Abstract
A SPEECH entitled “A Citizen Challenges the Universities”, delivered by Sir Ernest Simon at the summer, 1936, meeting of the Council of the Association of University Teachers in Cardiff, appeared in the Universities Review of November last, and a reprint of it has reached us. The challenge relates to the imminent threat to democracy involved in our tolerance of such conditions as those of South Wales and other depressed areas, and the universities' alleged neglect, in the face of that threat, to do their duty by the social sciences: their failure alike to provide adequate inducements, staff and equipment for research in those sciences and for specialized study in them, and to employ effectual measures, for ensuring that students, of whatever schools, shall not graduate without an active and realistic interest in the broader problems of the world to-day. The challenge is not a new one, but its urgency grows with the growing prestige of ‘corporative’ States. It was an outstanding motive of the remarkable series of eight university supplements published in Time and Tide in 1935. To that series Sir Ernest himself contributed an article on “Where our Universities Fail”.
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The Universities and Social Science. Nature 139, 499–500 (1937). https://doi.org/10.1038/139499c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/139499c0