The college system at Oxford and Cambridge

Abstract

It is by no means certain that all the readers of the ' Cambridge ' novels of Sir Charles Snow fully appreciate the institutional background against which those feline dramas are set. Indeed, looking round Britain, and the world, at some newly-created universities, one wonders whether those who have attempted to copy that unique set-up the college system of the ancient universities have really grasped what it is about. Like so many traditional ingredients of the British recipe for life, it is, so superbly, that those within it take it entirely for granted, and those outside entirely despair of understanding it at all. Sweet-sour reminiscences, high-table whodunnits, and romantically grubby undergraduate novelettes may give a whiff of the atmosphere of the place but how does it actually work? To write a full, precise and detailed account would be the work of years. It would demand the labours of a vast syndicate, for each college has its peculiar and secret ways, known only to its own Fellows. It would be a monumental enterprise, comparable with an account of the diplomatic system of modern Europe, or of the machinery of the American political parties. How can one bear to omit discussion of the subtleties of the balance of power in a college between Master, Tutor, Bursar and Fellows, or of the intricacies of land ownership that influence building policies, or of the conflicting roles of Proctors and Tutors in the discipline of undergraduates, or of the criteria that seem to determine which university lecturers become Fellows of which colleges? This article can only be an attempt at a prolegomena to a sketch of an outline of such an account. I shall try to stick to bare facts, such as are well known and uncontroversial in substance (whatever their implications on an ethical or managerial plane). I shall try to describe a 4 normal ' or * typical 5 college, recollecting that not one of these fifty-odd unique corporations conforms to the stereotype. Where there are large variations, as in size and financial strength, or significant differences between the customs of the two universities, I shall try to mention them but I beg for tolerance of conscious and unconscious sins of omission.