forbidden by statute to play marbles on the steps of the Bodleian, and
to roll hoop in the High; but if a mediaeval master of arts were to
"come up" to-day, he would be amused, not that so many rules framed
for his boyish pupils of old should be applied to grown men, but that
the men so obviously require a check to juvenile exuberance. Yet this
much has been gained, that the outgrown restrictions of college life
have kept Oxford wholesomely young. The survivals of the monastic
system meanwhile have kept it wholesomely democratic.
After the colleges reached their full development, the extinction of
the mediaeval university as an institution for teaching was largely a
matter of form. The quietus was given in 1569. The Earl of Leicester,
then chancellor, ordered that the government should be in the hands
of the chancellor, doctors, proctors, and the heads of the colleges
and halls. In 1636 (the year of the founding of the first American
college) the statutes of the university were revised and codified by
Archbishop Laud; the sole authority was placed in the hands of an
oligarchy composed of the leading dons of the colleges. The government
was limited to the vice-chancellor, the proctors, and the heads of
houses, and the vice-chancellor and the proctors were elected in
sequence by each of the colleges from its own members. The teaching of
the university was now legally as well as actually in the hands of the
college tutors, and the examination was in the hands of a board chosen
by the colleges. University lectures were still delivered in the
schools by the regent masters, but they had ceased to play any
important part in Oxford education.
IV
THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE MEDIAEVAL HALL
Like the colleges, the halls meanwhile tended gradually towards an
organized community life. The starting-point was a regulation that the
principal should give the university security for the rent of the
house. The logical result of this was that the principal became the
representative of the university, and the hall one of its recognized
institutions. The advantage of living in separate communities meantime
had become so clearly evident that by the middle of the fifteenth
century chamberdekyns were abolished. All students not living in a
college were required to live in a hall. It was thus that the halls
lost some of their democratic independence. At this period in their
development they may be roughly compared to such modern American halls
as Claverly at Harvard, where the residents govern their own affairs
in the main, admitting newcomers only by vote, but are all alike
subject to the authority of a resident university proctor. The analogy
is by no means close, for the principal of the mediaeval hall was not
so much a resident policeman as the actual head of the community.
As the colleges developed tutorial instruction, the halls followed
suit; the local administrator became responsible not only for the
social regime, but for the tuition of the undergraduates. The halls
thus differed from the college mainly in that they had no corporate
existence such as is necessary to an endowed institution. The mediaeval
hall was now in its golden age; it was a well-conceived instrument for
all the purposes of residence and of education. It is especially to be
noted that the regime of the community was still in the main
democratic. Though the head was appointed by the university, he had to
be accepted by vote of the undergraduates, a provision that was still
observed, at least in one instance, until the close of the nineteenth
century.
The discipline of the halls of the fifteenth century, severe though it
was by comparison with that of the earliest halls, was far less severe
than the discipline in the colleges. It was quite as much as the
university could accomplish, according to Rashdall, "to prevent
students expelled from one hall being welcomed at another, to prevent
the masters themselves condoning or sharing the worst excesses of
their pupils, to compel fairly regular attendance at lectures and
other university or college exercises, to require all students to
return home by curfew at 8 or 9 P.M., to get the outer doors of the
pedagogy locked till morning, and to insist on the presence of a
regent throughout the night." When the early habits of the community
generally are remembered, it will be evident that these regulations
still allowed a vast deal of liberty, or rather of license. Boys of
fifteen or sixteen living in the very centre of large and densely
populated towns were in general perfectly free to roam about the
streets up to the hour at which all respectable citizens were
accustomed, if not actually compelled by town statutes, to retire to
bed.
The halls were reduced in number by the wars of the Roses and by a
period of intellectual stagnation that followed, but they still
numbered seventy-one, as against eighteen colleges (including those
maintained by monasteries, which disappeared with the Reformation);
and the number of their students is estimated at seven hundred, as
against three hundred in the colleges. In the light of subsequent
development it seems probable that it would have been far better for
the university if the halls had remained the characteristic
subdivision. Their fate was decided not by any inherent superiority
on the part of the colleges, but by the force of corporate wealth.
Even in the fifteenth century, the halls were tending to pass into the
possession of the colleges, and later events made the tendency a fact.
"As stars lose their light when the sun ariseth," says an ancient
Cambridge worthy, "so all these hostels decayed by degrees when
endowed colleges began to appear." The Reformation, and a recurrent
pestilence, "the sweating sickness," a kind of inflammatory rheumatism
due apparently to the unwholesome situation of the university,
resulted in a sharp falling off in the number of students. The
colleges lived on, however thinned their ranks, by virtue of the
endowments; but the halls disappeared with the students who had
frequented them. In 1526 it was recorded that sixteen had lately been
abandoned. When the numbers of the university swelled again under
Elizabeth, the increase found place partly in the few halls that were
left, but mainly in the colleges. In 1602 there were only eight halls,
and these were all mere dependencies of separate colleges. "_Singulae
singulis a colegiis pendent_," as a contemporary expresses it. Only
one of these, St. Edmund Hall, now retains even a show of the old
democratic independence, and this has lately been brought into closer
subjection to Queen's College. Socially as well as educationally, the
mediaeval university faded before the organization and endowment of the
colleges. The life of Oxford was concentrated in a dozen or more
separate institutions, and so thoroughly concentrated that there was
little association, intellectual or social, between any two of them.
V
THE ORIGIN OF THE MODERN UNDERGRADUATE
If the tutors of New College were epoch-making, the amplitude and
splendor of its social life were no less so. Its original buildings
are in such perfect preservation that it is hard to believe that they
are almost the oldest in Oxford, and that the New College quadrangle
is the father of all quads. The establishment of the "head" was of
similar dignity. The master of Balliol received forty shillings
yearly; the warden of New College, forty pounds. In the statutes of an
old Cambridge college we find it required that since it would be
"indecent" for the master to go afoot, and "scandalous" to the college
for him to "conducere hackeneye," he might be allowed one horse. The
warden of New College had a coach and six. As century followed century
the value of the endowments increased, and the scale of living was
proportionately raised. The colleges in general became the home of
comfort, and sometimes of a very positive luxury.
In the colleges of the Middle Ages the students were the _socii_, and
were maintained by the endowment. These are the dons and
foundationers, or scholarship men, of to-day. But the comfort and
order of the life in the colleges were very attractive, and the sons
of the rich were early welcomed as "gentlemen commoners," precursors
of the modern "commoners." The statutes of Magdalen make the first
clear provision for receiving and teaching such "non-foundation"
students. They permit the admission of twenty _filii nobilium_ as
_commensales_, or commoners, in the vernacular. At first these were
few and unimportant; in the centuries during which the numbers of the
university were at an ebb, they could easily be accommodated within
the depleted colleges. When the university increased under Elizabeth,
the idea of living in halls in the mediaeval fashion, as we have seen,
was obsolescent, so that the result of the increase was to enlarge the
colleges. Thus, largely as a matter of chance, the commoners of
to-day, the characteristic and by far the larger part of the
undergraduate body, live under a regime invented for the endowed
scholars of the Middle Ages, and the democratic license of the
mediaeval undergraduate at large has given way to a democratic rule of
commoners in colleges. Though the commoner is no longer called a
gentleman commoner, he is more than likely to come from a family of
position and means, for the comfort of life in the colleges is
expensive. All this has transformed Oxford from a mediaeval guild of
masters and apprenticed students, a free mart of available knowledge,
into a closely organized anteroom to social and professional life.
VI
THE INSIGNIFICANCE OF THE MODERN UNIVERSITY
Though the university as a teaching body pined before the rising
colleges, and for centuries lay in a swoon, it was not dead. It was
kept alive by certain endowments for lecturers. But so thoroughly did
the college tutors supply all undergraduate needs that, unless walls
indeed have ears, the lectures were never heard. The professors
gradually abandoned the university schools and gave the unattended
lectures in their own houses. Such lectures were known as "study
lectures." Even these gave way to silence. An odd situation was caused
by the fact that there were also salaries paid to university proctors,
a part of whose duty it was to see that the professorial lectures were
properly given. When a proctor appeared, the learned professor would
snatch up his manuscript and read until his auditor got tired and
left. This was one case in which a thief was not the person to catch a
thief; such energy on the part of the proctor was unusual, and was
regarded as in extremely bad form. The abuse proceeded so far that in
some cases, when hearers appeared at the appointed hour, the
professors refused point blank to read their lectures. The climax of
the farce was that at graduation students were fined for having cut
these lectures that had never been given. When Samuel Johnson was
fined for neglecting a college lecture to go "sliding on Christ Church
Meadow," he exclaimed, "Sir, you have fined me twopence for missing a
lecture that was not worth a penny!" His untimely departure from
Oxford has lamentably left us to conjecture what he would have said
upon paying the university fines at graduation for cutting lectures
that had never been given.
Even the university examinations became farcical. Under the Laudian
statutes the very examiners became corrupt. Instead of a feast of
reason and a flow of soul, the wary student provided his examiner with
good meat and wine; and the two, with what company they bade in, got
gloriously drunk together. B. A. meant Bacchanal of Arts. Even when
the forms of examination were held to, the farce was only less
obvious. A writer in _Terrae Filius_, March 24, 1721, tells us that the
examination consisted in "a formal repetition of a set of syllogisms
upon some ridiculous question in logick, which the candidates get by
rote, or perhaps read out of their caps, which lie before them." These
commodious sets of syllogisms were called strings, and descended from
undergraduate to undergraduate in a regular succession like themes and
mechanical drawings in an American club or fraternity. "I have in my
custody a book of strings upon most or all of the questions discussed
in a certain college noted for its ratiocinative faculty; on the first
leaf of which are these words: _Ex dono Richardi P----e primae classi
benefactoris munificentissimi_." Lord Eldon took his degree at
University College by an examination that consisted of two questions:
"What is the meaning of Golgotha?" and "Who founded University
College?" It was, no doubt, the bearers of degrees thus achieved who
owned those marvelous libraries of the eighteenth century, which
consisted of pasteboard boxes exquisitely backed in tooled calf, and
labeled with the names of the standard Greek and Latin classics.
The decline of the university teaching and examination did not result
in a corresponding rise in the colleges. Each of the dozen and more
institutions was supposed, as I have said, to keep a separate faculty
in arts, and often in law and theology as well. If there had been any
incentive to ambition, the colleges might have vied with one another
in their impossible task, or at least have gone far enough to bring
about a reform. But they were rich and did not care. The wealth of
collegiate endowments, that had begun by ruining the university, ended
by ruining the colleges. There were still earnest teachers and
students at Oxford, but they were not the rule. The chief energies of
the tutors were spent in increasing their salaries by a careful
management of the estates, and in evading their pupils. In "the
splendid foppery of a well-turned period" Gibbon thus pictures the
dons of Magdalen in 1752: "Their deep and dull potations excused the
brisk intemperance of youth." Only one result was possible. In 1821 T.
J. Hogg, Shelley's college-mate at University College, referred to
Oxford as a seat of learning. "Why do you call it so?" Shelley cried
indignantly. "Because," Hogg replied, "it is a place in which learning
sits very comfortably, well thrown back as in an easy chair, and
sleeps so soundly that neither you nor I nor anybody else can wake
her." Permanent endowments had transferred the seat of learning from a
nobly indigent university to the colleges, and the deep and dull
potations of endowed tutors had put it asleep on the common-room
chairs.
The nineteenth century did not altogether arouse it. "The studies of
the university," according to the testimony of the Oxford Commission
of 1850, "were first raised from their abject state by a statute
passed in 1800." Heretofore all students had pursued the same studies,
and there was no distinction to be gained at graduation except the
mere fact of becoming a Bachelor of Arts. The statute of 1800 provided
that such students as chose might distinguish themselves from the rest
by taking honors; and for both passman and honor man it provided a
dignified and quite undebauchable university examining board. At first
the subjects studied were, roughly speaking, the same for passman and
honor man; the difference was made by raising the standard of the
honor examination. The examination followed the mediaeval custom in
being mainly oral; and though it soon came to be written, it still
preserves the tradition of the mediaeval disputation by including a
_viva voce_ which is open to the attendance of the public. Throughout
the nineteenth century the development consisted mainly in adding a
few minor schools.
The good and bad features of the English college system as a whole
should not be hard to distinguish. In all social aspects the colleges
are as nearly perfect as human institutions are capable of becoming,
and they are the foundation of an unequaled athletic life.
Educationally, their qualities are mixed. For the purpose of common or
garden English gentlemen, nothing could be better than a happy
combination of tutorial instruction and university examining. For the
purposes of scholarly instruction in general, and of instruction in
the modern sciences and mechanic arts in particular, few things could
be worse than the system as at present construed.
To exult over the superiority of American institutions in so many of
the things that make up a modern university would not be a very
profitable proceeding. Let us neglect the imperfections of Oxford. It
is of much greater profit to consider the extraordinary social
advantages that arise from the division of the university into
colleges, and the educational advantages of the honor schools. These
are points with regard to which we are as poor as Oxford is poor in
the scope of university instruction.
The point will perhaps be clearer for a brief review of the manner in
which our college system grew out of the English. The development is
the reverse of what we have just been considering. In England, the
colleges overshadowed the university and sapped its life. With us, the
university has overshadowed the college and is bidding fair to
annihilate it.
VII
THE COLLEGE IN AMERICA
In 1636 the Commonwealth of Massachusetts passed an act to establish a
"schoole or colledge," and set apart a tract of land in "New Towne" as
its seat, which they called Cambridge. Our Puritan forefathers had
carried from the English university the conviction that "sound
learning" is the "root of true religion," and were resolved, in their
own vigorous phrase, that it should not be "buried in the graves of
the fathers." In 1638 a master of arts of Emmanuel College, Cambridge,
John Harvard, bequeathed to the new institution his library and half
his fortune, some L780. A timber building was erected and a
corporation formed which bore the donor's name. From the regulations
in force in 1655 it is evident that in its manner of life, its laws of
government, the studies taught, and the manner of granting the degree,
Harvard College was a close counterpart of the English college of the
early seventeenth century, its very phraseology including such terms
as "disputing," "proceeding," "determining." It was the first
institution of higher education in British America. Until the founding
of the first state university, the University of Virginia, in 1819,
the constitution afforded the principal model for subsequent
foundations, and to-day colleges of the Harvard type are perhaps the
strongest factor in American education. Harvard thus transplanted to
American soil the full measure of the traditions of the Middle Ages,
many of which exist in a modified form to-day.
In "Harvard College by an Oxonian" Dr. George Birkbeck Hill suggests
that John Harvard expected others to found similar institutions which
collectively were to reproduce the University of Cambridge in New
England. The supposition is by no means impossible, and the manuscript
records in the Harvard Library would perhaps reward research. But
whatever the intention, it is abundantly clear that in the full
English sense of the word no second college was established at
Cambridge. The first constitution was in all essentials the same as
that of to-day. Hutchinson's "History of Massachusetts" records
(1676): "There are but four fellowships, the two seniors have each
30_l._ per ann. and the two juniors 15_l._, but no diet is allowed:
There are tutors to all such as are admitted students.... The
government of these colledges is in the governor and magistrates of
Massachusetts and the president of the colledge, together with the
teaching elders of the six adjacent towns." The fellows are the
forbears of the modern corporation, the tutors of the faculty; and
though the institution has been separated from the state, the
"teaching elders" are the earliest overseers. Furthermore, the
endowment of Harvard has remained undivided; and generations elapsed
before the present very un-English division was made by which the
teaching force is separated into independent faculties for arts and
the various professions. From the first the "college" was a
"university" in that it granted degrees; and less than twenty years
after its founding the two terms are used as synonymous; an appendix
to what is called the charter of Harvard "College" calls the
institution a "University." This confusion of terms still persists,
and is found at most other American institutions, the constitutions of
which were largely modeled after that of Harvard. For generations the
endowments and the teaching force of the American college and
university were identical. Thus as regards its constitution the
typical American university is a single English college writ large.
Almost from the outset, however, there were, in one sense of the word,
several colleges. In "An Inventory of the whole Estate of Harvd
Colledge taken by the President & Fellows as they find the same to be
Decemb. 10, 1654," the first two items are as follows:--
"Imprs. The building called the old colledge, conteyning a Hall,
Kitchen, Buttery, Cellar, Turrett & 5 Studeys & therin 7 chambers for
students in them. A Pantry & small corne Chamber. A library & Books
therin, vallued at 400lb.
"It. Another house called Goffes colledge, & was purchased of Edw:
Goffe. conteyning five chambers. 18 studyes. a kitchen cellar & 3
garretts."[3]
It is to be noted that "Old Colledge," which was Harvard's building,
had a kitchen, buttery, and cellar, a pantry and a small corn chamber,
and was thus primitively modeled after an English hall or college.
Presumably the inmates, like their cousins across the water, dined in
the hall. As for "Goffe's colledge," granting that the punctuation of
the inventory is intentional, it had a kitchen cellar, which would
seem to imply a kitchen; and it is not impossible that there should be
a comma after "kitchen." No hall is mentioned, and it is hardly likely
that there could have been so imposing a room in what was built for a
private house; but it would have been possible and natural to serve
meals in the largest of the five "chambers." A third building
Hutchinson's history describes as "a small brick building called the
Indian Colledge, where some few Indians did study, but now it is a
printing house," the first printing house in British America. The two
earliest buildings at Harvard would thus be the abodes of separate
communities, and though I can find no intimation as to the Indian
College, it can scarcely be doubted that since it was established for
the separate use of the redskins, it contained a separate
living-plant. A later record shows that there was a separate kitchen
in the first Stoughton Hall.