Dear Professor Weldon [Then at University College, London; now Linacre
Professor of Physiology at Oxford.],
I am sorry to have kept you waiting so long for an answer to your letter of the 17th: but your proposal required a good deal of consideration, and I have had a variety of distractions.
So long as I am a member of the Senate of the University of London, I do not think I can with propriety join any Association which proposes to meddle with it. Moreover, though I have a good deal of sympathy with the ends of the Association, I have my doubts about many propositions set forth in your draft.
I took part in the discussions preliminary to Lord Justice Fry's scheme, and I was so convinced that that scheme would be wrecked amidst the complication of interests and ideals that claimed consideration, that I gave up attending to it. In fact, living so much out of the world now, and being sadly deaf, I am really unfit to intervene in business of this kind.
Worse still, I am conscious that my own ideal is, for the present at any rate, hopelessly impracticable. I should cut away medicine, law, and theology as technical specialities in charge of corporations which might be left to settle (in the case of medicine, in accordance with the State) the terms on which they grant degrees.
The university or universities should be learning and teaching bodies devoted to art (literary and other), history, philosophy, and science, where any one who wanted to learn all that is known about these matters should find people who could teach him and put him in the way of learning for himself.
That is what the world will want one day or other, as a supplement to all manner of high schools and technical institution in which young people get decently educated and learn to earn their bread—such as our present universities.
It will be a place for men to get knowledge; and not for boys and adolescents to get degrees.
I wish I could get the younger men like yourself to see that this is the goal which they may reach, and in the meanwhile to take care that no such Philistine compromise as is possible at present, becomes too strong to survive a sharp shake.
I am, yours very faithfully,