Victoria University

Abstract

IT was only the singular moderation and good sense with which the promoters of the New Manchester University movement conducted their case that could have secured that no Parliamentary opposition should be made to the late Government taking a step so momentous, and affecting so many rival interests, as the foundation of a new English university. They were compelled, indeed, like many other strategists, to change front once or twice, and to accept a charter different in two vital respects from that which they had asked. They wanted a university in England on the model of the Scotch and German universities—a university of a single college in a great centre of population. They were compelled, however, to make provision for affiliating Lees and other colleges, when they become adequately equipped, with full faculties of arts and science, and when it is completed the new University will have to carry outran experiment completely novel. It Will occupy a midway place between the Scotch single-college universities, the English universities with their families of colleges bound together by their common locality, and the Central Examining Board for all qualified applicants, which is known as the University of London. The separate colleges will in fact be Universities of the Scotch type complete in themselves before they are affiliated in respect of two important faculties. They will differ vitally from the single colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, each with three or four tutors of its own, but each requiring to lean on the private tutors and the resident university professors and lecturers for the necessary supplement of their teaching. It will be most interesting to see how the University authorities will conciliate the independence and originality of the teaching of the individual colleges with the examination system which must govern and regulate them all. The new University will more nearly resemble the late Queen's University in Ireland than anything else of which we have had experience. It will differ from the Queen's University only in the greater importance of the separate colleges. Meanwhile all these arrangements are in posse. The University will be started on the familiar lines of the Scotch and German universities, with a single college, with which for the time being it is practically identified, and whose teaching it will be its sole business to influence.