Volume 74 — A FEW MORE WORDS ON UNIVERSITY REFORM.

The long vacation is over, and the streets of Oxford have once more resumed their sombre gaiety. Dons in the dignity of long tassels, and freshmen in that bizarre conjunction of all varieties of snuff-coloured coats and short black gowns, which seems at present to embody the undergraduate sense of the beautiful, meet in mid High Street—each regarding the other with a mild astonishment, and a benevolent consciousness of superiority. Term has begun; and it is generally believed that those reverend seniors, whom by a pleasant euphemism we in Oxford call the “Heads of Houses,” are hard at work making arrangements, with the fear of Lord John before their eyes, to set those houses in order; or to see what sop they can afford to throw to that seven-headed Cerberus, which, under the name of “Her Majesty’s Commission,” is barking at their gates. There has been a long foreboding lull; but surely there are throes in the Alma Mater’s womb; “parturiunt Collegia”—we trust the rest of the quotation would ill apply; though no doubt many a young tutor has come up with a plan of University Reform ripe for production, the result of three months’ sea-side gestation during the “long.” “What are you going to do at Oxford?” has been a question oftener asked than answered during these summer holidays. Indeed, what answer there has been was too often to this effect, “Probably nothing.” Too probably; and yet, not only the Home Secretary, but the public, are expecting something. It is of little avail now to question the legality or the expediency of the Royal Commission; whether we like it or not, it is now a great fact—like the repeal of the Corn Laws, or the cholera. And, whether or not the authorities of the University may please to recognise it, the public, who have an interest in these great public institutions, must recognise it, and have a right to a voice in the question. If we are to have, as we must have, University Reform, let us have it of the right quality; and in order to this it must come from the right hands. It must not be the amateur performance of clever theorists, but the mature result of practical experience, aided by calm and dispassionate inquiry. This we have not had, and for this it is that we are waiting. Oxford must set herself to the task; her best and truest sons must wrest, as they may easily, the ill-grasped weapon from the enemy’s hand, and turn it to their own defence. No purism of consistency, no fear of touching the unclean thing, must deter them from the task. The skilful pilot does not refuse to take the helm because he alone foresaw the danger, and would not have put to sea. It may seem very grand and heroic for the Senate of Oxford to sit still in their seats of office, though the enemy is within their walls, scorning to recognise his presence; but in their case none will mistake the reverend conclave for divinities, and their fall will be at the best but a caricature of the Romans. We live in an age of compromise, as Home Secretaries and Chancellors of Exchequer can amply testify: it may not be dignified, but it is practically convenient; no man makes a martyr of himself nowadays for a theory; he “accepts the position;” he eats and gives thanks. And in this temper of our times, undignified as it is, may lie the salvation of Oxford. Already one result of it has been, that the Government before which the report of her Majesty’s Commissioners now lies, is of quite another composition than that under which it issued; and however Oxford may still be disposed to question the jurisdiction of the court, and the legality of their warrant, she has no longer any cause, on the whole, to challenge the jury. She has, at all events, such privileges as we consider sufficient justice to foreigners; half aliens, half fellow-citizens, may be no unfair panel. Heaven send her a good deliverance!

We have said before, that the Commissioners’ report can scarcely be satisfactory to any one but the authors; it is wonderful, and, as the charity-boy said, somewhat disappointing, to go through so much, and learn so little. Engrossed, as it would seem, almost exclusively by the one grand panacea for all University discords—the professoriate idea—they have either altogether overlooked, or very slightly touched upon, defects and abuses which every honest member of the University had long since groaned over in secret—of which many had complained aloud. It seems as if the clever gentlemen to whom her Majesty sent greeting, impressed with an awful sense of duties as arduous as they were unusual, had felt themselves excused from noticing facts that were obvious to meaner eyes, and that “knowledge, ability, and discretion” so egregious as theirs, could only fitly be employed in grand conceptions and comprehensive theories of regeneration. The words of their Commission, to ordinary ears, conveyed only powers and instructions to “inquire into and report upon the state, discipline, studies, and revenues of the University;” but they, by an inspiration peculiar, perhaps, to commissioners, as all the moral and intellectual virtues are, we now know, to professors, interpreted these words in a transcendental sense, or rather, perhaps, read them by a cipher supplied from Downing Street. Still these words stand, in their innocent simplicity, on the outside of the Blue-book; but on opening it we find what has been sarcastically, but quite as reasonably, called “suggestions for the constitution of a University.”^[19] That it would have no longer been the University upon which they were commissioned to report, was in their eyes, perhaps, of little consequence. It is possible that their Report, if less original, might have been more practical, had they but contented themselves with humbler aims. Nay, the very witnesses themselves seem to have been infected by the important presence in which they stood, and with few exceptions to have rather aimed at remodelling everything according to an ideal standard of their own, than to be willing to address themselves to the real defects and anomalies of the existing system. There are abuses on which the most careless undergraduate could have borne important testimony, and which every honest tutor will confess with pain, on which this Report evinces either the strangest insensibility, or the most perverse conservatism.

First and most prominent, as regards the studies of the place, stands the crying evil, which might almost have claimed a Commission to itself,—that the real work of the University is done by private tutors. How tenderly and delicately the Commissioners deal with this—which we are surely not singular in considering a gigantic anomaly—may be seen by those who have the patience to read page 89 of their production. Fondly placing in the foreground, in the ardent words of Mr Lowe—himself an able and successful private tutor—the “manifold advantages” of the system, they touch lightly on its defects, and faintly hint at partial remedies. Admitting that “the amount paid for private tuition by many individuals far exceeds that which is paid for college tuition”—(it would, we believe, have been nearer the truth to say that the sum paid annually for the former more than doubles the college charges for the latter)—they congratulate themselves upon the fact, that the practice is less general at Oxford that at Cambridge. But when they tell us, as a serious piece of information, the result of six months’ laborious inquiry, the product of seven printed papers of questions, and the combined evidence of “the great majority of Professors” and “persons of note” (p. 1), that “of late years many candidates for an ordinary degree have had recourse to assistance from private tutors,” we feel that the veriest freshman—supposing freshmen ever to read Blue-books—must laugh in the face of her Majesty’s Commissioners. “Many candidates for an ordinary degree.” Indeed! Why, two men out of three, in some colleges, who are going up even for “little-go,” “have recourse,” &c. &c.; or, in the less Johnsonian language of undergraduates, “take a coach.” If the Commissioners did not know this, they are pretty nearly the only Oxford men who do not know it. We may indeed plead in their excuse that the “persons of note,” who have been evidently their favourite witnesses, have themselves found this branch of instruction both lucrative and honourable; and besides the natural and amiable tendency in all minds to be somewhat partial judges of those employments in which we have spent the best, the busiest, and, therefore, not the least happy years of life, there is another consideration which, however unwillingly and unconsciously, will always have its weight with poor weak human nature. “Sirs, ye know that by this craft we have our wealth,” is an argument no less cogent now than formerly.

The evil, we have said, is a gigantic one. It is for this reason—because its roots are spread so wide and deeply, and because it involves so many interests, and shelters itself under such powerful patrons—that a Royal Commission, that λᾶας ἀναιδης’ trenchant and unsparing of minor delinquencies, recoils from it. Well may Mr Foulkes in his evidence, unquoted by Commissioners, call it “one of the curses of our days.”^[20] Even Mr Congreve,—himself an able private tutor, and on other points a witness after the Commissioners’ own heart—denounces it as “a great evil”^[21] both for pupil and tutor. But in this case, with all deference to names which seem to carry with them all the weight due to practical experience, the unacademical common sense of the public sees its way pretty clearly. Like railway mismanagement and hotel charges, the force that is to move this mountain must come from without. We must be our own Commissioners. And first we say,—though with some hesitation, in the presence of such tried logicians as the Commissioners and their witnesses,—that in almost all the arguments, pro and con, there has been an ignoratio elenchi. With all submission to such authorities, the question is not, whether it be or be not popular with undergraduates, as giving them some taste of the German heaven of “Lernfreiheit” and “Lehrfreiheit;”^[22] or convenient for M.A.’s, as “retaining within the University many able men whom it is not possible”^[23] otherwise to provide for, and “affording a field for public competition and display;” whether it promote that “intercourse and confidence” between the pupil and the tutor of his own choice, which he refuses to his legitimate college instructors; whether it be an “unhealthy stimulus,” or an opportunity of “direct personal contact and privacy invaluable to the student;”^[24] whether the moral influence acknowledged to be thus acquired by men whom the University does not even recognise as teachers be used for good or for evil; nor even whether it be, as one gentleman in his evidence has waggishly described it, and as the Commissioners have printed in apparent innocence of the joke,^[25] desirable as an “investment for a certain amount of loose private capital”^[26] (well known to abound in undergraduate pockets), and safe to bear a good interest when the pupil in his turn becomes tutor;—all these, important and interesting questions as they may be in themselves, are quite beside the real issue. Turn and twist it how you will, the fact resolves itself into the plain words of Mr Melville,—“the work of the University is done by an order not recognised by that system whose operations it so extremely influences.”^[27] “Unauthorised adventurers,”^[28] as they are not unfairly styled by one of themselves, usurp the teaching which the University professes to commit only to hands carefully and deliberately selected, and for whose fidelity she possesses the strongest guarantees. Granted that these men are, as most of them are undoubtedly, clever, hardworking, fully equal to their position—granting even what cannot be asserted in all cases, even by the warmest admirers of the system, that they are all in principle, in private character, and habits of life, what we look for in the guides and instructors of youth,—still is it reasonable, is it decent, that these magnificent institutions, endowed with ample revenues for the promotion of sound learning, and receiving the flower of the youth of England in solemn trust for the highest purposes of education, should leave them, after all, to pick up this education as they may, by the wayside? If Universities and Colleges cannot educate as Universities and Colleges, what can they do? Are they really, as their enemies would call them, mighty shams—hoary hypocrisies? It is because we believe that these questions admit at once of an indignant answer,—an answer which has already sprung to the lips of many an energetic teacher—that we here ask them. But it is because her Majesty’s Commissioners have apparently thought them neither worth asking nor answering, that they need to be asked again and again.

The absurdity of the present system of private tuition is indeed so patent, that only long-established custom, and the infection of example, mixed with some considerations of self-interest already alluded to, can have shut the eyes of so many, within the academic walls themselves, to an abuse which, so far as the public is concerned, has surely only to be fully exposed and understood to be condemned unanimously. A young man enters a college at Oxford, and thereby becomes a member of the University, devoting to this object four of the best years of his life, and incurring expenses which, even with prudence, are necessarily considerable. Often, as we all know, this step cannot be taken without much resolved self-denial on the part of parents, sometimes not without some postponing, in the case of an eldest or talented son, of the interests of younger brothers and sisters. But these family sacrifices are cheerfully made, in the feeling that they will purchase for the object of them the highest inheritance which a father can insure for a son—a first-rate education; an education which, unless his own abilities or industry fail him, shall enable him hereafter to move pari passu through life by the side of the eldest-born of any noble in the land, and stand in any presence unabashed by a sense of inferiority. These advantages, which University distinction is to purchase for him, are scarcely of less value, in the world of English society, than its more legitimate and solid fruits—the improvement of the mind, and the material for future usefulness. The path to all these brilliant possibilities lies through the portals of Oxford; and the youth who enters them, finds all the machinery which is to produce these great results apparently in its place, and in fair working order. It is idle for a Royal Commission to tell us how, in ruder times, ruder engines were contrived to do the same work; that there were days when tutors were not, and professors were all in all; that tedious exercises and disputations supplied, or failed to supply, the stimulus which examinations do now: we can all guess, and have a right to suppose, that the means and appliances for education have altered like everything else, and that the great national seminaries have not been behindhand with minor institutions in adapting themselves to the growth of human learning. How prælectors fell, and college tutors rose, is of little consequence, except to the educational antiquarian. Whether the University, or his college, or both, be responsible for his teaching, it is certain that every man who matriculates does so under an implied engagement that he is to be taught. Nor does there seem, to the uninitiated eye, to be any lack of teachers. Not to mention the long list of public functionaries who figure in the University Calendar—professors of Greek, of Hebrew, of Divinity, of Ancient and Modern History, of Geometry, of Moral, Natural, and Experimental Philosophy, of Astronomy, of Logic, Geology, Chemistry, and Political Economy—quite exclusive of any by-hours which he may devote to Music or to Medicine—even if he should be indisposed to avail himself of the services of the Lord Almoner’s reader in Arabic, or to study Anglo-Saxon or Sanscrit under their respective professors,—within the walls of his own college there is ample provision for his intellectual wants. Passing over the Bursar and the Dean—whom he will find somewhat dry nurses—the new alumnus must have been very unfortunate in his selection, if he does not find three tutors at the least ready to welcome him, besides a mathematical lecturer and divinity reader; he may be lucky enough, also, to obtain (according to the Calendar) the services of a “catechetical” or a “humanity lecturer,” whatever those may be. At any rate, here seems quite enough to satisfy any moderate appetite for learning. But he soon finds that this showy and apparently well-appointed staff is considered quite inadequate to its duties; nay, confesses itself to be so. If his Latin prose be not quite Ciceronian, or if his irregular Greek verbs be more than usually irregular, his best friends warn him earnestly of the necessity of “putting on a coach for Little-go;” if he be a promising scholar, and likely to win distinction for himself and his college, his tutor, with a cautious compliment, and the kindest intentions, suggests his “reading with Mr So-and-so.” No one seems to entertain the idea that his appointed pastors and masters can either save him from being “plucked,” or train him for his place in the class list. He finds college lectures are regarded as matters of routine, like Temple dinners: a course of the former, duly attended, makes a B.A., as a course of the latter, duly eaten, makes a barrister, each being a sort of causa formalis. Nay, in many cases the regular University or rather College course of instruction is regarded as interfering with that which, look at it as we will, is and must be the main object with three-fourths of its recipients—the obtaining a degree. Nothing is more common than for a young man, who is a candidate for honours, during the term or two previous to his examination, to apply to the authorities of his college “to be excused lectures;” and the request is commonly granted: that is, in plain words, because the time is approaching which is to test his acquirements under his alma mater’s teaching, that very teaching is to be withdrawn as useless—nay, worse than useless—for the end proposed. Can anything be more preposterous? What, in the name of common sense, was the use of that apparatus of tutors classical, mathematical, and catechetical, if not to prepare him for this said examination? In what is he to be “examined,” if not in the progress which, with their help and guidance, he is supposed to have made?

But let us examine matters more closely, and we may discover some of the causes of this remarkable state of things. Our friend, whom we have matriculated, is, we will assume, of modest acquirements, and proposes (under the old system) to take up for his degree, Herodotus, Virgil, portions of Cicero, and four plays of Euripides. But the lectures which he has to attend (for he has seldom much choice of his own in the matter) are one in Livy, one in Horace, and one in Plato’s Republic; in which latter college tutor No. 1 is supposed to be great, having edited some new readings. All very desirable subjects, no doubt, but not exactly what he requires at present. One hour of Alcestis were worth more to him than a cycle of Republics; the tense of a verb in μι is to him, at this conjuncture, a subject of more anxiety than the destinies of Rome or Carthage. Or, granted that he is fortunate enough to be in a Herodotus lecture; he gets through five chapters in an hour, thrice a-week, in a class of seventeen, including one freshman who cannot construe a line together decently, and stutters into the bargain, and another from the sixth form at Eton, who rattles it all off in a tone perfectly inaudible to any one except himself, and, it is supposed, the tutor. Why, at this rate, it will take him about two academical years more to get through the five books of the old historian in which he is to be examined! If he be a candidate for high honours, the case is just the same, or even worse; either there are no college lectures on the subject in which he needs special assistance, or they are attended by such an ill-assorted class, containing men of all grades of scholarship and no scholarship, that he either cuts them altogether or goes to them with disgust, and brings away from them little of more value than a leading-string abstracted with much patience and vigilance from his next neighbour’s gown, or a series of bad pencil-caricatures of the tutor. He has done more than waste an hour—he has begun, or encouraged, a habit of idleness that may haunt him during his life.

Now, only let us transfer ourselves in fancy, for one moment, from this great University to one of our public schools. There, a father pays some hundred and fifty pounds per annum for his son’s education—a large deduction from the income of many fathers, yet, perhaps, considering all things, not too much. We agree with the Commissioners in having no fancy for very cheap education. But supposing that at this public school the instruction given in the school itself by the recognised head master and assistants was considered, both by boys and masters, as quite insufficient, and indeed, of itself, worth very little at all, but that there were residing in the town or village in which the said school was located several very clever gentlemen of undoubted scholarship, having indeed, in their time, been amongst the head boys there, and carried off all the prizes; that to these gentlemen (paying extra for the privilege, of course) all boys who wished to learn could resort, and, in fact, did resort, and thereby got on surprisingly (not that the head master knew much about them, but believed them to be respectable), saving thereby considerable trouble both to head and assistant masters, who, in fact, could not undertake, though it might be possible, to educate at all without such assistance, holding that, nevertheless, their school was an excellent school, admitted to be such (else how did so many boys go there?), and turned out most unexceptionable scholars;—would not the fathers, and the public generally, think this rather a strange way of doing business, and that the education might go on quite as effectually in the hands of the clever gentlemen aforesaid, at a clear saving of a hundred or so of the original guineas, which seemed a good deal to pay to the head master for mere board and lodging, and the use of his name? Why is it that a state of things which would not be tolerated in any decent grammar-school is considered “unavoidable”—“beneficial”—nay, even “a valuable element”^[29] in the great schools of the nation?

We will not touch here upon a charge more than insinuated in some of the evidence volunteered before the Commission against college tutors, of incapacity or inattention; first, because we firmly believe that the charge is in the main untrue, and, at all events, less true now than it has ever been; and, secondly, because no amount of diligence, no quintessence of scholarship, could enable any man to make an hour’s lecture with a class of from twelve to twenty young men of various calibre that which a catechetical lecture should be. Mr Lowe is quite right in saying that “the plan”—if by this he means the present plan—“of teaching in large lectures is inexpressibly odious and disgusting to the forward student.”^[30] Until this evil be remedied, no tutor can do his work with profit or with satisfaction. But it must be borne in mind, that when private tuition is so universal, the public tutor has not fair play. It is hard to judge, from what college lectures are, of what they might be, if they were attended in a different spirit. Few men work heartily who do not hope to see some fruit of their travail: the criminal at the treadmill works with double disgust when he knows that he is grinding nothing. Once let the pupil think that his teacher cannot teach, and let the teacher know that he thinks so, and it is true—he cannot. On this point Mr Foulkes, himself a college tutor, speaks with equal sense and honesty. “Pupils,” says he, “make light of their college lectures in comparison with those of their private tutor; and college tutors, finding their lectures ill got up or remembered, are apt to grow apathetic, and relax in their diligence.” They were more than mortal if they did not. A dull audience, the Commissioners confess, may make even a professor dull;—to borrow an illustration from the Report (which has throughout a tendency to the poetical), a tutor with an inanimate class is “Pyrrhus” without “his Epirots”^[31]—an eagle with clipped wings.

It is undeniable that the existing tutorial staff, in every College, is insufficient for the demands upon its labours; the remedy for this insufficiency, in any minor educational establishment where reason and common sense hold a commission of inquiry, would be to increase it. But before we discuss this question, it may be well to examine whether all is done which might be done even as things stand at present. What is the actual amount of work performed by a college tutor? We may gather pretty accurately from the evidence volunteered by, we are bound to suppose, not the least energetic of those who are so employed. Thirteen lectures in the week, of one hour each, is a fair average of the actual instruction given by each tutor;^[32] how many hours besides may be spent in preparation for each lecture is, of course, a question impossible for any but themselves to answer. Now let us take the case of the head master of one of our public schools, who may surely be assumed, without offence, to be fully the college tutor’s equal in scholarship and in social position. His work ordinarily begins at seven in the morning, and continues, with perhaps two hours intermission, till twelve; to which, on “whole schooldays,” about three days in the week, must be added two hours in the afternoon; making, in all, some twenty-two hours in the week, allowing for some extra half-holidays. This allows no time for looking over and correcting written exercises—an important and laborious part of every schoolmaster’s work. And this, we must remember, continues for nearly nine months in the year, instead of six, involving a question which we may have to discuss hereafter. Now, why should there be this enormous disproportion? Why is the college tutor to work a little more, on an average, than two hours in the day, and the schoolmaster a little less than four? It may indeed be answered, that college tutors are not so well paid; but considering that the value of this office, when combined with a fellowship (which surely, in these days, may be considered as implying some educational duties), averages about £450 per annum, and that its cares and responsibilities are comparatively light, it may be questioned whether the position is not quite as desirable. It must be borne in mind, also, that many men perfectly qualified by academical honours for a college tutorship, are content to accept under-masterships, which, with harder and more distasteful work, and often less emolument, offer a position immeasurably inferior in the eyes of society, and certainly presenting a great contrast, to a man of cultivated mind, to the collegiate life of Oxford. Even if the advantages of such a life are not all that they might be—if the common-room has its petty jealousies, and party bitterness, and men thrown constantly together see too much of each other’s weaknesses—still, a University, as a place of residence, has its attractions for minds of almost every character, except those who, from apathy or cynicism, set themselves firmly against the doctrine that man is a social animal. Where, unless he have the entrée of the literary or political society of London itself, which few can have—where will a man to whom “the humanities,” in their widest sense, are something more than the cram of the schools—who believes in his heart that there are subjects which are as really and truly interesting to the human intellect as the growth of turnips or the price of stocks—find anything approaching to a companionship of thought and feeling, if not in collegiate society? To call such society “narrow-minded,” to say that it has its mannerisms and its pedantries, is true enough: they are defects incidental to all society. Never were yet three schoolboys, who walked arm-in-arm, that had not a creed and a shibboleth of their own; but surely the narrowest track that ever the soul of college fellow moved in was the liberty of the prairie, compared to the round of dull conventionalities which delight our “excellent neighbourhoods” in the country. At all events, there will always be an abundance of ripe scholars and sensible men, to whom the social position, and the congenial work, even with the present modest emoluments of a college tutor, will be an object quite sufficient, even if, in this active age, we add a little to their work. An extra early hour in the morning—say from eight to nine—would be a wonderful incentive to the energies of many a freshman, who is now hugging himself every morning in bed with the comfortable reflection, that in his new sphere he is emancipated from the odious “first lessons” of Harrow or Eton. Another hour in the evenings devoted to Horace or Aristophanes—say three times a-week—would hardly interfere with those pleasant dinner-parties, or social cup of coffee, to which the tutor naturally looks as the reward of his labours, and with which we are sure it would be rank ingratitude for any stranger to intermeddle, who has been welcomed, as all strangers are welcomed, to those classic hospitalities. It is only fair to say, that more than one college might be quoted, where, of late, tutors have been seen imposing upon themselves some such additional labours, and doing their utmost to make college tuition a reality. Much also might be done by a better division of the work assigned to each, and the more judicious classifying of their pupils—points which are at present in most colleges grievously neglected.

But the great remedy must be, the appointment of additional tutors in each college. This, of course, implies additional funds for their payment. Now, considering that the whole charge for “tuition” is £16 for the academical year, we say unhesitatingly that the public, with all its ardour for retrenchment of University expenses, would not grudge an increase in this particular item. Twenty pounds per annum would hardly be considered too much, by the most economising parent, for a really efficient course of classics and mathematics. At all events, it would be far cheaper, and far more satisfactory, to pay the larger sum for an equivalent, than to be charged as at present for what is confessedly insufficient for its purpose, and be saddled with indefinite extra demands under the item of “private tutor.” John Bull likes to know how the money goes, and to have his money’s worth. Half the sum annually spent in Oxford upon private tuition, would amply provide for public teaching of a much more useful character. It is possible that some of the surplus income of many colleges, which is now divided among the fellows as a sort of bonus, or laid by for the purchase of advowsons and other purposes, might be quite as legitimately, and much more usefully, employed in establishing an additional tutorship; or some of the fellowships themselves, which the Report proposes to melt down into professorships, might much more properly be held in future to involve the residing and taking part in the college work. It appears at least doubtful, from the statutes of more than one College, whether all fellowships did not there involve some tutorial duties; at any rate, such a regulation would be quite in accordance with the spirit of their founders.

One objection, indeed, there is urged by the opponents of the present tutorial system, which must be allowed to have some foundation. College tutors are inefficient, they say, not only because they are too few, but because they are often incompetent or indifferent. “The system,” says Mr Lowe, “has often been grossly abused by the appointment of incompetent persons.” So, we suppose, has pretty nearly every system at some period. This argument from the abuse, to less subtle rhetoricians than our Commissioners, might have seemed to border on a fallacy. Still, that incompetent persons have occasionally been appointed is true, and is not to be defended, even on the ground that incompetent appointments are sometimes made by other patrons than heads of Colleges—that they are not unknown upon the bench, at the bar—nay, we dare to say it, even in Royal Commissions themselves. But it is hardly assuming too much for our own times to say, that the days of such appointments, if not wholly past, are already numbered; that soon it will be a rare exception to point to a man who holds an important public trust by favour of nepotism or corruption. To assume that Oxford is sharing, and will share, this improved tone of public morality, is surely no more than we may claim for her in common fairness, or than the testimony of any unprejudiced observer could support by recent facts. And once let it be understood that a college is bonâ fide to educate its own men without extraneous help, and we shall have the best of all practical checks upon incompetence or idleness in the teachers. There needs in this case no statute to be repealed, no founder’s will to be set aside; the heads of houses have themselves acknowledged that “the tutors of colleges are not necessarily appointed from the fellows of colleges.” It is in the power of any principal to choose his tutors from the whole University; to summon to his aid any portion of that marketable scholarship which at present can only find employment in private teaching; it is nothing but custom and prejudice which at present restrict his choice within his own society.

Let this plan only be tried: let some college, now considered inferior, select and pay a couple of first-rate tutors, and let them form their classes according to their own judgment, selecting those departments for which each feels himself best qualified, and really working them. We will not ask of them twelve, ten, or even six hours a-day: much less will give an amount of genuine instruction sufficient for the limited numbers which any one of the smaller colleges can expect to supply as candidates for honours. A couple more tutors for the pass-men, in a small college of say forty undergraduates, with a mathematical lecturer, would complete an establishment, not much more formidable in point of numbers, but infinitely more efficient than any at present existing. They will be fully competent to do all which private tutors now do, if it is distinctly understood both by undergraduates and their friends that they, and they alone, are to do it. If it be desired to leave something to their own free choice and taste, let each attend such lectures (a minimum number per diem being fixed, of course) as he may think tend most to his improvement; and let each tutor be paid in proportion to the number of his pupils. From forty men, paying, as we have suggested, £20 per annum each, we have £800 to apply in this manner; to which the college may well add another £200, sinking, if it be necessary, as it seldom would be, a fellowship for the purpose. In the larger colleges, where more tutors are required, the funds will increase in proportion. This will allow, even in small colleges, at least £300 per annum to a first-rate tutor, in addition to the fellowship which we may naturally suppose he will hold on his own or some other foundation. And this, we repeat, will be enough to secure good men, and men whose energies are young and fresh; for we cannot agree with the Commissioners in thinking that the succession, by which a college tutor quits his work for the “expected living,” and thus makes way for his juniors, is in itself an evil; or that it is not far preferable to the system of married professors, who will stick to their chairs, if not to their work, long after the “solve senescentem” might be fairly applied.

And if, as we trust, the opening of new halls, affiliated or private, shall stir up the old foundations to exertion, in order to maintain their ground, that college which, from the inefficiency of its tutors, fails to educate, will at least soon be relieved from the necessity of pretending to educate at all. Even its foundation scholarships, with which we would never meddle, will fail to recruit its ranks, if the path to a fellowship be made, as it should, to lie only through a fair place in the Honour-list. With the addition which may thus easily be made to the staff of college tutors—by exacting some little additional labour from each—by abolishing at once the monopoly which now drives a man to enter at a bad college rather than not to enter at all, and allowing, at the same time, every Master of Arts, who has sufficient confidence in his own abilities (and in whom the University shall place sufficient confidence), to open a hall of his own—and by rigorously insisting not only upon attendance at lectures, but upon due preparation for them—college tuition may again become what we believe it has been, what an innocent public naturally suppose it to be, and what it undoubtedly ought to be; and the hydra-headed incubus which has gradually supplanted and overpowered it will thus, if not annihilated, become a very innocent monster indeed. When the regular college work makes its full demand on the undergraduate’s time and powers, private tuition will only be resorted to by those who have more money than brains; and the private tutor will gradually come to be considered, by all well-regulated minds, much in the same light as a “crib” to Thucydides, or a key to Colenso’s algebra. Even now, his services are absurdly magnified, and much of the supposed benefit derived from them is wholly imaginary. Men who, years ago, rose to the highest University honours without such artificial aid, may fairly challenge, in the extent and accuracy of their scholarship, any name in later class-lists; nay, it is no unheard-of or unfounded complaint that, in spite of the formidable apparatus criticus, and various modern patents for learning-made-easy—in spite of the “invaluable” facilities afforded the student by these private tutors—(it might be unfair to say because of these things)—the scholarship of Oxford has declined. Nay, the cram, “purchased and handed down from tutor to tutor,” is not actually so valuable, even in the schools, as either buyer or seller would fain persuade themselves. The man who lost his “First,” because he had no private tutor^[33]—whom Mr Rawlinson so pathetically holds out as a sort of George Barnwell to undergraduates—would have made a very good addition to Mr Douglas Jerrold’s “men of character,” as a pendant to “the man who couldn’t help it;” but the latter character is more common in Oxford. For one man who fails in the attainment of expected honours, from ignorance of some technical formulas, or recondite information, supposed to be the exclusive property and stock in trade of practised private tutors, twenty break down from inaccurate scholarship, or imperfect knowledge of the actual text-books of the examination. It is quite true that the examiner, who has unfortunately himself been a private tutor, is very apt, in the vivâ voce examination, to lead a candidate into these by-ways of learning, where he himself feels so much at home, when, if the candidate be also one of the initiated, a very pleasant dialogue takes place, to the great delectation of the audience, but probably with very little effect upon his place in the class-list. For it must be remembered that, even should the candidate succeed in flattering the known predilections of a single examiner into a false estimate of his abilities, there are three others sitting by who regard all this display with perfect indifference. The atrocious blunders made by showy men would pass the belief of any but an examiner. A few specious answers on a “science paper” will not cover the multitude of sins. We have heard from the lips of one of the ablest examiners in Oxford—whose name would have some weight even with the Commissioners—that more men lost their expected class from a want of knowledge of their books than from any other cause whatever. But one of the great evils of the system which now exists is, that it is so infectious; it is hard for a young man not to believe that the assistance which he sees others so eager to obtain is necessary, or at least very desirable, for himself; if A, B, and C read with private tutors, D considers that he starts with a disadvantage unless he does so too. And when the college tutor sees that nearly all his men prefer to seek other aid, he, very naturally, if he be an indolent man—not without some vexation, if his heart be in his work—feels his own responsibility in a great measure taken from him.

And this so-called liberty in the choice of an instructor, thus opened to the youth of Oxford, how often is it wisely exercised? What a mere caprice of fashion it is often which makes men rush in crowds to this or that popular tutor, as if he alone were in possession of some specific for the schools! whilst he again has soon to give place to some newer favourite—

“Arbitrio popularis auræ.”

Can one blame the teacher, if with such a precarious tenure he strives hard, for the time being, to make the most of his brains? Is it wonderful if he is willing to take pupils whilst they are to be had, even at the rate of twelve hours a-day?^[34] It has been done—with what effect upon the tutor, with what benefit to the pupil, let the reader judge for himself. So again, in the case of a pass-tutor (whose course of preparation is only for Responsins, or for the ordinary degree), his reputation is sometimes made or unmade by the result of a single examination—some half-dozen men plucked whom he had considered almost safe—a few desperate cases “shaved through,” who had failed under other trainers; this, or less than this, in the chapter of accidents, is quite sufficient to overwhelm a man with applications for the next examination, or leave him gradually almost without a pupil.

In short, this forcing system, which aims at pumping into the pupil’s brains the condensed results of another’s labours, owes its chief popularity to the notion that it saves the pupil work. Whether even a less amount of actual knowledge, if the result of personal labour and research, would not be far more valuable, is a question which the undergraduate, anxious only for his examination, cannot be supposed to ask. If the true object of a University education be “to train the powers of the mind,” every artificial aid which tends to weaken self-reliance, and discourage self-exertion, is a step towards defeating it. It is quite true that the results of originality of thought, as displayed in the examination papers of even the best candidates for honours, may not be very valuable in themselves; but the habit of thinking for one’s-self, and the exercise of mental power in mastering difficulties, are amongst the most precious fruits of a student life. And if ever one of the most valuable suggestions contained in the Report be carried out, as we trust it will, and candidates for classical honours be tested more and more, as may easily be done, in the translation and analysation of unseen passages, it will do good service in proving the hollowness of a system which aims at communicating to the student knowledge ready made, instead of strengthening him to attain it.

We have said little of that strange hallucination which has led the Commissioners to see in the extension of the professorate alone the remedy for all the educational mistakes of Oxford. It has been so effectually exposed by other writers, and has been so little popular with any but its authors, that it may be considered as pretty well disposed of. It is very satisfactory to find the “Tutor’s Association,” in their Report (No. II. p. 42), in a few cool words giving us the deliberate opinion of so large and important a body, that “it is in no way desirable that the instruction of professors should ever become the main instruction of the place.” That some addition may with great advantage be made to the present number of professors—still more, that existing professorships should be made efficient—no one will deny. We could be content to take the last reform first as an instalment. We should like to have one or two of the existing types of the class put into working order, that we might know how to value the effect of a larger importation; for the professor, as he is, is not unknown in Oxford, though not apt to exhibit much for the public delectation. But we have the thing, of various species—Regius, Margaret, and others—and have not as yet been much the better for them. We are told that with new professors we shall have a greater command of talent than can be expected in the case of college tutors. “I have always found,” said Arnold of Rugby, “that the great difference between one boy and another lay not so much in talent as in energy.” No man was a better judge; few men in themselves had more of both; and we are sure he would have applied unhesitatingly to the teacher what he had said of the taught. We need, in those who are to regenerate Oxford, talent, it is true—we need yet more energy. There is enough Greek and History and Philosophy already dormant in University Chairs, “celata virtus,” to satisfy the most voracious undergraduate that ever hungered and thirsted after knowledge. It may be a great comfort to him to know that his teachers, or those who should be his teachers, know so much, but with this comfort he must rest content. And even with the immense “run” of public talent which our modern tyro is to have opened to him, let him not be too sanguine. In the multitude of his new councillors there shall surely be wisdom, but not surely for him. He shall have teachers in plenty, but they shall only teach as shall seem to them good. The Commissioners have made the profound discovery that no statutes “can compel a man to lecture well;” and one of their chosen witnesses even doubts whether they should be compelled to lecture at all.^[35] Because the plan of teaching in large classes does not work well in colleges, the student shall be transferred to larger classes, under other names, formed out of the whole University. Because existing professors are a failure—those who have done their duty having been “brilliant exceptions,” “not even encouraged by success”^[36]—therefore he shall have more. Because college tutors do not always lecture well, he shall have a new set of teachers, who shall lecture, if it so pleases them, not at all. By some magnetic process, the learning of the professor shall be instilled into the pupil without having recourse to the ordinary mediums of communication. We have not patience to pursue all these absurdities to their conclusion.

Yet we must not wonder that the Commissioners’ scheme has on this point found able advocates. A measure of reform which is to create at once some fifty snug and honourable appointments, of from £800 per annum downwards, can hardly fail to be popular amongst unemployed and ambitious M.A.’s. More than one name might be pointed out amongst the eager witnesses for the prosecution, who are already in fancy seating themselves in the professors’ chairs. If they have not been slow to impute to existing teachers low aims and unworthy motives, they must not wince if they are cross-examined closely as to the feelings which might possibly influence themselves. It would not be difficult to select from those names probable candidates for the visionary chairs of “Jurisprudence,” “Philosophy,” or “Mental Philosophy.” “Professor, sir? Here you are, sir!” we fancy we hear chorused by a score of eager voices. They are conscious, many of them honestly conscious, of talents which have not yet found scope enough for exercise, and long naturally for recognised position and rank. The pay, as Mr Vaughan slily says, “is a slighter but not unfelt consideration.”^[37]

We must protest, at all events, against this ex parte evidence. It is too late now to discuss the wisdom of that policy which closed so many lips, which might have been fitting oracles of Oxford, before a court whose jurisdiction they denied. But we now claim to hear those men of grave and mature experience, whose names are not upon the Commissioners’ list of witnesses; there are some among them to whom all must listen reverently, although all may not adopt their views. The University has called for their opinions; let them now speak, or else hereafter for ever hold their peace.

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