PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.
BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
No. CCCCLXIII. MAY, 1854. Vol. LXXV.
THE OXFORD REFORM BILL.
On Friday night, April 2, 1854—or rather at half-past one on the Saturday morning—there passed to its second reading in the House of Commons, represented at that time by twenty-four members, a Bill “to make further provision for the good government and extension of the University of Oxford.” A measure, declared by her Majesty’s Government so important as to demand their careful deliberation—heralded by its promoters as a new charter of intellectual liberty for England—denounced by its opponents as unconstitutional and illegal—appears to have commanded, at this crisis of its parliamentary existence, as little of the attention of the House as if it had been a Welsh highway act or an Irish grievance. True, the debate occupied its fair share of the time of the Commons, and filled its due number of columns in the morning papers. If the reporters as well as the speakers found themselves occasionally upon rather difficult ground—making some trifling confusion between “Students” and “Tutors,” and leaving out here and there a negative which must have rather confused their non-academical readers—such little inaccuracies are neither surprising nor important in a debate in which almost every speaker seems to have been anxious to assure his hearers, such as he had, that he meant nothing—at all events, that he did not mean what he said, still less what he might have said on some previous occasion; where the reputed parents of the bill, Lord John Russell and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, were rather its apologists than its advocates, promising amendments even before they were proposed; while Mr Blackett, as the organ of the “root-and-branch” men, puzzling himself how to deal with the sop thrown to him and his party—sweet to the taste but far from satisfying—tendered his best thanks for a measure which he concluded by saying “the Liberal members of that House could never adopt.”
The truth is, that there is an apathy in the public mind upon this great question which has reacted upon its representatives. The University Commission, as a political speculation, has been a failure, and the game of Academical Reform has lost much of its piquancy by a change in the players. Setting aside the question of the legality of parliamentary interference, it was found, somewhat to the surprise of a large section of those who had swelled the cry for a commission—well-meaning, but ill-informed on such subjects—that the most active, as they were the most able university reformers, were to be found within the walls of the University itself. That there was also a section to whom such a discovery was a disappointment, we have little doubt. At all events, from that time the public interest in the subject appears to have gradually died away. Visible excitement of men’s minds, since the issuing of the Commission, there has been none. And since the presentation of the Report, when even the warmest imagination could no longer picture the goodly revenues of Oxford transferred to the London University, or handed over to a Whig minister of education, the extremes of both parties, obstructive and destructive, must have felt their occupation gone;—moderate non-academical politicians began to vote the whole thing rather a bore—and the Oxford Blue Book, of which more copies were sold we believe than of any similar publication, went the way of all blue books, and was seen no more except on Tutors’ tables. In no circles, political or social, in town or country, did University Reform become the topic of the day. If you heard three people together in conversation on the subject, two at least were Oxford men. They, indeed, with that propensity charged against them, with some truth, of “talking shop,” as it is called—and which, with deference be it said in this large-minded and Catholic generation, is better at all events than talking nonsense—they “ventilated” the subject sufficiently, each having usually some pet scheme of his own for the regeneration of Alma Mater, under which, if you were to believe the author, she was to come forth in the renewed beauty of her youth, without losing aught of the reverend features of age.
But while the country at large has been taking things so quietly, Oxford herself has been neither unmoved nor silent. Her bitterest enemies cannot have charged her, during the last few months, with inactivity. Schemes of reform and extension, which a few years ago would have startled the most zealous of the progressistas, have been poured into the Home Office, since this year began, at a rate which would seem to have disconcerted even the impassable Palmerston. There is not wanting both external and internal evidence of Lord John’s present bill having been ushered into the world somewhat in a hurry; in fact, there was some risk of his being outbid in the improvement market. Even our old friends of the Hebdomadal Board had made wonderful progress since we last wrote of them, and, as an undutiful boating undergraduate of our acquaintance phrased it to us, “put on an awful spurt at the end.” College Visitors have been called on to discharge unwonted duties; Heads and Fellows have been closeted in their respective common-rooms for days together; statutes that were before as the Eleusinian mysteries are recklessly published, with their owners’ new interpretations thereof, “by command of her Majesty,” and may be bought, together with the select epistles of Palmerston to his new familiares in Oxford, for the small charge of one shilling and threepence; and Mr Parker’s well-known counter teems with pamphlets. Many a College dignitary appears to have had Job’s wish realised; his enemy has written a book, and he, as in duty bound, has been down upon him, in another, immediately. The brother Professors of Modern History and Hebrew, besides a stout pamphlet each, have had a little private (published) correspondence, in the latter part of which the professorial tone predominates over the brotherly. The Professor of Poetry has a letter—more poetical than anything else—to the Warden of Wadham, who has not replied; not having, possibly, a poetical taste. Of minor and anonymous brochures there are more than we care to number. From this category we must carefully exempt the clever argument in defence of the private tenure of College property by Mr Neate of Oriel—himself a staunch university reformer, and a supporter of the Commission; and the unanswerable appeal of Mr Woodgate of St John’s to the “National Faith,” as pledged to founders by the acceptance of their endowments.
The introducers of the bill congratulate themselves, with some complacency, on the satisfaction with which it has been received in Oxford. True, when Mr Blackett expressed his disgust at the fact as an evident proof of its utter inefficiency, the Chancellor of the Exchequer hastened to contradict himself, and to assure his friends of that party, that the remonstrances against it had been many and vehement, and that it was by no means such an innocent measure as they feared. The truth is, the feeling of the University on this great question has been much misunderstood, and, we believe not intentionally, misrepresented. This is in itself unfortunate, and adds to the difficulties which the world without suddenly finds besetting what seemed at one time an easy and a popular question: but more unfortunate than all will it be, if the comparative apathy of the public mind arises from a delusive notion that the bill now before Parliament is the advance of a government of progress against an antiquated corporation, fortified with prejudices, and tenacious of vested interests; that the two great parties in the struggle are, a growing nation, clamorous for intellectual food, and a rich and covetous university, like an unnatural stepmother, proffering them stones for bread, and keeping her rich gifts for some few favoured children. For such is the view carefully set before men’s minds by those whose designs against the universities of England would accept Lord John Russell’s bill, or even the bolder scheme of the Commissioners, as a very small instalment of what they deem justice. Unless the people of England can be disabused of this false notion,—and by the people, we beg here to be understood to mean especially those classes to whom some political authorities restrict the term, “the masses”—unless they can learn somewhat more truly what their rightful claims upon their national universities are, and who are perilling, and who defending them, and how far they are likely to be secured or lost by the measures now in contemplation,—they may only find out too late that they were led to confound friends with foes, and to cast recklessly from them the solid advantages which wise and good men in days gone by had bequeathed them, for the sake of a glittering dream.
Even in Oxford itself, it seems to have been too much assumed that a broad line of distinction could be drawn, placing on the one side the advocates of progress, who were desirous of remodelling the constitution of the University, and re-distributing its revenues, at whatever cost; and, on the other, those who thought they saw in every change a dangerous innovation. Whereas, in fact, both these extreme sections would at any time have made but a very poor show in the Convocation-house, the former especially having been always inconsiderable in numbers, and more noisy than influential; while the ranks of the latter, more open to argument and conviction, were thinning day by day. That the first were represented in Her Majesty’s Commission was a mistake in its composition, of which the present Government at all events have begun to feel the consequences embarrassing; it has furnished weapons against them to the hands of both supporters and opponents: either too much was intended, or too little has been done. The two great points on which a vast majority of members of Convocation, resident and non-resident, found themselves united in a hostile attitude against the government of the day, were, first, the constitutional right of Parliament to interfere at all; and, secondly, the animus of the Commission. As to the necessity for practical reforms, for rearranging some of the machinery of university education, and extending its basis,—this had for years impressed itself upon most thinking minds,—had at least received a formal acknowledgment at the hands of a committee of the Hebdomadal Board so long ago as 1846, and had been elaborately, if not wisely, dealt with in the new Examination Statute of 1850; a measure which, whatever may have been its tendencies, could not be charged with narrowness or prejudice, and showed, at least, much zeal and pains-taking in its compilers, and an honest wish to meet the educational wants of the age. The real difficulties—not the faults—of Oxford were, that she was fettered by a code of Caroline Statutes which checked her attempts to take a freer attitude, and a form of local government which was the very reverse of representative. Had some friendly ministry given her the power, as she had the will, to rid herself of these incumbrances, we should have had a measure of reform and extension—we are not afraid of the words—not perhaps so showy and sweeping as the present, but much better considered, and therefore more really effectual. No one can have read the evidence laid before the Hebdomadal Committee, and the Tutors’ Association, and considered the various suggestions there embodied, from men of very different minds, sometimes widely at variance with each other, but almost always thoughtful and fairly argued, without feeling that we have there the only materials out of which any wholesome scheme for the “good government” of Oxford is to be built, and can there trace the hands best fitted to combine them. And the strongest argument in favour of the bill now before Parliament is, that its authors have borrowed from this legitimate source their best enactments.