Empire of scholars

Universities, networks and the British academic world, 1850–1939

Tamson Pietsch

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780719099304
  9780719085024
• eBook ISBN:
  9781784991777
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Études supérieures

At the start of the twenty-first century we are acutely conscious that universities operate within an entangled world of international scholarly connection. Now available in paperback, Empire of scholars examines the networks that linked academics across the colonial world in the age of 'Victorian' globalization. Stretching across the globe, these networks helped map the boundaries of an expansive but exclusionary 'British academic world' that extended beyond the borders of the British Isles. Drawing on extensive archival research conducted in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, this book remaps the intellectual geographies of Britain and its empire. In doing so, it provides a new context for writing the history of ideas and offers a critical analysis of the connections that helped fashion the global world of universities today.

PART I

Foundations: 1802–80

CHAPTER ONE

Building institutions: localising ‘universal’ learning

To a visitor from Britain the original buildings of many of the universities established in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa appear reassuringly familiar. With ivied cloisters and neo-gothic edifices they seem to stand as tangible signs of the exportation of old-world traditions to the new. But it would be a mistake to see these early universities as little more than transported institutions. As F. H. Chase, a professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, declared in 1903, in the settler colonies ‘inherited tradition’ was ‘modified in the light of experience’ to create ‘many types of universities’, each ‘largely determined by its previous history and by its environment’.¹ Although the history of British settler universities is dominated by this tension between local conditions and imperial connections, in the period of their foundation it was the former that predominated.

Local foundations

The first universities founded in British North America were established by settlers from Britain and loyalists fleeing the American Revolution. They sought to perpetuate in colonial communities the privileges the Established Church enjoyed in England. As the 1802 statutes for King’s College in Windsor, Nova Scotia, stipulated, ‘[n]o member of the University shall frequent the Romish mass, or the meeting Houses of Presbyterians, Baptists, or Methodists, or the Conventicles or places of Worship of any other dissenters from the Church of England … or shall be present at any seditious or rebellious meetings.’² As colleges that provided a classical education to students who were required to affirm the 39 Articles, the ‘King’s Colleges’ these settlers established in Windsor (1789), New Brunswick (1800, Royal Charter 1828), and Toronto (1827, opened 1843) borrowed heavily from the model of unreformed Oxford – with its residential colleges, confessional criteria and classical curriculum.³ This was also the model initially proposed in Australia. In the mid-1820s Thomas Scott – secretary to the Bigge Commission of Inquiry into the conditions of settlement in the colony – suggested the establishment of a comprehensive scheme of education under the control of the Church of England, ranging from elementary schools through to universities.⁴

However, these attempts to extend to the colonies the monopoly over education that the Established Church enjoyed in England provoked strong opposition from the numerous Presbyterian, Roman Catholic and nonconformist groups that also comprised colonial communities. In Sydney the Scott plan fell into abeyance, while in British North America two other kinds of institution arose to claim university status.⁵ The founders of both Dalhousie in Nova Scotia (1818) and McGill in Montreal (1821) looked not to Oxford but to Edinburgh. Non-residential and non-sectarian, in Edinburgh teaching was delivered through lectures, and the curriculum included medicine and the sciences. Open ‘to all occupations and sects of religions’, both Dalhousie and McGill planned to offer courses in the natural and physical sciences as well as classics and theology.⁶ ‘If Dalhousie College [will] acquire usefulness and eminence,’ declared its President, Thomas McCulloch, ‘it will be not by an imitation of Oxford, but as an institution of science and practical intelligence.’⁷ Third, alongside these Scottish-inspired foundations, an array of denominational colleges also emerged that modelled themselves after the nonconformist theological training colleges in Britain and the United States.⁸ Founded in the 1830s and 1840s and funded by the donations of parishioners, these institutions aimed to train preachers and teachers by providing a classical and religious education in a residential setting. Yet in their early years all three kinds of university struggled to survive. Attracting tiny numbers of students, they lacked both money and materials. In the economic downturn of the early 1840s the denominational colleges only just managed to remain afloat, Dalhousie did not become fully functional until it was refounded in 1879, and McGill consisted only of the local medical school until it acquired a faculty of arts in 1843.

Things changed significantly in the improved economic conditions of the 1850s.⁹ But better times produced conflicting impulses. On the one hand they brought a social and economic dynamism which in turn attracted money, confidence and migrants, resulting in the extension of responsible government and in turn the franchise. But on the other hand they also provoked uncertainty among established colonial elites who were anxious to ensure that social order did not crumble in the face of new forms of economic and political power. The history of the foundation and organisational design of settler universities records both these influences. In the context of intense debate in Britain about the form universities should take, colonial governments increasingly involved themselves in the foundation and reconstitution of a new wave of institutions.

In 1849 the Legislative Assembly of Ontario passed a bill that refashioned the Anglican King’s College in Toronto into a secular, state-sponsored and faculty-based body called ‘the University of Toronto’. However, with the other local denominational colleges resisting the government’s plans for them to merge with the new institution, in 1853 the model of the University of London was proposed as a compromise.¹⁰ Founded in 1836 as way of reconciling the ‘Godless institution on Gower Street’ later known as University College London (1826) with the rival King’s College established by the Church of England (1828–29), the University of London was a secular body that awarded degrees solely on the basis of examination performance, to students taught in affiliated colleges. Following the example of London, in Toronto the provincial parliament turned the former King’s College into ‘University College’ and proposed that, together with the denominational colleges, it should prepare students to sit the exams of a degree-confirming institution called the ‘University of Toronto’. But the religious colleges were sceptical about this plan and only affiliated themselves slowly.¹¹ The complex politics of the colony meant that the original concept of a state-funded university that included professional schools was replaced by one that consisted of an examining institution and a government-run Arts college – albeit an Arts college in which history, geology, modern languages, natural history and engineering were also taught.¹²

Under the force of different local politics, in Sydney a separate compromise emerged. In 1849 a local politician and landowner, William Wentworth, had introduced a bill to the New South Wales Legislative Council proposing the foundation of a university along the lines of that in London. But in the course of its passage, the bill was modified to allow the University Senate to establish its own secular, non-sectarian, state-endowed liberal arts college that would be staffed by the university professors and compete with colleges run by the various denominations. However, when the first professor of classics, John Woolley, arrived in 1852, fresh from contemporary debates about reform taking place in Oxford, he discarded this notion and argued that the University of Sydney should be reconstituted as a teaching and examining institution.¹³ This was not a settlement that pleased the churches. Objecting to the diminution of their role, they campaigned hard until the university agreed on a compromise in the form of the University Colleges Act (1854). It gave land to each of the denominations to establish residential colleges, but prevented them from conducting any teaching. As Woolley himself explained to a parliamentary committee of inquiry in 1859, the result was a new sort of institution:

in this University we are trying an experiment which is a very difficult one … that is, to unite the general secular teaching of the University with independent denominational Colleges, which are independent in their own sphere. It is a very difficult scheme, which has never been tried before anywhere.¹⁴

In contrast, in South Africa and New Zealand the London examining model had greater success as a solution not only to religious diversity but also to diffuse colonial populations animated by fierce provincial loyalties. As in Canada, in New Zealand the first efforts to establish higher education had been sponsored by the churches. A university was central to the plans of those who settled in Wakefield’s Church of England Colony at Canterbury in the late 1840s, and equally important to the settlement scheme of the Scottish migrants who in the same decade founded communities in the South Island. However, when the Presbyterian Church in Otago endowed two chairs in the mid-1860s, the central colonial parliament responded by introducing its own University Endowment Act. This led the Province of Otago to pass an ordinance that formally founded a university, which in turn led the colonial parliament in 1870 to establish a rival ‘University of New Zealand’. But the British Secretary of State was unwilling to grant two Royal Charters to the small colony. The foundation in 1873 of a third institution – an Anglican College in Christchurch called Canterbury College – hastened compromise between them. In 1874 both Canterbury and Otago became affiliated as founding members of the federal ‘University of New Zealand’; a body that granted degrees in arts, law and medicine to students who had undergone a course of study at one of what would eventually be four constituent colleges.¹⁵

Similarly in South Africa, the model of London served as a boon to colonial nationalists wishing to centralise tertiary education. From 1858 students who had studied in a number of Cape Town’s teaching establishments were able to sit ‘higher’ examinations set locally by the ‘Board of Public Examiners in Literature and Science’. But in 1873, following the extension of responsible government, the newly elected Cape parliament converted this board into the ‘University of the Cape of Good Hope’. An examining body fashioned after the University of London, it was designed to grant degrees to students taught in teaching colleges spread across the country. However, although in the 1870s a number of schools secured the government grants issued to centres that educated such students, in this period only the South African College and Stellenbosch School conducted serious collegiate-level work. English-language degrees in arts (with broad-based courses modelled after London), law and medicine and certificates in land surveying were issued, but in the 1870s and 1880s student numbers remained small, and scholarships as well as the prestige of a European degree encouraged many students to travel to abroad for their studies.¹⁶ Like the other universities established or re-established in the British settler colonies in the middle part of the nineteenth century, the University of the Cape of Good Hope was forged by the vicissitudes of local politics.

Taking a variety of forms, these settler universities all sought to localise the universal culture taught in British universities. This education was liberal in the sense that it sought to develop a student’s moral and intellectual faculties through broad study, enabling him (and in the early period, colonial students were invariably male) to take up whichever occupation he might choose. But it was also liberal in that it presupposed another kind of liberty that was social and financial as well.¹⁷ Universities in Britain differed in the kinds of learning they thought best constituted this education: Oxford placed the emphasis on classics, Cambridge on pure mathematics, the Scottish universities on moral philosophy, and London on a cross-section of arts, languages and sciences. But in practice all made some accommodation with the sciences and with the world outside their walls: for example, Cambridge introduced a Natural Sciences Tripos in 1851, and all three institutions prepared graduates for careers in the Church or the public schools, in law or medicine, the Civil Service or public life. Yet regardless of their various accents, the liberal and humane education they each provided emphasised the cultivation of character and culture as preparation for a life of political and social responsibility. The early settler universities assumed these same aims, seeking to shape those who would lead colonial society with an education worthy of the metropole. Most retained a focus upon the classical curriculum and continued to have Latin and Greek as entrance requirements. Although some, such as Melbourne, also offered science subjects, these were usually built into a broad-based arts degree. As the University of Adelaide’s first chancellor said in 1877, the task of the settler universities was to direct ‘the studies and [form] the character of the governing classes’ and ‘help elevate the middle class to higher civilization, the result of a more intellectual education’.¹⁸

This kind of liberal education was relatively easy to transport to colonial locat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• General editor’s introduction
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Note on terminology
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I – Foundations: 1802–80
• Part II – Connections: 1880–1914
• Part III – Networks: 1900–39
• Part IV – Erosions: 1919–1960s
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index