Abstract
OXFORD.—In connection with the extracts printed last week (p. 165) from the reports of the delegates of the University Museum, referring to the want of accommodation and equipment for research in certain branches of science, it may be worth while directing attention to the leading article in Literature of June 11, regretting that little original work is being done in the domain of letters. The opinion is expressed that the Royal Commission which sat on the Universities rather more than twenty years ago, “made Oxford and Cambridge much more effective places for teaching and examining than they had been before, while at the same time it helped to ruin them as places for study.” The leader concludes with the words:— “Englishmen are by nature somewhat too much inclined to look for an immediate advantage; to bring all things to a common-sense, even a commercial, test; to distrust theory; to despise action for an abstract end. One of the functions of a University is to keep alive a higher faith by giving an example of thorough and devoted work done without a commercial object. Our Universities, as they are at present managed, do no such thing.”
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University and Educational Intelligence. Nature 58, 186–187 (1898). https://doi.org/10.1038/058186a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/058186a0