Girton College, Cambridge

“ At these honored institutions young women live in their own “halls,” as at some of our American colleges, under care of women of highest social standing, enter the same lecture-room and listen to the same lecture with the young men. The following from a leading educational journal, reveals the growing favor of co-education at Cambridge: “Since the modest beginning thirteen years ago of Girton College,—the woman’s college at Cambridge,—it has twice been found necessary to make considerable extensions. ”

“ Newnham to Girton in the collegiate status now enjoyed by both,{360} Girton to Newnham because the considerable advantages accruing to women students through proximity to Cambridge have been reflected on the sister college. Each displayed a boldness distinctively its own which has been the main source of the success of the movement: Newnham planted her house of students in the university town, Girton asked to follow the same curriculum as men ”

“ It has thus bound itself to compare the work of all tripos students irrespective of sex. While at Oxford there is no university recognition of the status of the candidate or of her hall, and no university certificate of the place obtained, Girton and Newnham are recognised colleges at Cambridge; the name of the successful candidate followed by that of the college is read aloud in the Senate House and published on the Senate House door; and only students presented by these colleges are admitted to the university examinations, as is the case with men. ”

“ Newnham at first prepared its students for the Higher Local examinations and the triposes, discountenanced the Previous Examination and would not allow its students to prepare for the Ordinary degree. In the event, Newnham has had to abandon the examination which was the original raison d’être of its existence, and Girton has had virtually to abandon its claim to examination for the ordinary degree. This means that every woman who takes a degree takes it in honours: the same is true of no college of men in Cambridge except King’s. ”

“ The "Mays," in spite of drawbacks, have often been of great value, in giving confidence to industrious but despondent students, and in warning those whose progress was unsatisfactory. The fact of having been through a certain course, examined on the subject, and marked with the undergraduates, emphasised the fact to the women students, the undergraduates, and the world at large, that the work done at Newnham and Girton was really of University standing. ”

“ Now it is known that the Cambridge colleges, and Trinity College in particular, are doing a great deal for the instruction of women. The young women of Girton College and Newnham College--both of these being institutions for their benefit, in or near Cambridge--not only enjoy the instruction of the university, but they share it under a guaranty that it shall be of the best quality; because they attend, in many cases, the very same lectures with the young men. ”

“ Former Girton students not only fill posts all over Great Britain and Ireland as head or assistant mistresses in high schools, grammar schools,{323} and women’s colleges, but they are to be found holding the professorship of mathematics and a classical fellowship at Bryn Mawr College Pennsylvania, in the high schools of Pretoria, Bloemfontein, and Moscow, in women’s colleges at Toronto and Durban, as mathematical or other tutors in Queen’s College London, Queen’s College Belfast, and Alexandra College Dublin. ”

“ Girton and Newnham students, if no other lady is to be present, can only visit men’s rooms accompanied by some senior of the college. Visits of men to students’ rooms are not permitted, except in the case of fathers and brothers; but a student cannot ask her brother to her room to meet her college friends, for as Miss Clough observed “the brother of one is{351} not the brother of all.” Careful supervision with large liberty and an atmosphere which encourages the students to make themselves the trustees of the rules, characterise both colleges ”

“ In 1875 Newnham Hall was built on one side of Coe fen and Newnham Mill, as{328} Peterhouse had been built on the other. So that Newnham students frequented the streets of Cambridge from the first, and had their house of residence in the town two years before the sister community settled at Girton. The founders of Girton had been the first to ideate a women’s college in connexion with university teaching, but Newnham was the first college for women to take its place by the side of the historic colleges in Cambridge. ”

“ Except under special circumstances the age for admission at Newnham and Girton is 18. Students’ quarters at Newnham consist, in most cases, of a bed-sitting room; at Girton each student has a sitting room with a small bedroom leading from it. The necessary furniture is supplied, and can be supplemented according to taste by the student. All students must be within college boundaries by 7 o’clock (but with permission they can be out till 11) and are “marked in” two or three times a day, the chief occasion being the 7 o’clock “hall.” ”

“ In this latest part of the college is the principal gateway, now closed by a double gate of beautiful ironwork, in memory of the first principal, Miss Clough. In the hall are portraits of Miss Clough, Professor and Mrs Sidgwick, and Miss M. G. Kennedy, by Mr J. J. Shannon, and one (by Richmond) of Miss Helen Gladstone, who till lately was one of the leading Newnham dons. Young as they are, both Girton and Newnham have their history, and are able to inspire their students with a patriotism which is the natural result of extraordinary perseverance and hardly-won victories. ”

“ In times past, when any rich man died in London they were wont to help the poor scholars of the Universities with exhibition. When any man died, they would bequeath great sums of money toward the relief of the poor. When I was a scholar in Cambridge myself, I heard very good report of London, and knew many that had relief of the rich men of London: but now I can hear no such good report, and yet I inquire of it, and hearken for it; but now charity is waxen cold, none helpeth the scholar, nor yet the poor. ”

“ The characteristic peculiar to Cambridge and Oxford, and which distinguishes them not only from American but also from all other universities in England and elsewhere, is the college system. Thus Cambridge is a collection of eighteen colleges which, though nominally united to form one institution, are really distinct, inasmuch as each is a separate community with its own buildings and grounds, its own resident students, its own lecturers, and Fellows—a community which is supported by its own moneys without aid from the university exchequer, and which in most matters legislates for itself. ”

“ There is likely to be an extension of university education in the near future. The ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge with their great college system will be strengthened, as will be the universities which were established at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. The demand for the better training of teachers will result inevitably in the creation of more universities. The inadequate sum which this country has spent upon university education up to the present will be greatly increased. ”

“ Before, however, we offer any conjectures as to the probable effect of these yet untried changes, we must remind our readers of a certain characteristic of the Cambridge system, which is important in estimating the internal relations of the late reforms. The academic life of Cambridge circulates through two concurrent systems, which we may term the university and the collegiate system. The university is one corporation, and each individual college is altogether another. ”

“ There is neither the reward of honour nor of money. There is none of that great competition which exists at our Cambridge for the high place of Senior Wrangler; and, consequently, the degree of excellence attained is no doubt lower than with us. But I conceive that the general level of the University education is higher there than with us; that a young man is more sure of getting his education, and that a smaller percentage of men leaves Harvard College utterly uneducated than goes in that condition out of Oxford or Cambridge. ”

“ Milton, whose life is very largely bound up with Cambridge, brings us to another critical point in University history. It is difficult to estimate the attitude of Cambridge as a whole to the Civil Wars. Oxford remained faithful to the King, but, while Cambridge possessed no college so unanimously loyal as St John’s at Oxford, there were one or two colleges, such as Sidney and Emmanuel, whose sympathies were undeniably Puritan. An University cannot help a certain amount of conservatism, and Cambridge sacrificed a great deal in the Stewart cause. ”

“ Yet in spite of its municipal expansion and business enterprises, Cambridge is still pre-eminently the place where the lamp of learning is kept lighted. Though the college waxes great in numbers and its buildings multiply, and the jar of business invades the academic quiet, yet the purposes and habits of the scholar’s life still distinguish the community. ”

“ The college the distinguishing characteristic of Cambridge and Oxford
It is the collegiate system which distinguishes the English universities from all others. Everywhere else in Europe students live in their own private lodgings and have complete control of their lives, subject to no supervision whatever; the university has no rights over them and no means of ensuring their good behaviour during the period in which they choose to attend its lectures. ”

“ The University of London has no colleges directly connected with it, but confers degrees, upon examination, to students of nearly all the institutions of learning in the country. Oxford has twenty-three colleges and Cambridge eighteen. This college system distinguishes the universities of England from those of the continent. A student must connect himself with a college before he becomes a member of the university. The teaching in these colleges is done almost entirely by tutors, and the professors of the university only deliver lectures on special subjects once or twice a week. ”

“ This the young women cannot do. They have only the rights of all Cambridge ladies to attend the many public lectures and readings of the university.
The Harvard Annex is, then, to-day a woman’s college, with no degrees, no dormitories, no women instructors, and with a staff of teachers made up from volunteers of another college. The Fay House, 332 where offices, lecture and waiting rooms, library and laboratories are gathered, is in the heart of Old Cambridge, but at a little distance from the college buildings. This is the centre of the social and literary life of the students. ”

“ It has, in the chapel of King's College, a building of marvellous beauty; Oxford cannot match it, nor can it be matched anywhere in England save by that "miracle of the world," the Chapel of Henry VII., in Westminster Abbey. The roll of Cambridge's alumni is illustrious to a degree, having such names as Bacon, Erasmus, Newton, Milton, Cromwell, Macaulay, Byron, Thackeray, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Harvey (discoverer of the circulation of the blood) , Darwin, and many, many others equally well known.
Cambridge more Progressive than Oxford. ”

“ Its constitution was consequently oligarchic rather than democratic, the government being entirely in the hands of the teaching body, while the bachelors and undergraduates had no share in the passing of new laws and regulations." J. B. Mullinger, A History of the University of Cambridge, chapter 1-2. "The earliest existing college at Cambridge is St. Peter's, generally called Peterhouse, historically founded A. D. 1257, in the reign of Henry III. The Universities are known merely by their situation; as Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, St. ”

“ The Working Men’s College was largely, perhaps mainly, the product of Oxford and Cambridge, in the sense that most of its founders and first teachers had belonged to one or other of the two Universities, and their object was to impart to others the College spirit as they had felt and known it and realised its value; to give to poor men, to manual workers, something, if it were ever so little, of the atmosphere which had brightened and broadened and sweetened their own lives. The College, accordingly, has always taken Oxford and Cambridge for its models. ”

“ But we believe that it has principally originated in the jealousy of those who are attached to Cambridge and Oxford, either by their interests, or by those feelings which men naturally entertain towards the place of their education, and which, when they do not interfere with schemes of public advantage, are entitled to respect. Many of these persons, we suspect, entertain a vague apprehension, scarcely avowed even to themselves, that some defects in the constitution of their favourite Academies will be rendered more glaring by the contrast which the system of this new College will exhibit. ”

“ Like Peterhouse which was adapted and built for the “Ely Scholars,” the Hall at Newnham was the outcome of a students’ association:—the North of England Council for the Higher Education of Women, of which Miss Clough was president, and the association formed to promote the interests of the Higher Local students were its real progenitors.
As soon as the removal from Hitchin had been decided, it was hoped that the students already settled in Cambridge and the Girton community might form one body; but the decision to build away from the town put a stop to any such scheme. ”