T.H. Huxley.
[He sketches his ideal of a modern university, and especially of its relation to the Medical Schools, in a letter to Professor Ray Lankester of April 11:—]
Hodeslea, Eastbourne, April 11, 1892.
My dear Lankester,
We have been having ten days of sunshine, and I have been correspondingly lazy, especially about letter-writing. This, however, is my notion; that unless people clearly understand that the university of the future is to be a very different thing from the university of the past, they had better put off meddling for another generation.
The mediaeval university looked backwards: it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge, and except in the way of dialectic cobweb-spinning, its professors had nothing to do with novelties. Of the historical and physical (natural) sciences, of criticism and laboratory practice, it knew nothing. Oral teaching was of supreme importance on account of the cost and rarity of manuscripts.
The modern university looks forward, and is a factory of new knowledge: its professors have to be at the top of the wave of progress. Research and criticism must be the breath of their nostrils; laboratory work the main business of the scientific student; books his main helpers.
The lecture, however, in the hands of an able man will still have the utmost importance in stimulating and giving facts and principles their proper relative prominence.
I think we should get pretty nearly what is wanted by grafting a College de France on to the University of London, subsidising University College and King's College (if it will get rid of its tests, not otherwise), and setting up two or three more such bodies in other parts of London. (Scotland, with a smaller population than London, has four complete universities!)
I should hand over the whole business of medical education and graduation to a medical universitas to be constituted by the royal colleges and medical schools, whose doings, of course, would be checked by the Medical Council.