CAMBRIDGE l7NIVERSITY REPORT.
THE abstract of the Cambridge University Report which we pub- lished a fortnight ago and the comparative table of the leading sug- gestions of the two Reports given in another page of our present number, enable us to assume that our readers are in possession of the main recommendations of the two Commissions for the Reform of the Universities, and to comment upon them without any fur- ther enumeration of details. Persons much interested in Univer- sity questions will most probably by this time have studied the Reports themselves.
The Cambridge Report tends in some degree to confuse, at least to reopen, questions on which the Oxford Report had pronounced decided opinions. This may be partly accounted for by the differ- ent composition of the two Commissions; partly by the different circumstances with which they had to deal; partly, perhaps, by the accident of the one Report being delayed several months behind the other. The Oxford Commissioners belonged in the main to the most advanced Reforming party ; the Cambridge Commission- ers, though of known Liberal tendencies, certainly represented opinions in which the Conservative element was effectively pre- sent. The truth is that for years past the opposition to Reform at Cambridge has been rapidly diminishing, and the original state of things to be reformed, especially in the Colleges, was not so fla- grantly bad. Consequently, the Reform tendency at Cambridge has not risen to a passion: men have felt, that in spite of obstruction, great improvements have been gradually introduced, and that the system was yearly training a large number of young men in sound knowledge and self-government, and upon the whole bestowing its honours and emoluments upon the most distinguished of its stu- dents. Moreover, owing perhaps to the predominantly scientific character of her academical course, theological disputes have not " tormented " the Cambridge air as of late years they have that of the sister University. To these differences may be partially traced the milder character of the remedies proposed by the Cambridge Commission. Thus, at Cambridge the extension of College accom- modation has been going on during the last thirty years to such a degree that new buildings and old are thrown together in almost equal proportions ; while, on the other hand, the pressure upon the Colleges has been relieved by the general practice of allowing the College students to lodge in the town under College superintend- ence; so that in the largest College half the students are thus accommodated. We see in this fact at least a probable reason
why the Cambridge Commissioners should not have thought it necessary to sacrifice the peculiar advantages of College life and discipline for the sake of admitting to the University an increasi d number of students. It is the singular benefit of an elastic sys- tem to be released from the necessity of violent and extreme changes. Again, the Fellowships at Cambridge have uniformly, within the recollection of living persons, been bestowed upon those, who had most distinguished themselves either in the examinatien for degrees or in special examinations for Fellowships ; and a vast majority of these Fellowships were open to the competition of all members of the College from whose property the annual in- come of the Fellowship was derived : indeed, in many cases where the smaller Colleges have not been able to fill a vacant Fellowship creditably from their own ranks, they have not hesitated to invite some distinguished student of a larger College to occupy the va- cancy; so that, at this moment, the majority of the Fellows of some smaller Colleges have come from the larger Colleges, Trinity and St. John's, principally the former. There are at Cambridge but few local Fellowships. The great exception is at King's College, whose rich foundation is appropriated exclusively to the Collegers at Eton. This, there is good ground for saying, is a state of things exactly the reverse of what it is at Oxford. Restricted Fellowships are there the rule, open Fellowships the exception ; and within the restrictions, or with Fellowships not statutably re- stricted, it is said that the electors have dealt as with patronage in their gift for the exercise of which they were not responsible. On the other hand, the Oxford Commissioners were familiar with a few Fellowships open to the competition not only of the Colfegb in which they were localized but of the whole University. We are by no means prepared to maintain that a difference of circum- stances so marked as this required a corresponding difference in the recommendations of the Commissioners ; because the objector the Commissioners was not to ascertain how to leave Oxford and Cambridge as like as possible to what they are at present, but to improve them, and render their great endowments as efficient as possible in stimulating talent and industry. But, knowing the effect upon men's minds of the circumstances with which they are familiar, how they are acutely alive to those evils of whieh they have experience, and how the reaction towards strong remedies is just in proportion to the sharpness of the experience, we are not surprised to find that where the evil of restriction and private patronage has been most crippling in its effects and most revolting to the moral sense, there the remedy sought should be of a more violent character than where already a large though limited com- petition has been the prevailing rule. And who can be surprised that the theological rage and folly that have embittered Oxford life, and made Oxford a byword through England, should have so acted on the minds of the Commissioners as to induce them to seek to correct it by raising up in the Colleges a band of cultivated laymen in whose presence such futile controversies would die or at least be silent ? No such evil has existed in Cambridge, and the Commissioners have left the Fellowships still subject to the con- dition of taking orders, where the statutes at present prescribe it. It is not easy to refer to a similar influence of familiar circum- stances the recommendation of the Oxford Commission in favour of an entrance examination for students, and the silence of the Cambridge Commission on this much-argued point. The students. at Cambridge are certainly as much in need of such a stimulus to due preparation for the University as those at Oxford; nor are any objections to such an examination valid at Cambridge which lose
their force if urged upon the banks of Isis. It may be that, the sympathies of the Cambridge Commission being strongly towards mathematical and physical science, a fear of deterring illiterate men of scientific talent may have operated with them. Or perhaps the vapid argument of a supply of pions ignorance being needed for the Church may have prevented them from adopting the re- commendation by which the Oxford Commission has sought to ele- vate the standard of its University, and to release it from the ab-
surd necessity of teaching the elements of Greek, Latin, and ma- thematics, to young men of from nineteen to three-and-twenty years of age. The very few cases in which a young man of real
merit would be delayed by such an examination, are as nothing compared to the beneficial influence it would, if strictly carried out, exert both upon our schools and upon the subsequent teaching of the Universities ; while the Church, so far from suffering in the long run, would be supplied with as many ministers as at present, but they would have been working at their studies before coming to the University, and would so be able to profit by the more ad- vanced instruction, instead of being intellectually lazy for eighteen or nineteen years of their lives, and spending their precious three years at the University either in ineffectual efforts to make up lost ground, or, as oftener is the case, in continuing a career of idle- ness and adding to it the additional excitements of extravagance and dissipation. For it can never be too strongly maintained, that most of the vice and folly displayed by Under-Graduates results from their taking no interest in the studies of the place; and this, again, from their coming up unprepared to profit by the instruc- tion given. Both Commissions concur in recommending a restoration of the professorial system to activity, and propose to extend it at the ex- pense of the Colleges which have choked its life, if rather it las not fallen into disuse from the greater efficiency of the catechetical instruction given in the Colleges, and from the ease and cheapness with which books are and have been for a long time procurable. It may be added, that the subjects of examination at Oxford and Cambridge have hitherto been those in which professorial teaching,
as generally understood to imply a continuous lecture and nothing else, is peculiarly inapplicable. In the experimental sciences and to a certain degree in the moral sciences, such continuous lectures are both useful and interesting—may at least be made so by a man of genius who is interested at once in his subject and in his class. The reason is, that in these sciences illustrations may be presented visibly; or drawn from common life, and it is only the generaliza- tions that are difficult of apprehension ; while in mathematical science or in philological pursuits the generalizations depend on details that are at once unfamiliar and difficult of mastery. It seems to follow that continuous lectures can only be serviceable to advanced students in these latter departments of knowledge, while in the former the only necessary condition of deriving profit from them is the interested attention of a mind of ordinary capacity. If, therefore, we imagined that the future instruction of our Uni- versities would, as a result of the Commissioners' recommenda- tions, be mainly committed to Professors teaching by continuous lectures, we should think this evil would far outweigh any advantage that could possibly be derived from their suggestions. But it will be found that in practice the principal effect of the so-called exten- hion of the professorial system will be to provide a definite career in the Universities for men who feel the wish and have the requisite talents to devote themselves for life to teaching in their respective departments of knowledge. The mode of imparting in- struction will by due process of experience shape itself in each spe- cial branch to the peculiar needs of that special branch. Private tuition will go on still, as it does now, to the exact extent in which it is needed to supply the defects of the regular organization. Only students having a greater liberty of choice will no longer be compelled to "get up" subjects which are thoroughly distasteful to them, and a consequent increase of interest in their studies, and of independent exertion, may be expected from them. Between the two modes of mulcting the Colleges to pay the new Professors and Lecturers, there is this important difference, that the Oxford plan connects the Professors with the Colleges from whose property their salaries will be in great part supplied, while the Cambridge plan, by creating a common fund out of the sum assessed upon the Colleges, severs the Professors from any such special connexion. The former plan is, we should imagine, likely to be less galling to the Colleges. The latter seems to throw a needlessly offensive ele- ment into what, after all, is a confiscation of property.
There is no reason why the two Universities should be reformed into exactly identical systems; on the contrary, there is a positive advantage in preserving for each a distinctive character. It is, we think, to be regretted, that the Cambridge Commission has not seen fit to recommend an entrance-examination, and the release of Fellowships from the condition of taking orders; but the differences between the two Reports would seem no bar to their being both car- ried into execution, so far as may seem advisable to Parliament. All modern legislation is tentative; and the greater variety, within reasonable limits, that can be given to our experiments, the greater will be the accumulation of facts constituting our most valuable legacy to our own posterity, and to the human race at large. The step gained by the publication of the two Reports is, after all, that the nation has before it at last a large body of evidence re- lating to the Universities, authentic in the main from the source from which it is derived, and systematized by the summing-up of Commissioners, whose characters acquirements, and gratuitous labours, entitle them to a respected consideration.
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