The academic ethos under strain

Abstract

The decade before the outbreak of the Second World War had been a very hard time for universities. The worldwide economic depression affected universities as it affected all other institutions. In Great Britain, which was perhaps least injured, the chances of employment of university graduates did not decline markedly, but the universities did not recruit many young members to their teaching staffs. The already established university teachers were not loosened from their moorings. A small number became communists or supporters of communism, but this did not interfere with their performance of the tasks of teaching and research to which they had committed themselves.1 They did not attempt to impel their universities towards their own political objectives. Under the dominion of an ungenerous ministerial bureaucracy, French universities carried on in a humdrum way. Their graduates were finding it difficult to obtain employment, their teachers were becoming somewhat more radical politically. Nonetheless, French academics retained their traditional views that teaching was a chore, that the supervision of dissertations was a little better, and that to do scientific or scholarly research was best of all.