1892, St. Andrews and Dundee
Dr. Metcalfe was duly appointed to the assessorship; and with one at his side in whose sound judgment as well as his personal attachment to himself he had the fullest confidence, Bute was greatly encouraged in the assumption of his important duties with regard to the university, in which he had already shown his practical interest by giving it, at a time of some financial distress, very timely and welcome help. This help had been all the more welcome in view of the unsympathetic attitude of successive Governments towards St. Andrews. Mr. Arthur Balfour had indeed during his Rectorship (1886-1889) persuaded the administration of which he was a member to build the addition to the library to which Bute refers in the extract from his diary quoted above. But, generally speaking, Tories and Liberals alike had shown towards the premier university of Scotland the minimum of interest and generosity. This was the more remarkable, inasmuch as the patronage of the principalships of the United College as well as of St. Mary's, and also of the chairs of Church History, Biblical Criticism, and Hebrew and Oriental Languages, was vested in the Crown. In 1889 Parliament had actually entrusted to the newly appointed Universities Commission powers to abolish St. Andrews University altogether—a proposal which found a certain measure of support in Dundee, where University College had been founded in the same year. The relations of this new college to the ancient university were still indeterminate when Bute took office in 1892; but its medical possibilities, situated as it was in the heart of a populous and growing city, had of course become quickly apparent to its managers.
It must be borne in mind that medical degrees had all along been granted by St. Andrews itself after due examination by the professors of the university, who were assisted by external examiners of high distinction. The number of such degrees, originally unlimited, had been afterwards reduced to ten. At the time of Bute's coming into office there were two main contentions as to medical teaching at St. Andrews. The first was that provision should be made for one annus medicus only, so that practically the whole weight of medical teaching should be thrown on Dundee. The second was that there should be two complete anni medici in St. Andrews; but this was at the time impracticable, owing to the insufficiency of adequate medical teaching. Bute saw clearly that if, as was his great desire, the science of medicine should be worthily represented in the university, proper provision for the teaching of that science must be made in St. Andrews itself, and students of medicine must be encouraged to come to St. Andrews for the completion of their medical course. At no stage of the long controversy between St. Andrews and Dundee did he ever seek or propose to establish a complete medical school at St. Andrews; and he would have been the first, with his robust common sense, to see the absurdity of such a proposal as regarded the university city, where there was not even a hospital, and therefore no opportunity for the necessary clinical instruction. Unguarded language on this subject may have been employed by some of his supporters, but never by himself. He aimed only at what was practicable and desirable, and this he made it possible to attain by instituting a lectureship (now the Bute professorial chair) of Anatomy, by promoting the refoundation of the Chair of Physiology,[[8]] and by building at his own cost the new medical school, the completion of which, though he did not live to see it, was a source of satisfaction to him only a few weeks before his death. It would have been not less gratifying to him to foresee, had that been possible, the natural result and development of his enlightened munificence, as shown in the following figures. The number of students of anatomy in the Bute Medical School was, in 1914, eighteen; in 1915-16 thirty; in 1916-17 thirty-seven; in 1917-18 fifty-four; and in 1919-20 ninety.
It would be doing Bute a great injustice to suppose that in his attitude towards Dundee he was actuated by any feeling of hostility towards the newly-founded college. The very contrary was indeed the case. Keenly interested as he was in the higher education of the people, especially in large centres of population, he was naturally as favourably disposed towards University College, Dundee, as he had shown himself to be towards University College, Cardiff. But he could not view with equanimity the prospect which was, as he well knew, hopefully contemplated by some of the supporters of the new college, namely, that of its ultimately not only absorbing the ancient university to which it had been united within the last three years, but even possibly of crushing it out of existence altogether. Of this prospect he wrote on March 12, 1893:
The object of the Dundee people is evidently to obtain entire command of the university, which they will employ by secularising St. Mary's and translating all the Science subjects to Dundee, as well as starting, I take it, a complete Arts curriculum there, possibly allowing the United College to exist as a kind of outhouse.
"It has been said, and said publicly, by one of that party," he wrote on another occasion, "'Give us two years more of the union, and we will drag St. Andrews at our chariot wheels.'" To Bute, with his almost passionate veneration for the ancient university, which for centuries had been the chief home of religion and learning in Scotland, it was intolerable to think of St. Andrews being deposed from its pride of place and sinking into a decaying village, a mere resort of sea-bathers and golfers. From this fate he was resolute, if possible, to save the "House of the Apostle" (as he loved to call it), at whatever cost to himself. "For months past," he wrote a little later, "I have been slaving for St. Andrews. The people—or some of them—may not be worth saving, but the place surely is. My vital force is, it is plain to myself, much diminished by all this anxiety and strain; but I shall work on as long as I have strength to do so."
In the long and elaborate memorandum which he drew up in the second year of his Rectorship, on the four possible relations in which the University of St. Andrews and the college at Dundee might conceivably stand to one another, Bute gives clear evidence of his genuine desire that the cause of education and learning should flourish equally in both institutions. But both he and those who thought and acted with him were perfectly convinced that this would never be so long as Dundee continued its intrigues to become the predominant partner in what he calls the "ill-assorted union" between them; and he was equally convinced that an absolutely essential preliminary step in this direction was the dissolution of the Order of the University Commission of March 21, 1890 (dies nefastus, as Bute calls it in one of his notes), by which the existing union between St. Andrews and Dundee had been brought about. It was with this object that an action was brought in the Court of Session in July, 1894, for the "reduction" of the union in question, and also that a bill was introduced into the House of Lords by the Chancellor of the university, the Duke of Argyll, whose sympathies were entirely with Bute in the question at issue.[[9]]
1893, St. Andrews and Oxford
"I have sometimes dreamt," wrote Bute in one of the most picturesque passages of his Rectorial Address, "of the primeval headland, still lifting skyward its crown of ancient towers, but with that crown encircled by an aureola of affiliated colleges—a commonwealth of seats of learning, an Oxford of the North." It may have been with some such vision as this before him that Bute had suggested to his assessor, some time before drawing up the memorandum above referred to, another solution of the difficulty: