To the Tutors’ Association indeed, especially, Oxford will hereafter in any event confess herself much indebted. Numbering some fifty or sixty of the most able and active college and private tutors—men of all shades of party—practically acquainted with the real wants and difficulties both of College authorities and undergraduates, and conscientiously desirous of remedying them—they took upon themselves, not without some obloquy, an anomalous and quite unrecognised position in the University,—that of a voluntary and independent legislative body, and supplied for a time, in this irregular manner, the defects of the academical constitution. By this gentle pressure from without, the Hebdomadal Board were made aware of the state of public feeling, and were brought to act somewhat more in harmony with it. To them we owe the changes of 1850—changes which, we say again, in many important features we cannot think improvements, and which we quote only in evidence of a progressive tendency. To them we shall owe almost all that is valuable in the Government measure of 1854.
For let no one suppose that the bill now introduced by Government is the scheme of her Majesty’s Commissioners. The spirit which dictated their Report peeps out, indeed, here and there, in some of its most objectionable enactments; but, on the whole, their ponderous blue folio has contributed much less than the four modest pamphlets issued by the Tutors’ Association; and when those important modifications shall have been made in it, either in committee or in the Upper House—without which this measure can never become the law of England—it will be difficult for the late commissioners to recognise, in its altered features, the rickety and unpleasant-looking offspring of their own incubations. Their sole representative in the newly-proposed Commission, if he ever takes his seat in the altered company in which he must be rather surprised to find himself, will be called upon to administer an act of a character widely different from the recommendations which received his signature in April 1852. And before we briefly discuss the objections, both of principle and detail, against the bill as it stands, we would first of all draw our readers’ attention to these points of difference.
The leading idea of the Commissioners’ scheme was, as every one knows, the Professoriate. The multiplication of professors was to be the remedy for all shortcomings in the way of education; a government by professors was to close all mouths which were complaining of the powers that be, and demanding representation; college revenues, applied to the liberal support of professors, could no longer excite the envy, or awake the rapacity of reformers, but must be held to have been at last applied to their rightful uses; examiners, appointed by professors, were at last to achieve the difficult task of satisfying every candidate; to be a professor was to be all that man ought to be—a guarantee amply sufficient for religion, learning, and energy—an office which could teach independently of vulgar details of actual instruction, diffusing scholarship through the University by its mere presence—
“Dives, et sutor bonus, et solus formosus, et est rex.”
Where this new race of more than mortal teachers was to spring from, was a point for which, it will be remembered, the Commissioners made no provision; but as to their mode of appointment there was no difficulty whatever. All newly-created chairs (pretty comfortable berths too) were to be filled with nominees of the Crown—in plainer words, of a future minister of public education,—for we should have soon found that office even more necessary than a secretary at war,—and these, with such as were already subject to the same appointment, would have had an absolute majority in the remodelled House of Congregation. But this is by no means the only mode in which, if the Commissioners should have had their will, Oxford would have been gradually converted into a national gymnasium under Government superintendence, and at the same time a gigantic field of patronage. They did not, indeed, go so far as to recommend, because in their delicate consideration for the feelings of others they thought it might be “distasteful” to the societies themselves, but they evidently entertained with favour Mr Senior’s cool proposition,[[1]] that “the power of selection of Heads of Houses should be given to the Crown, under the advice of the prime-minister.” And in Recommendation 44 we have the first step made towards it—that the election to these offices should, if possible, be left to the Fellows of Colleges; but that in case abuses in these elections should continue, provision to abate them should be made by an alteration in the mode of election. To what this subtle proviso might have led, and was intended to lead, it requires no peculiar spirit of divination to foresee. Again, the staff of professors and the “Crown,” indirectly through these its nominees, was, by the Commissioners’ scheme, to have the control of the studies, and the sole appointment of the public examiners, although on this latter head not a tittle of evidence went to show that the present mode of nomination (by the vice-chancellor, as representing the governing body, and by the two proctors, as representing the Masters of Arts collectively) had in any instance been abused; it being a truth so notorious, both in and out of the University, that we have rather taken it for granted than given it its due weight as the highest of all testimonies in favour of the existing system, that whatever disappointment there may have often been amongst the candidates for honours, the honesty and integrity of the award has never been questioned for a moment.
These features, then, at all events, are not reproduced in the bill of 1854. Another pet idea of the Commissioners, which they may claim exclusively as their own—for very few of their own chosen witnesses in Oxford approved it, and those somewhat hesitatingly, and with awkward apologies—was that of unattached students, who were to be the great means of increasing the numbers, and new-leavening the morality of Oxford. Whether this wild project fell before the grave and loving Christian arguments of Dr Pusey,[[2]] the quiet irony of Mr Gordon,[[3]] or the bitter but amusing sarcasms of the Quarterly Review, it is certain that it has found no favour in the eyes of our present university reformers. The “independent monads” have vanished.
So it has fared again, with that sweeping clause in the Commissioners’ Recommendations (32), that “all persons elected to Fellowships should be released from all restrictions on the tenure of their Fellowships arising from the obligation to enter into holy orders,” which, when viewed in connection with the abolition of all religious tests in the appointment of teachers, and the last-named provision for a large class of students who would have been as far as possible removed from religious influences, with their confessed longing to tread the forbidden ground of the admission of Dissenters, clearly showed their object to be the severance of the University as much as possible from the Church; the gradual withdrawal of the whole education of the place out of the Church’s hands—for the theological as well as other studies were to be “supervised” by the professors;[[4]]—and the future admission, not only to degrees, be it remembered, which is the only right openly claimed at present, but to the emoluments and the dignities of our old religious foundations, of men of any religion, or of no religion at all. It is true that even the small amount of change proposed in this direction by clause xxxiv. of the present measure, forces upon us unpleasant suspicions, and seems founded upon no better reason than that some Fellows of colleges in Oxford are impatient of the restrictions, or forgetful of the professed objects, under which and for which they were elected; still, practically, it is admitted it would not tend materially to secularise the tone of the colleges, or weaken the clerical element in the University generally.
These disagreeably prominent features of the report of 1852 will not be found in the bill of 1854. Other minor points there are, in which the views of the Commissioners have been set aside, in deference, as we may hope, to the deliberately-expressed opinions of the University. The abolition of the distinctive ranks of nobleman and gentleman-commoner, odious in the eyes of the popular reformer, but proved to be at least harmless, and probably beneficial in practice, has not been insisted on; a light straw, perhaps, yet serving as some indication of the setting of the reform current just at present. The general matriculation examination, from which such benefit was hoped to the general standard of scholarship at entrance—often it must be confessed very low—a point in which we are not sure but that the Commissioners were in the right by accident, this too we hear no more of, it would seem in deference to the opinion of the University.[[5]] And even in the great question of the throwing open the foundations, the clauses of the proposed act, though, as we shall be prepared to show presently, utterly indefensible, whether on the ground of justice or expediency, are yet not so sweepingly destructive as Recommendation 40 of the Commissioners’ Report.
There is another point too, the great difficulty and the great evil, as we think, not of the Oxford system, for the system itself does not recognise it, but of Oxford practice, which, as the bill would surely have been powerless to deal with effectually, its promoters have perhaps done wisely in not dealing with at all. Of private tuition, with the expenses which it involves, the idleness which it encourages, the specious pretexts under which it has gradually wormed its way into a sort of quasi-official existence, and is fast sapping all university and collegiate education as such, and substituting the flimsy trickery of “cram” for the sound and wholesome scholarship of other days,—we have expressed our opinion elsewhere in no measured terms.[[6]] And we are thankful to my Lord John, or Palmerston, or our own clever and, as he assures us, affectionate representative,—whichever we are to thank for such benefits, for none of these gentlemen seem over anxious to take the credit of their good deeds,—that they have left this question, at all events, for the University to deal with it at its own discretion. The private Tutors, we rejoice to say, are not recognised as yet, even in name, by act of Parliament. If we have no “enabling powers” to get rid of them, they are at least not forced upon us by “extraneous authority.” The Commissioners themselves found them a ticklish subject to handle; they took them up unwillingly, apologised for them in a deprecating manner, as being ugly but useful, and were glad to let them go. It was not the only point upon which, for excellent reasons, they were compelled to differ from their own witnesses. Clause xxxvi. 1, is, we hope, specially intended to ignore them as lawfully “engaged in the tuition or discipline of the said University.” And assuredly a “heavy blow and a great discouragement” is dealt out to their present occupation in the wide powers given to open private halls; whilst, at the same time, we are glad to think it opens a legitimate field of usefulness, and, we hope, emolument, to the many talented and excellent men so employed; for it is against the whole system of private tuition that our strictures are directed, and not the individuals who are forced to take a false position by its general prevalence. It is the more necessary to draw public attention to this prudent omission in the bill, because already voices are raised in complaint against it. This body is too numerous and too influential not to have its organs both in and out of the House. The fluent Mr Byng, representing one phase of young Oxford, takes the earliest opportunity of claiming for them their share in the new representation;[[7]] and it would be very hard if they had not their champion among the pamphleteers. We only trust that no parliamentary friend, by some ingenious insertion of words, will be allowed to establish a new reading of the aforesaid clause in their favour. So much for the evil which this bill might have proposed to do, and which it has happily left undone. These are its virtues of omission; it has also its sins. If it has sometimes firmly resisted the mischievous proposals of the Commissioners, it has in no case had the courage to take a bold line of its own. One measure of practical reform which would have trenched upon no rights, and violated no principle, and therefore, perhaps, was not sufficiently telling to recommend itself to the Commissioners—but which the public would have thankfully acknowledged, and which the University could hardly have objected to—was the removal of the inconvenient fiction, which demands four years for the first degree, whilst, in the thirteenth term, the beginning of the fourth year, the final examination may be, and often is, passed, not only with success, but with honour. We are not arguing, it must be remembered, for an actual shortening (unless it were by the odd thirteenth term) the academical course, which we agree with Mr Justice Coleridge in regarding as an evil; but merely for insisting, in the case of all pass-men, that the period which is now the minimum should also be the maximum of their university course, and that the absurd and expensive anomaly of “grace terms” should be altogether done away with. We will not trouble our readers again with the arguments on this subject which we have used before;[[8]] but we must confess the disappointment with which we have looked in vain through the Reports, both of the Hebdomadal and of the Tutors’ Committee, and find this most simple and convenient re-arrangement,—change it can hardly be called—either wholly overlooked, or only noticed to be dismissed without consideration. It is totally distinct in principle from the 12th Recommendation of the Commissioners, “that, during the latter part of their course, students should be left free to devote themselves to some special branch or branches of study”—which of course is neither more nor less than a postponement of classical literature, to what is popularly called “Useful Knowledge,” against which we should assuredly protest as strongly as any of the Oxford witnesses; three clear years of four terms each, all strictly kept, would save undergraduates some expense, much indecision and confusion as to when they shall go up, would be easier understood by the public generally, and would not involve the sacrifice of a single hour of classical training,—nay, in connection with one little improvement to be mentioned presently, might allow more time to be really devoted to it than at present. We are glad to recognise the “consent, though with great doubts of its expediency,”[[9]] to this view of one of the most real, because one of the most cautious and moderate reformers in the University. And we still entertain some confidence that it is a principle which must find its way into a well-digested scheme of collegiate reform, whenever we have one.
Another measure which we had hoped to have seen suggested by the bill, important as it certainly is to the “good government” of Oxford—but on which we are sorry to find both the Oxford committees rigidly silent—is the shortening of the long vacation. On this subject, necessarily a distasteful one to college Tutors, we have already, in a previous article, spoken at some length, and nothing has been written or said to shake in the slightest degree our strong opinion of its desirability. In all the evidence which has been sought or volunteered by the Tutors, this point has been studiously, as it seems, avoided. Only Sir F. Rogers, (who is not a Tutor) follows us in pressing this, as he also confesses, “unpalatable suggestion.”[[10]] He sees in it, as we do, the simplest means of shortening the time of a general university education, without in the least impairing its efficiency. Exeter College also, in the abstract of proposed changes in its statutes, forwarded to the Home Office, Feb. 1, 1854, has set a solitary example of endeavouring to reclaim to collegiate study some portion of that pleasant but not very profitable four months during which Alma Mater usually turns her children out of doors: “It is proposed that a Tutor or Fellow reside during the greater part of the long vacation, to enable undergraduates to reside there for the purpose of study.” In these few lines we gladly hail one of those just and sensible reforms in which Exeter does not now for the first time take the lead,—which are overlooked because they are so simple in themselves, and so plainly within the reach of every college, but which, when once seen in action, cannot fail to be generally adopted.