or to subscribe to the worship of mere prosperity and success. A university may always be a protest against these and other mental vulgarities, against even that debasing of the good coin of the King’s English in which Milton saw the incipient undoing of a nation. What better place for combating the last ridiculous refuge of English mauvaise honte—the shamefacedness which prefers to speak one’s own language incorrectly? Something every man at least who reads for a tripos must learn about the uses of work, about its respect, something about breadth of view and accuracy of detail—and also about the legitimate support which such work is in life. It will be said that a man’s personal character and his home life inculcate all these things and give him the means to meet the shafts of outrageous fortune. But what the university can give him which his own personal character and probably his home surroundings cannot, is the way to set about making of learning a possession for ever. Some nice person said “mathematics is such a consolation in affliction,” and there is much to be said for the point of view.
A university can teach these things because, unlike technical colleges or seminaries for the professions, it exists first and foremost for the advancement of learning. Traditionally inseparable from this is its other object—education; and together they provide the tests it applies to all such questions as ‘how far it shall adapt itself to a commercial standard.’ For a university is not only a place of higher studies, it is the nursery of study; and to instil the love of learning for its own sake will always be required of it. In the words of Elizabeth of Clare: “When skill in learning has been found, it sends out disciples who have tasted its sweetness.” In the last resort universities must stand for these things; the day when they cease to do so the idea of a university will have oozed out of them. Like all good things the university will bring forth from its treasure things new and old. We shall not look for degrees in cricket, but there may be degrees in agriculture, degrees in engineering, degrees in forestry. Why not, if a degree signifies a diploma of competence? But there should be degrees and degrees. There should be licentiates in the technical arts by the side of bachelors and masters in the liberal arts: the university must claim to mete with its own measure, and to teach its own lesson to all sorts of men. Hinc lucem et pocula sacra——
CHAPTER IV
COLLEGIATE AND SOCIAL LIFE AT THE UNIVERSITY
University and college officers:—chancellor and vice-chancellor—the senate—graces—proctors—bedells—the master of a college—the vice-master or president—the fellows—unmarried and married fellows—the combination room—dons’ clubs—‘Hobson’s choice’—the dons of last century—classes of students:—scholar—pensioner—fellow-commoner—sizar—age of scholars—privileges of peers—position of the sizar—college quarters and expenses—‘non-colls’—early discipline—jurisdiction of the university in the town—present discipline:—the proctors—fines—‘halls’—‘chapels’—town lodgings—expulsion—rustication—‘gates’—the tutor—academical dress—cap and gown—the undergraduates’ day—the gyp—the college kitchen—‘hall’—‘wines’—teas—the May term—idleness—rioting—modern studies and tripos entries—athletics—the Union Society—Sunday at Cambridge—scarlet days—academic terms and the long vacation—multiplication of scholarships—class from which the academic population has been drawn and careers of university men:—the Church—the rise of an opulent middle class—the aristocratic era—English conception of the benefits of a university—examples of the classes from which the men have come—recruiting grounds of the university—popularity of colleges—numbers in the colleges—religion at Cambridge—Cambridge politics—university settlement at Camberwell—married dons and future changes.
WE have seen that it is of the essence of a university that it should be both a learned and a learning body, and that from the first the academic group consisted of “masters” or licensed teachers, and of scholars maintained on the college foundations. Contemporaneously with the growth of the college we find at the head of the university a chancellor, and at the head of the college its principal or “Master.”[318]
The chancellor.