Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

William James, as we have seen, was a university man. In one capacity or another, he was linked to Harvard, Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago. Like some nine thousand other Americans in the nineteenth century, he studied at German universities. At the time that Emerson, Holmes, the Peirces and the Jameses were developing their talents, the American universities were in the process of formation and so, it should be said, were the German and the British. Particularly in Britain, universities are looked upon fondly as ancient institutions, dating from medieval times. So they are, in one sense, but that should not blind us to the fact that universities, as we know them now, are largely the creation of the nineteenth century.

One can see why. Until 1826 there were just the two universities in existence in England – Oxford and Cambridge – and offering a very restricted range of education.⁷⁷

At Oxford the intake was barely two hundred a year and many of those did not persevere to graduation. The English universities were open only to Anglicans, based on a regulation which required acceptance of the Thirty-Nine Articles. Both seats of learning had deteriorated in the eighteenth century, with the only recognised course, at Oxford at least, being a narrow classics curriculum ‘with a smattering of Aristotelian philosophy’, whereas in Cambridge the formal examination was almost entirely mathematical. There was no entrance examination at either place and, moreover, peers could get a degree without examination. Examinations were expanded and refined in the first decades of the nineteenth century but more to the point, in view of what happened later, were the attacks mounted on Oxford and Cambridge by a trio of Scotsmen in Edinburgh – Francis Jeffrey, Henry Brougham and Sydney Smith. Two of these were Oxford graduates and in the journal they founded, the

Edinburgh Review

, they took Oxford and Cambridge to task for offering an education which, they argued, was far too grounded in the classics and, as a result, very largely useless. ‘The bias given to men’s minds is so strong that it is no uncommon thing to meet with Englishmen, whom, but for their grey hair and wrinkles, we might easily mistake for school-boys. Their talk is of Latin verses; and, it is quite clear, if men’s ages are to be dated from the state of their mental progress, that such men are eighteen years of age and not a day older . . .’⁷⁸ Sydney Smith, the author of this attack, went on to criticise Oxbridge men for having no knowledge of the sciences, of economics or politics, of Britain’s geographical and commercial relations with Europe. The classics, he said, cultivated the imagination but not the intellect.

There were two responses we may mention. One was the creation of civic universities in Britain, particularly University College and King’s College, London, both of which were established deliberately to accept Nonconformists, and which were based partly on the Scottish universities and their excellent medical schools. One of the men involved in the creation of University College, London, Thomas Campbell, visited the Universities of Berlin (founded 1809) and Bonn (1816), as a result of which he opted for the professorial system of tuition, in use there and in Scotland, rather than Oxford’s tutorial system. Another source of inspiration came from the University of Virginia, founded in 1819 thanks largely to the efforts of Thomas Jefferson. The main ideals of this institution were set out in the report of a State Commission which met at Rockfish Gap in the Blue Ridge in 1818 and which became known as the Rockfish Gap Report. The specific aim of this university, according to the report, was ‘to form the statesmen, legislature and judges, on whom public prosperity and individual happiness are so much to depend . . .’ Politics, law, agriculture, commerce, mathematical and physical sciences, and the arts, were all included. University College, London, followed this more practical vision and the even more practical – and novel – idea was adopted of floating a public company to finance the building of the college. Non-denominational university education was begun in England.⁷⁹