Social Life in a Provincial University

Abstract

E-T>HE PECULIAR PROBLEMS of life in a provincial uni| versity have been the theme of a number of publications and 1 discussions for a generation. The first group of provincial universities was founded in the nineteenth century in the big centres of population in the north of England. They were conceived of by their founders consciously and deliberately as institutions quite different from Oxford and Cambridge. Their students were to live at home and so save the expense of residence; they were to receive instruction in the form of lectures and to have good libraries provided, but they were not to be given the individual supervision that we now associate with the tutorial system in Oxford and Cambridge; nor was there to be any disciplinary regulation of their conduct when they were not at work in the uriiversity buildings. By the time of the 'second wave' of university foundations, beginning, at the turn of the century, with Reading, followed by Nottingham,l Hull and Leicester, misgivings about the pattern of the northern universities were already being felt, and these later new universities have from the beginning striven to provide residence for a large proportion of their students, while the older ones have built, and are still building, halls of residence. In these older provincial universities, like Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds or King's College, Newcastle, however, the majority of the students still live at home or in lodgings; and whereas the advantages of residential life are almost regarded as axiomatic, little is really known about the life these Chome' or 'lodgings' students lead. This attitude appears to have had two practical results: first that insuicient thought has been given to the merits of different patterns of residence, or to the question whether changed social conditions do not indicate types of residence not exactly modelled on Oxford and Cambridge; and second, a tendency to inhibit creative thinking about the best form that university education can take, when at least half its students live at home and a very large number in lodgings. A number of assumptions about the way of life in a provincial