The truth about Essex
Sir: As I happen to live in Australia and my SPECTATOR reaches me by sea mail, I have only recently encountered Ian MacGregor's article in your issue of 24 May, 'The truth about Essex.' This is a fascinating and detailed study of the situation in one university. But, since it was written, student violence, in one country or another, has become an almost daily head- line in the world's press. Such a universal phenomenon demands a general rather than a local explanation. And it is likely that the immediate causes of a sense of grievance, advanced by students in different situations, merely conceal and confuse the main issue. These are not the 'Vietnam war' or `Communist agitators' or any of the more local `headaches' which look challenging on placard, and provide student organisers with slogans.
The real basis of student dissatisfaction, the reason why students make these general causes into a justification for violent action which can have little influence on the world problems about which they claim to be agitating, must be something which comes much closer to the daily preoccupations of the students them- selves.
The 'real' cause was stated some forty years ago by the late Ortega y Gasset. He wrote The trend towards a university dominated by "inquiry" has been disastrous.' But that this trend has increasingly dominated university thought in recent decades is incontestible. It is proverbially an age of science. And, as Lord Snow has observed, 'The overwhelming majority of the scientific culture (i.e. the group of scien- tists observed through anthropological eyes) would feel certain, without needing to cogitate or examine their souls that research was the primary function of a university.'
What is the consequence? No human institute can develop peaceably unless there is a sufficient element of common agreement as to its purpose among those participating in it. In the univer- sities of the world, ever since the beginning of the century, that element of common agreement has been progressively eroded.
Students, and their parents, still fondly imagine that they go to universities in order to be educated. That is to say, broadly, that they may live' intelligently and be prepared to earn a living in an adult world. Not one in a hundred of them will become a `scientist' in any true meaning of that term. They will become pro- fessional men of all kinds, traders, journalists, teachers and so on.
But among the men who 'staff' the univer- sities the idea of becoming a 'scientist,' an original thinker, has made enormous progress. The evidence that this process is taking place is publication of original thought—in learned journals or, better still, in book form. It has almost entirely displaced, except with those who are `born teachers,' the idea that teaching is their primary function. 'Publish or perish' has become a recognised slogan among the staffs of many universities, especially in the us.
Indeed this research function, this itch for publication, is often in direct conflict with their function as teachers. With the ramification and specialisation of modern knowledge, `original work' inevitably counts as a high degree of specialisation. As a qualified observer noted of the teaching of archaeology at Cambridge, some twenty years ago : `The student who wishes to learn the subject as a whole finds that, to obtain a degree, he has to study intensively such limited periods as happen to be the choice of his instructor. . . . He (the student), needs a little bit of everything. . . . He does not need weeks of lectures on cross-cousin marriages, or the sexual life of savages, or an intensive course on various shapes of pots. He wants to know briefly the different kinds of men and how they lived and live and where and why.'
Indeed, this primacy of 'research' has become so much a matter of course among university staffs that they often refer deprecatingly to their 'teaching load.' Increasingly senior professors, and those who are regarded as the more bril- liant among their janitors, regard relief from teaching as a symbol of status. The task is dele- gated to the junior, less qualified and less promising among their colleagues.
Thus, while the total number of university students has increased enormously, the student has been, almost imperceptibly, demoted from his former position as the centre and raison d'être of university life. He has become 'a second-class citizen.'
This comes out indirectly in Ian MacGregor's article when he says 'many junior staff, now seized of the virtues of staff-student com- munion, in the past kept students at the greatest distance. One of the more perfervid but also prolific militants is notorious in the university for driving in to give his classes and then as quickly driving home to write his books.'
But he begs the central question when he refers to Essex as 'a high-pressure institution, demanding not only a high standard of teach- ing but also much in the way of research and publication.' And again when he writes of 'the most able of the staff, the men most concerned with teaching and research.'
It is proverbial wisdom that `no man can serve two masters.' Because the modern univer- sity has tried to do so, its students are in revolt. The remedy is to segregate its teaching and research functions, either in terms of persons or in terms of time. The first remedy involves separate establishments for research and teach- ing. The second involves insisting, as Benjamin Jowett did at Balliol in the last century, that the primary duty of a tutor is to teach. 'If a "room in a tower" is essential to them, they must make the kind of sacrifice in order to live in it and return to it that he, Jowett, made throughout his life.' Jowett never married. But academic celibacy is unnecessary. The university terms only occupy half the working year.
To try to cure the present disorders by half- baked 'concessions' is fiddling with the problem. Students do not really want to 'govern' them- selves: they want to be educated.
L. F. Urwick Poyntington, 83 Kenneth Street, Longueville, NSW, Australia
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