I trust Rucker and Thorpe are convinced by this time that I knew what I was talking about when I told them, months ago, that there would be an effort to hook us into the new University hotch-potch.
I am ready to oppose any such project tooth and nail. I have not been striving these thirty years to get Science clear of their schoolmastering sham-literary peddling to give up the game without a fight. I hope my Lords will be staunch.
I am glad my opinion is already on record.
[And similarly to Sir M. Foster on October 30:—]
You will have to come to London and set up physiology at the Royal College of Science. It is the only place in Great Britain in which scientific teaching is trammelled neither by parsons nor by litterateurs. I have always implored Donnelly to keep us clear of any connection with a University of any kind, sort, or description, and I tried to instil the same lesson into the doctors the other day. But the "liberal education" cant is an obsession of too many of them.
[A further step was taken in June, when he was sent a new draft of proposals, afterwards adopted by the above-mentioned general meeting of the Association in March 1893, sketching a constitution for a new university, and asking for the appointment of a Statutory Commission to carry it out. The University thus constituted was to be governed by a Court, half of which should consist of university professors] ("As for a government by professors only" [he writes in the "Times" of December 6, 1892], "the fact of their being specialists is against them. Most of them are broad-minded; practical men; some are good administrators. But, unfortunately, there is among them, as in other professions, a fair sprinkling of one-idea'd fanatics, ignorant of the commonest conventions of official relation, and content with nothing if they cannot get everything their own way. It is these persons who, with the very highest and purest intentions, would ruin any administrative body unless they were counterpoised by non-professional, common-sense members of recognised weight and authority in the conduct of affairs." [Furthermore, against the adoption of a German university system, he continues], "In holding up the University of Berlin as our model, I think you fail to attach sufficient weight to the considerations that there is no Minister of Public Instruction in these realms; that a great many of us would rather have no university at all than one under the control of such a minister, and whose highest representatives might come to be, not the fittest men, but those who stood foremost in the good graces of the powers that be, whether Demos, Ministry, or Sovereign."); [it was to include such faculties as Law, Engineering, Medicine, while it was to bring into connection the various teaching bodies scattered over London. The proposers themselves recognised that the scheme was not ideal, but a compromise which at least would not hamper further progress, and would supersede the Gresham scheme, which they regarded as a barrier to all future academic reform.
The Association as thus constituted Huxley now joined, and was immediately asked to accept the Presidency, not that he should do any more militant work than he was disposed to attempt, but simply that he should sit like Moltke in his tent and keep an eye on the campaign.
He felt it almost a point of honour not to refuse his best services to a cause he had always had at heart, though he wrote:—]
There are some points in which I go further than your proposals, but they are so much, to my mind, in the right direction that I gladly support them.
[And again:—]