Abstract
IN his address on Tuesday last week, at the London University, the Chancellor noticed in dignified and sensible words the proposed application of Owens College to the Government for a Charter of Incorporation as a university, either by itself, or as the centre of a family of northern colleges. Nothing could well have been more unfortunate or ill-judged than the furious onslaught of Mr. Lowe, the member for the University, in the Fortnightly Review. The complaint of the Manchester people is that the London system, however suitable in itself, hampers the educational activity and usefulness of institutions capable of an independent existence, and it was scarcely decent for the member for that university to step forward in her interests as a mere partisan of the status quo. In fact there is no antagonism. Manchester has never denied that it is a good thing that there should be a university in London to examine all comers. She has said that she thinks it a bad thing for institutions with a sufficient permanent teaching staff, a large enough number of students and a solid establishment in the district to which they belong, to have to shape their work according to the ideas of any central university that must suit all comers. Mr. Lowe is the one member of Parliament who should have held his tongue on the matter till he was forced to speak, because a hasty utterance on his part could not but seem to compromise his University. Lord Granville took pains to remove the injurious impression of an unworthy jealousy in London which Mr. Lowe's article could scarcely fail to create. He tells us that London feels “absolutely no objections of a merely jealous character,” and that London would have a “very friendly feeling to any university which, after due deliberation and with a sound regard to the real advantages of education, may hereafter be established.” In that wise and sensible attitude it is open to the University to consider either of the two schemes suggested for the northern university. The first of them, which is that favoured by the college authorities, is that Manchester should be created a university much as Glasgow is. According to the views of the supporters of that scheme we should be prepared to multiply our universities as the Scotch have done, by chartering one in any large town where its students and its endowments, its history and its reputation offer equally solid guarantees of permanence. The other is that Manchester should be the capital—primus inter pares—of a new northern university on the original affiliation basis from which London has departed. The weakness of the affiliation principle is that it is scarcely in nature that it should not gradually relax, so that colleges should be affiliated on easier and easier conditions till it becomes useless to keep up the farce. But both schemes, the latter of which, indeed, is Dr. Carpenter's, are practicable—both worthy of careful consideration and discussion—and it is pleasant to see that the University of London, through her Chancellor, disavows any settled policy of obstruction.
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The Owens College University Question . Nature 16, 38–39 (1877). https://doi.org/10.1038/016038a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/016038a0