I had an excuse for omitting two influential dons, F. R. Leavis and Michael Oakeshott, since I had written at length on each in Our Age. But why omit towering scientists like Florey and Todd? Or one of Oxford’s most revered scholars in classics, John Beazley, who brought order into the study of Attic vases? Or socialist thinkers like G. D. H. Cole or ‘Sage’ Bernal? Or miraculous eccentrics such as the professor of Modern Greek at Oxford, R. M. Dawkins, remembered for his cackle of laughter and keen interest in flagellomania?
I would have liked to have included more scientists. When I returned to Cambridge after the war one of the scientists who became my special friend was Victor Rothschild. He did research on spermatozoa in the zoology lab, but although a fellow of Trinity he did not teach and left the university to become chief scientific adviser to Royal Dutch Shell. I had made a rule for myself not to write about the living and I therefore did not choose Alan Hodgkin, Nobel Prizeman and Master of Trinity, who died only as this book was ready to go to press. The others were in the molecular biology unit – Max Perutz, Sidney Brenner and Francis Crick, the discoverer, with Jim Watson, of the structure of DNA, all still happily alive. I failed to persuade Francis to allow his name to go forward for a fellowship at King’s. He would not join any society with a chapel: to do so would have been to connive at error; and King’s undeniably had a chapel.
Universities have endured hard times since government decided to move to mass higher education, none more so than the elite institutions I knew so well in London – University College, Imperial College and the London School of Economics – and the leading civic universities. It is these places, with Oxford and Cambridge, that are the guardians of intellectual life. Over thirty years ago I tried to put into words what such places exist to do. They cannot teach the qualities that people need in politics and business. Nor can they teach culture and wisdom, any more than theologians teach holiness, or philosophers goodness or sociologists a blueprint for the future. They exist to cultivate the intellect. Everything else is secondary. Equality of opportunity to come to the university is secondary. The matters that concern both dons and administrators are secondary. The need to mix classes, nationalities and races together is secondary. The agonies and gaieties of student life are secondary. So are the rules, customs, pay and promotion of the academic staff and their debates on changing the curricula or procuring facilities for research. Even the awakening of a sense of beauty or the life-giving shock of new experience, or the pursuit of goodness itself – all these are secondary to the cultivation, training and exercise of the intellect. Universities should hold up for admiration the intellectual life. The most precious gift they have to offer is to live and work among books or in laboratories and to enable the young to see those rare scholars who have put on one side the world of material success, both in and outside the university, in order to study with single-minded devotion some topic because that above all seems important to them. A university is dead if the dons cannot in some way communicate to the students the struggle – and the disappointments as well as the triumphs in that struggle – to produce out of the chaos of human experience some grain of order won by the intellect. That is the end to which all the arrangements of the university should be directed.
I still believe that this is the principle that should govern Oxford and Cambridge and our élite universities.
CHAPTER ONE The Dons Create an Intellectual Aristocracy
The word ‘don’ carries many meanings, quite a number of them ironical. Some use it loosely to mean anyone who holds a post at a university, but well into the twentieth century it meant something more precise. ‘Don’ did not immediately suggest a creative scholar or a professeur of a particular subject, still less a privatdozent. A don was not expected to be an intellectual nor yet a man with a passion for general ideas. No: essentially he was a teacher and a fellow of an Oxford or Cambridge college; a teacher who stood in a peculiar relation to his pupils in that they came to his rooms individually each week and were taught by him personally. And since these pupils were men of his own college, his first allegiance was not to the university but to his college – to the close-knit society whose members had elected him. To the other fellows he was bound by ties of special loyalty and affection – sometimes, of course, by the no less binding ties of enmity and loathing which led to feuds and vendettas within the society,
It was only in late Victorian days that election to fellowships and university posts at Oxford and Cambridge began to be made on merit; and even then, merit could be determined by numbers of tests which were by no means all strictly academic. Was he, it could be asked, a good college man, sociable, willing to share in due course in the administration of the college, a potential bursar, tutor or dean? Was he a man of character as well as intellect, for he was educating the next generation who were to be the clergymen, statesmen and gentlemen of England?
In the early years of the nineteenth century before the ancient universities were reformed everything depended on patronage and few were ashamed to admit it. ‘I don’t know what we’re coming to,’ said Canon Barnes of Christ Church in the 1830s. ‘I’ve given Studentships to my sons, and to my nephews, and to my nephew’s children, and there are no more of my family left. I shall have to give them by merit one of these days.’ An old fellow of Merton was urged to award a fellowship to the candidate who had done best in the examinations. ‘Sir, I came here to vote for my old friend’s son, and vote for him I shall, whatever the examiners may say.’ To appoint by merit had echoes of the French Revolution. Had not Napoleon declared that every soldier carried a marshal’s baton in his knapsack, and look what ruffians Junot, Augereau and Ney were. Wellington per contra defended the system of officers in the army purchasing their commissions since, as gentlemen of England, they could be depended upon to be loyal as well as brave. Patronage was the passport to getting on in life. The venerable Dr Routh, President of Magdalen, who died in 1854 in his hundredth year, was in no doubt: ‘Take my advice, sir,’ he said to an undergraduate destined for Parliament; ‘choose some powerful patron, sir, and stick to him – stick to him always, sir, that is the only way.’* Today it is not the only way. Men and women can rise on their own merits; but, if they are honest and reflect, how many will admit that someone – a friend of their family, a teacher skilled in writing testimonials or an employer or senior colleague who took a shine to them – gave them their chance?
In the ancient universities, in which the majority of fellows were clergymen, patronage affected professorships, canonries and country livings to which, if a fellow decided to marry, he could be appointed. In those days politics were more concerned with religion, and which prime minister was in office mattered because patronage was often in his gift. Readers of Trollope’s Barchester Towers will remember how the fall of the Conservative ministry dashed Archdeacon Grantly’s hopes of being made bishop and the preferment went to Dr Proudie. Tories could be expected to appoint High Churchmen, the Whigs to prefer liberals or what came to be called Broad Churchmen. But it was not as simple as that. How staunch a Protestant was a candidate? Was he stalwart against Catholic Emancipation? Routh was a High Churchman and the only head of a college to support John Henry Newman when Newman declared that Anglican beliefs were not inconsistent with Roman dogma, but he opposed Sir Robert Peel when Peel stood for the chancellorship of Oxford because Peel had finally brought himself to vote for Catholic Emancipation.*
What kind of don did this system of patronage throw up? Writing at the end of the nineteenth century William Tuckwell, a fellow of New College, thought they fell into four categories: cosmopolitan, ornamental, mere – and learned. The cosmopolitan don, intelligent but worldly, would be found in London as often as Oxford, seeing that the political