University College, Oxford

“ But no one who has been brought intimately in contact with the Oxford life can fail to realize its charm. The influence on a few American students scattered over the whole country will surely be of advantage to them and to our relations with Great Britain. The American university presidents who have been given control of the administration of the Rhodes scholarships have decided to require residence at an American college before the student proceeds to Oxford. ”

“ While the University is thus only a union of the Colleges for attaining such ends and such status as can better be attained by united than by isolated existence, the College is a real and concrete thing, the foundation stone of the ‘Oxford System’. Each College is within itself independent; each has its own traditions and some characteristics of organization, life, and system which are peculiar to itself. With the affairs of the College individually the University is not concerned. ”

“ Effect of these reforms
Other salutary changes naturally grew out of this comprehensive reform, and far greater progress was made by the University during the thirty years immediately following it than in any previous century of its history. The impulse given to education reacted upon learning and research; Oxford science began once more to command the respect of Europe; the professoriate received an accession of illustrious names; and college tuition, instead of being the mere temporary vocation of fellows waiting for livings, gradually placed itself on the footing of a regular profession. ”

“ There is a great difference between a university and a college. A university is great enough to shelter many colleges, and its chancellor is ruler over all. When we reflect that Christ Church College, alone, included as many important buildings as are to be found in some of our modern American universities, we may have some idea of the extent of Oxford University, within whose boundaries twenty such colleges could be counted. ”

“ It had at length become possible again for [Pg 182] a man to keep his terms and take his degree without continual residence within college walls. The numbers of the University grew rapidly, and at a time when more efficient tutors and discipline made Oxford attractive to many who were neither frivolous nor rich. Oxford became, in fact, a place of education. The previous century had been conspicuous for great names and lack of system; what was achieved was due to individual endowment and energy; and the able men stood somewhat apart from their contemporaries. ”

“ Oxford has now 21 colleges, among which are Balliol, Christ Church, Magdalen, Oriel, Trinity, and University College; 64 professors and teachers, and 3000 students. It is rich in museums and libraries; the Bodleian Library is of great value, the Taylor Library is devoted to modern literature. The Oxford or Tractarian Movement, one of the most remarkable religious impulses of modern times, had its centre in the University between 1834 and 1845. Among distinguished Oxford alumni were Hooker, Jeremy Taylor, Wesley, Newman; Hobbes, Locke, Adam Smith; Johnson, Gibbon, Freeman, Green ”

“ But Christ Church is not the only unique college in Oxford. As there is no other to be found in any university so curiously combined with the cathedral and ecclesiastical dignitaries of a see, so is there no other, in this country at all events, that has preserved its original intention, as a college for Fellows only, as has All Souls. Here no noisy undergraduate is allowed to disturb the calm. ”

“ The last reforms have made Oxford a huge collection of schools, in which physical science, history, philosophy, philology, scholarship, theology, and almost everything in the world but archæology, are being taught and learned with very great vigour. The hardest worked of men is a conscientious college tutor; and almost all tutors are conscientious. The professors being an ornamental, but (with few exceptions) merely ornamental, order of beings, the tutors have to do the work of a University, which, for the moment, is a teaching-machine. ”

“ He must be a single man; he may marry a wife. He must be in residence; he may board and lodge wherever he sees fit. He cannot leave Oxford; he need not remain in Oxford. He may be a Tutor, a Lecturer, a Professor; he may be a Fellow and nothing more. He must be a Graduate of the college in which he holds his Fellowship; he may be a Graduate of one college and a Fellow of another. He may be an Honorary Fellow, with no Oxford degree at all. But he must, in most cases, have taken at least the degree of Bachelor of Arts, or of a Student in the Civil Law, from some College or University. ”

“ The distinctive feature of the social organization of Oxford life is said to be the colleges. Fifty years ago the remark held good, but to-day it requires an extension. The distinctive feature is the duality of the social organization: a man who enters fully into undergraduate affairs takes part both in the life of the college and in the life of the university. The life of the college, in so far as it is wholesome, is open to all newcomers; it is so organized as to exert powerfully upon them the force of its best influences and traditions, and is thus in the highest degree inclusive. ”

“ If the founders of the earliest Oxford college were indebted for their inspiration to any foreign source, they must have derived it from the great French University in Paris, of which the collegiate system already formed a distinctive feature. Not to speak of still more ancient colleges at Paris, either attached to monasteries or serving the purpose of mere lodging-houses, the Sorbonne, founded about 1250, furnishes a striking precedent for its Oxford successors, as an academical cloister specially planned for the education of the secular clergy. ”

“ Here is the first misconception of all strangers. And this feature of Oxford it is which has drawn such exclamations of astonishment from foreigners. Lipsius, for example, protested with fervor, on first seeing this vast establishment of Oxford, that one college of this university was greater in its power and splendor, that it glorified and illustrated the honors of literature more conspicuously by the pomps with which it invested the ministers and machinery of education, than any entire university of the continent.
What is a university almost everywhere else? ”

“ For even at home the general uneducated public, taking but a passing interest in educational details, is apt to be hopelessly at sea as to the mutual relation of Colleges and Universities. In the public mind the College probably represents the University: an Oxonian will be sometimes spoken of as 'at College;' University officials are confused with heads of houses, and Collections with University examinations. That foundation which is consecrated to the education of Welsh Oxonians is generally referred to in the remote fastnesses of the Cymru as Oxford College. ”

“ The University has its ‘Statutes’, its ‘Handbook’, its ‘Calendar’, its ‘Examination Statutes’, its ‘Programmes’ and ‘Lecture Lists’, which contain the official information which an American inquirer expects to find in his University ‘Catalogues’, ‘Bulletins’, and ‘College Annuals’. Then there are numberless books which deal with various phases of Oxford life, some of them serious, some merely impressionist sketches. But no one book professes to give a really comprehensive description of Oxford or to touch on all its phases; few persons have time or opportunity or inclination to read all ”

“ Universities are, of course, hostile to geniuses, which seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints. Yet we all send our sons to college, and, though he be a genius, he must take his chance. The university must be retrospective. The gale that gives direction to the vanes on all its towers blows out of antiquity. Oxford is a library, and the professors must be librarians. ”

“ Until the nineteenth century, there really was no university at Oxford, at least in modern times. The colleges were quite independent of one another socially and in athletics, and each of them provided all the necessary instruction for its members. The social clubs which now admit members from the university at large began life as wine clubs of separate colleges, and even to-day the influence of the parent college is apt to predominate. ”

“ Some of the fellowships are held in connexion with university offices; but the majority are awarded on examination, and are among the highest honours in the university offered by this method. The only undergraduate members of the college are four bible-clerks, [5] so that the college occupies a peculiar position as a society of graduates. The college has its beautiful original front upon High Street; the first quadrangle, practically unaltered since the foundation, is one of the most characteristic in Oxford. ”

“ At first the college instruction was regarded as supplementary to the university teaching, though it soon became far more important. The masters of the university continued to read lectures on the recognized subjects, living as of old on fees from those who chose to listen; but they were clearly unable to compete with the endowed tutors and professors of the colleges. By the beginning of the fifteenth century, the mediæval teaching master was disappearing. The only real teaching in arts—by all odds the most popular branch of study at Oxford—was given within the colleges and halls. ”

“ Much time was devoted to the organisation of education in the college and the university. Arrangements were made for inter-collegiate lectures, and Scottish professors were invited to give lectures in the summer term, when their labours in the north were at an end. But his chief object was to lessen the expense of an Oxford career. For this purpose he persuaded the college to found more scholarships and exhibitions, and to establish a hall where, as he hoped, young men would be able to live for little, while enjoying the benefits of the college system. ”

“ A very large proportion of professors and college tutors have travelled widely; many are well known in London as contributors to scientific and literary periodicals or otherwise; while Oxford itself is constantly thronged with visitors from the metropolis. In ceasing to be clerical and aristocratic, the University has become far more cosmopolitan; all religions are there mingled harmoniously, nor is it uncommon to meet in the streets young men of Oriental race and complexion wearing academical costume. ”

“ There are three private halls in Oxford, established under a university statute of 1882, which provides for such establishment by any member of convocation under certain conditions and under licence from the vice-chancellor. Non-collegiate students, [13] i.e. members of the university, possessing all its privileges without being members of any college, were first admitted in 1868. As a body they are under the care of a delegacy and the supervision of a censor. Women are admitted to lectures and university examinations but not to its degrees ”

“ Magdalen College.
occasional manifestoes, which a few professors sign and publish, of any great importance. But it is through the press and through Parliament that the voice of young Oxford is heard. It is through the minds and the examples of those statesmen and administrators, who have imbibed their principles of life and action within her precincts, and have been trained in her schools and on her river or playing-fields, that the influence of the University is reflected on the outer world. ”

“ In the University of Oxford, those are called convictores who, although not belonging to the foundation of any college or hall, have at any time been regents, and have constantly kept their names on the books of some college or hall, from the time of their admission to the degree of M.A., or Doctors in either of the three faculties.—Oxf. ”

“ Merton was a marked step forward in the modern University system, as it exists in Oxford to-day; but its Founder left the system in a state of transition, which the New College, with its wealth and grandeur of architecture, and its mode of imparting knowledge, brought to a state of what was considered culmination at the end of the Fourteenth Century. And, as it was the first to force its members to go to Mass daily, it was the parent of what now is called Compulsory, or Required, Chapel.
New College was good to the poor and to the needy. ”

“ Oxford suffers in this respect from a real embarras de richesse. The University is rich enough, though by no means so rich as it was formerly, to keep up a double staff of teachers, professorial and tutorial. It supports sixty-five professors, readers, and lecturers, and probably four or five times as many tutors. Many of the tutors 105are quite equal to the professors, nay, it may be, even superior to them, but the most popular tutor, whose lectures, when in college, were crowded, has to be satisfied with two or three listless men as soon as he has been raised to the professoriate. ”

“ The educational function of the University had, in fact, been almost wholly merged in college tuition, but the scholarships, as well as the fellowships, of the colleges were fettered by all manner of restrictions, which marred their value as incentives to industry. The great majority of fellows were bound to take Holy Orders, and the whole University was dominated by a clerical spirit, which directly tended to make it, as it had so long been, a focus of theological controversy. ”