British Universities Past and Present (review)

The Victorian era was decisive for British higher education both as a culmination of past trends and as laying the foundation for twentieth-century developments: many long-standing tensions concerning the balance between religious and secular activities in British universities came to the fore during this period; the University of London and universities in provincial cities emerged as alternatives to Oxford and Cambridge; and the university extension movement, which started in the later nineteenth century, began to broaden the popular reach of higher education. Accordingly, while this book covers the full history of the British university back to the twelfth century, five of the twelve chapters of British Universities Past and Present are devoted to the Victorian era along with another five chapters on the twentieth century. This is perhaps unsurprising, given that Robert Anderson's own work as an historian of higher education has frequently focused on the Victorian period.

Anderson's first two chapters take the story up to the Victorian era. Chapter 1 relates the role of state and church in the founding and early development of Oxford and Cambridge. Anderson points out that university education in the medieval era had the very practical function of providing training for the clerical and lay bureaucracy. It was aimed at those from the middling social classes to whom such training would appeal; only in the late sixteenth century did those of more aristocratic origins come to find the university an attractive way of coming of age. Chapter 2 relates how the development of medical and legal education in Scotland and the emergence of the research university in Germany promoted competing aims of university education. Oxford and Cambridge as late as the early nineteenth century were primarily way stations for aspiring clergy seeking a living and alternatives to the grand tour for aristocratic youth. Attempts to secularize and rejuvenate both institutions at that time came to little, and both remained largely uninfluenced by England's growing industrialization.

Anderson organizes his chapters on the Victorian era thematically rather than chronologically. He argues that Oxford and Cambridge at the beginning of the Victorian era could claim continuity with the early modern dominance of colleges over the central university, a legacy that continues to the present, reminding readers that this has influenced newer British universities as they have in their own ways attempted to emulate the residential college tradition of Oxbridge. Anderson also notes, however, that the tutorial system commonly associated with Oxbridge was a late-nineteenth-century innovation aimed at breaking with a long-standing legacy of soporific, poorly attended lectures along with idle and bibulous albeit celibate college fellows.

Anderson underscores other more fundamental changes that can be traced to the Victorian era, even if their full import was only realized in the twentieth century. These include the opening up of access to college education to lower classes and women, the emergence of professional and economic interests as influences on university education, and the adoption of a research mission following the German model while still retaining the traditional commitment to liberal education. Finally, the Victorian era saw the beginnings of the national centralization of university planning that has been a distinctively British feature of the organization of higher education in the twentieth century. Victorian reform efforts underscored that universities were not ivory towers beholden only to themselves but were accountable to the nation and indeed humanity at large.

Anderson's twentieth-century chapters trace both the conservatism embodied in the legacy of the college tradition of Oxford and Cambridge and the forces for change inherent in a substantial expansion of the population experiencing higher education. They also consider the loss of university autonomy in the face of growing accountability to both state and market.

Anderson's study is strongest when he places the British situation in an international context as well as when he is sensitive to the existence of distinctive Welsh, Irish, and Scottish traditions in higher education. Anderson also extensively treats influential reflections on...