Academic Liberalism Research Articles

Integrated Of Islamic Education in Ideology Liberalism

Educational liberalization is a contemporary educational movement in which education must take cultural action for cultural freedom and revolution. The concept of liberalism about education implicitly leads to the idea of integrative education. It is the same with Islamic education, where educational liberalism emphasizes the principle of problem-solving when referring to the concept of the main thing about academic liberalism. The expected goal is about integration between theory and practice. This paper uses qualitative concept research. Data sources come from related articles and books. Then analyzed and described descriptively. The study results indicate that the concept of educational liberalism is under integrative education (idea) or in line with the idea of Islamic education. While the idea of Integrative Islamic education in the ideology of liberalism can be seen in 4 ways. 1) foundation, 2) objectives, 3) methods, and 4) evaluation.

Morrill Issues and Academic Liberalism

Morrill Issues and Academic Liberalism

Morrill Issues and Academic Liberalism

Morrill Issues and Academic Liberalism David R. Roediger (bio) it is a pleasure to write in brief response to this exciting and remarkable project of mapping, journalism, and political intervention. From 1985 until 2013 I taught entirely in land-grant universities: the University of Missouri, then Minnesota, and finally Illinois. Justin Smith Morrill's ghost roamed those grounds, roughly 150 years after the act bearing his name funded such colleges through the sale of Indian lands that the government had taken. Leaders at Minnesota and Illinois frequently reminded everyone of each university's land-grant status and linked the strengths of the university to the heroism of Morrill. The latter campus had a Justin Smith Morrill Hall. Administrators talk of land-grant universities in terms of "mission." Histories of the 1862 law and of Morrill himself have left plenty of room for mission creep. Historians view the Land Grant Act as part of a bundle of prodevelopment legislation of the early 1860s. At least since Louis Hacker's The Triumph of American Capitalism (1941), the law has taken its place among initiatives toward economic and territorial expansion passed when Southerners had left the Union, taking their sectional views on the course of empire, railways, and industry with them. Resulting laws included the land-grabbing authorizations of the transcontinental railroad, the Homestead Act, and high tariffs sought by nascent industries—a cause with which Morrill passionately identified. Hacker rightly connected such legislation to the boom in U.S. industrial and agricultural production that sent the United States to the position of unchallenged economic world leadership. The Land Grant Act spoke both to farm production and to things "mechanic" in ways comporting with agribusiness and engineering emphases so dominant in many large state universities. The business-government-military synergies envisioned by the original act played even better to college administrators as time passed. Braided into the rhetoric of the practical, prodevelopment land-grant university are populist appeals equally serviceable to university administrators. The University of Illinois presented a particularly expansive version of such appeals, one underwritten by the fact that only a short walk separated Morrill Hall from Lincoln Hall. The connections, real and imagined, of these two sons of common folk, along with the Illinois origins of plans for support of agricultural colleges, made it possible to discuss the Morrill Act [End Page 92] as if it sprouted from the very soil of the state. The connections of college education to what the historian Gabor Boritt has called Lincoln's belief in the "Right to Rise" joined Morrill's presentation of his own story—the blacksmith's son become merchant-farmer—in defining the purposes of the land-grant college. Morrill advertised his legislation as championing not only the "mechanic arts" but also the prospects of the "lowly mechanic." Outreach from universities to the broader community, from 4-H Clubs to agricultural extension services, grew from the Morrill Act and allied initiatives. The law seemed to deserve mention whenever an event strayed from campus, tried to bring in a community audience, or even just happened to take place on a weekend. To criticize very seriously the throat-clearing rhetoric of administrators introducing a speaker or welcoming a conference to campus invites unhappiness and courts a reputation for crankiness. I manage to grit teeth during invocations of the university's profound connection to the service of "citizens," even as rights of noncitizens stand among the most critical moral and political issues. However, I have found it important to interrupt the logic of homilies to land-grant institutions by asking first myself, then those sitting near me, and now as broadly as I can: "Whose land?" Struggles over Indigenous rights and representations at Minnesota and especially at Illinois provided the context for such an emergent question. In the former university, Indigenous rights campaigns have included ones over the genetic mapping of wild rice and the university's buy-in to the Mount Graham telescope project, both of which involved the disappearing of Indigenous interests at a moment when the university's interest in securing Native support for endowment projects was quickening. It seemed necessary to remind administrators of what activists were teaching us...

Charles Mills’s Liberal Redemption Song

Charles Mills’s Liberal Redemption Song

1867 and the Rule of Wealth

This essay examines the widespread concern in the 1860s and 1870s with ‘plutocracy’ – the political and social power of commercial wealth. It argues that we should not interpret either the pressure for parliamentary reform in the 1860s, or the consequences of the 1867 act, simply in terms of a contest between aristocracy and democracy. A third element, the growing influence of commercial men, was very widely noted before and after 1867, with differences of opinion about whether this would more favour the aristocracy or the democracy. Anxiety about plutocracy fuelled much of the pressure for reform, from both Cobdenite radicals and academic Liberals; this last group in particular was preoccupied with the possible parliamentary dominance of unimaginative and materialistic money men. On the other hand, opponents of reform were sceptical that a new electoral settlement would halt the rising influence of money. They were proved right, not least because the 1867 reforms increased the cost of winning a seat. The three parliaments elected in 1868, 1874, and 1880 were dominated by commercial men, and there was even more alarm about plutocracy than before 1867. While this was interpreted in different ways by different groups, on the whole it benefited the Conservative Party and Conservative argument significantly more than it helped the Liberals. The Liberal Party found it difficult to agree on whether the political influence of commercial elites – a group with which it had once been identified – was now excessive, and what, if anything, could be done about it. This was to become a major problem for the left.

1867 and the Rule of Wealth

This essay examines the widespread concern in the 1860s and 1870s with ‘plutocracy’ – the political and social power of commercial wealth. It argues that we should not interpret either the pressure for parliamentary reform in the 1860s, or the consequences of the 1867 act, simply in terms of a contest between aristocracy and democracy. A third element, the growing influence of commercial men, was very widely noted before and after 1867, with differences of opinion about whether this would more favour the aristocracy or the democracy. Anxiety about plutocracy fuelled much of the pressure for reform, from both Cobdenite radicals and academic Liberals; this last group in particular was preoccupied with the possible parliamentary dominance of unimaginative and materialistic money men. On the other hand, opponents of reform were sceptical that a new electoral settlement would halt the rising influence of money. They were proved right, not least because the 1867 reforms increased the cost of winning a seat. The three parliaments elected in 1868, 1874, and 1880 were dominated by commercial men, and there was even more alarm about plutocracy than before 1867. While this was interpreted in different ways by different groups, on the whole it benefited the Conservative Party and Conservative argument significantly more than it helped the Liberals. The Liberal Party found it difficult to agree on whether the political influence of commercial elites – a group with which it had once been identified – was now excessive, and what, if anything, could be done about it. This was to become a major problem for the left.

British academics, liberalism, and the First World War

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of the War on two prominent academic liberal historians. Design/methodology/approach The research is based on a narrative of their lives and careers before and during the War. Findings The findings include an analysis of how the War engaged these academic liberals in the pursuit of the War effort. Originality/value By the end of the War, both sought to reaffirm much of their earlier academic liberalism despite the political and social changes in the post-war world.

Reflections on Academic Liberalism and Conservative Criticism

Liberal bias in academia is a complex sociological issue. The empirical evidence suggests that part of the explanation for ideological imbalance is that conservatives tend to self-select out of careers in higher education. We examine the explanation offered by Neil Gross that political-typing is partially responsible. While we are generally receptive to this explanation, our own research provides some evidence that college students do not find academia to be a hostile or unpleasant place. This raises some questions about why they would self-select out of careers in academia. We also offer alternative explanations for conservative criticism of the academy and suggest that institutions of higher education have some responsibility for creating the impression that they are hostile to conservative views.

Liberals and Conservatives in Academia: a Reply to My Critics

In this essay I respond to criticisms of Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care? Although the book is not without its flaws, in my view critics have not yet offered a persuasive response to the self-selection account of academic liberalism it lays out.

On Lecturing and Being Beautiful: Zadie Smith, Elaine Scarry, and the Liberal Aesthetic

AT THE HEART OF ZADIE SMITH'S PRIZE-WINNING NOVEL, On Beauty, is strong sense that humanities today are in state of crisis: values of equality and relativism assumed in principles of liberal education have been outpaced, on one hand, by competitive forces of market and, on other, by new forms of protest and self-knowledge, both of which lie beyond academia's traditional paradigms. Howard Belsey, novel's academic anti-hero, embodies this crisis. Stuck at an impasse with his anti-humanist book, Against Rembrandt, caricatured by his students as demonically opposed to any expression of enthusiasm for anything, failing to reproduce his hard-won middle-class secularism in either of his sons, opposed to Mozart, Forster, and all representational art, and suffering consequences of his committee on positive discrimination having devolved into an extramarital affair, Howard's agenda seems to lack all ethical horizons as he plummets into state of skeptical despair: 'What,' he asks, pointing to picture by Rembrandt, ready to undercut feeling that any college freshman might have for great works of art and literature by suggesting historical and cultural specificity of our appreciation of beauty, 'are we signing up to when we talk of of this light?' ... 'What are these images really concerned with?' (252). (1) The central irony of novel is that Howard is already something of an aesthete, if not someone who can appreciate art in classroom then certainly someone who senses it, imagines it, and confronts it everywhere else. Howard feels everything: sadness of funeral service, ridiculous dancing of glee club ruining U2's Pride (in name of love), smell of alcohol, touch of his children. Smith's characterization of Howard's fraught persona picks up on widespread mood of concern over perceived antipathy of academic liberals--particularly those making cerebral, relativist arguments for which Howard sees himself mouthpiece--to current ethical practices. Thus, Howard realizes that responsibility and obligation that individuals should feel toward each other--the principle tenet of modern ethical liberalism--lies outside bounds of university as an institution, so-called vanguard of liberal education. The affection people can and do have for each other, novel suggests, emerges in spaces and moments of ecstatic fissure in university's bureaucratic edifice rather than in institution proper. Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just, from which Smith claims to have borrowed a title, chapter heading and good deal of inspiration (i), also chafes at liberal arts' tendency to refute power of aesthetic experience. Disavowed by Marxist critics as form of deflection from structural critique and by poststructuralist critics as form of violence done to object being viewed, language of beauty, states Scarry, has fallen out of favour with Howards of world: although the humanities are made up of beautiful poems, stories, paintings, sketches, sculpture, film, essays, debates, and it is this that every day draws us to them, she argues, conversations about beauty of these objects has been banished, so that we coinhabit space of these objects ... yet speak about their beauty only in whispers (57). The underlying aims of On Beauty and Being Just are first to unveil and then to counteract institutional prohibitions that deprive intellectuals of an enriching language of beauty and render works of art and literature powerless as moral resource in university life (58). (2) Protesting this situation, Scarry introduces beauty, which she sees as an alliance between individual responses to aesthetic objects and larger instances of truth or justice, as corrective to rationalism of humanities and supplement to discourse of postmodern liberalism. The assumption behind Scarry's and Smith's arguments is that beauty, and all that it implies as focus of moral disposition and practical engagement with life, exists somewhere outside liberal academy. …

Charles J. Holden. The New Southern University: Academic Freedom and Liberalism at UNC. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2012. 224 pp. Cloth $50.00.

Charles J. Holden. The New Southern University: Academic Freedom and Liberalism at UNC. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2012. 224 pp. Cloth $50.00.

What is the Legacy of Austrian Academic Liberalism?

In her book Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life, Deborah Coen 2007 portrays one of the most influential academic dynasties of Habsburg Austria over the course of three generations, starting with the philosopher and educational reformer Franz Exner (1802–1853) and extending into the 1940s. ‘‘With their hands in projects spanning science, politics, and the arts, the Exner family is an ideal guide for a tour of Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century’’ (Coen 2007: 3), and a paradigmatic case for Austrian liberalism as it developed over eight decades. With this family Coen has without a doubt discovered a treasure chest for the history of science, the history of ideas, and European social history. She utilizes it to produce a contribution to the history of Austrian science and academic liberalism in Habsburg lands, seminal notably because it eschews the trend to simply subsume Austrian research under German traditions and perspectives, inherent in several histories of European science. In our essay, we will first review Coen’s argument, and then pass on to discuss a contrasting narrative about the legacy of Austrian academic liberalism in the twentieth century, as outlined in Malachi Hacohen’s 2009 long essay review of Coen’s book.

The Ambiguities of Rawls's Influence

John Rawls is the towering figure of academic liberalism. A gentle, dignified, self-effacing man, he taught philosophy at Harvard for more than thirty years and from his commanding position exerted a decisive influence on his profession. Through his scholarship and teaching he played a major role in establishing the now-dominant understanding of liberalism in the academy and, more generally, of the method and purpose of the philosophical study of politics.Peter Berkowitz teaches at George Mason University School of Law and is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution (berkowitz@hoover.stanford.edu). He is the editor of the companion volumes Varieties of Conservatism in America (Hoover Institution Press 2004) and Varieties of Progressivism in America (Hoover Institution Press 2004).This essay weaves together (and in places corrects) the argument of “John Rawls and the Liberal Faith,” in The Wilson Quarterly, Spring 2002, pp. 60–69, and “The Academic Liberal,” in The Weekly Standard, Dec. 16, 2002.

Relativism and the Foundations of Liberalism

Relativism and the Foundations of Liberalism. By Graham Long. Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2004. 250p. $59.00.A work that treats relativism without mentioning Nietzsche, the foundations of liberalism without mentioning Locke, and universalism without discussing any of the great philosophers from Plato to Hegel is apt to be defective. Yet Graham Long's book proves that such a work can still merit serious attention. Through his taste for rigorous arguments, his seriousness of purpose, and his knowledge of the literature written in the spirit of English analytical philosophy and academic liberalism more generally, he has succeeded in producing a book that is both thoughtful and thought-provoking.

Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism. By Peter Berkowitz. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. 235p. $27.95.

"For quite a while," Peter Berkowitz notes, "leading aca- demic liberals and their best-known critics formed an unwit- ting alliance, promulgating the view that liberal political theory" ignores the whole subject of virtue and cultivation (p. 170). If that view is correct, this neglect not only would spawn "fatal theoretical lacunae" (p. 4) but also would raise serious doubts about liberalism's capacity to sustain the "qualities of mind and character" (p. 172) required for "the operation and maintenance" of "free and democratic institutions" (p. 6). In recent years, however, a new generation of liberals have challenged this widely held view. Thinkers such as William Galston and Stephen Macedo acknowledge that liberal re- gimes depend "upon a specific set of virtues," which "they do not automatically produce" (pp. 27­8). Their work points toward the "dependence" of liberal societies on "extraliberal and nongovernmental sources of virtue" (p. 28), such as "the family, religion and the array of associations in civil society" (p. 6). Simultaneously, they insist that "limited government is not the same as neutral government" (p. 173), and they affirm "that the liberal state, within bounds, ought to pursue liberal purposes" and, thus, "may, within limits, foster virtues" that serve these purposes (p. xii).

Contemporary Models of Management Education in the UK

What is the role of higher education in society? How should universities be managed? What is learning, and what should count as ideal outcomes of that process? What types of knowledge should a higher education pursue? All these questions have been considered ever since universities were first created, and answered in different and sometimes competing ways. The aim of this article is to examine how these questions are currently being considered and dealt with within management education in the UK. It does so by outlining four models of management education: academic liberalism; experiential liberalism; experiential vocationalism; and the experiential/critical school. Each of these models is examined in relation to the assumptions it makes about epistemology, the nature of management, pedagogy, the organization of management education and universities, and the role of management education in society. Based on an appraisal of the relative advantages and disadvantages of each model, the article goes on to speculate about possible future directions for management education, and the relationship of this to the current context of higher education and the Dearing Report. The article concludes with suggestions for possible avenues of future research and practice.

The Lady Was a Sharecropper: Myrtle Lawrence and the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union

Editors' note: This essay is part of a forthcoming book, Showers Of Blessings: Lawrence and the Southern Thenant Farmers' Union. From his deathbed, Alabama native Aubrey Williams pleaded for a more textured understanding of the South's poor whites. Lamenting that the poor white southerner been despised and insulted over and over, and he has been cheated and he has been gulled and he has been exploited, Williams hoped to share his hard-earned wisdom that the struggle of the African American was entwined intrinsically with the fate of the southern poor white. As a New Deal administrator, the director of the National Youth Administration, and an activist in numerous reform organizations, Williams had lived his life serving the southern poor of both races. cause of the Negro cannot be won, he insisted. The South cannot be saved until he [the poor white] too is saved.(1) After a lifetime of commitment and reflection, Williams despaired that too often the South's literary and academic liberals, and many of its political and social reformers, rejected poor white southerners as a way of distancing themselves from the region's racial practices. Accordingly, they sought to elevate their own standing in the eyes of other liberals, especially northern supporters, by applauding the virtue, cleverness, and courage of blacks while at the same time mocking or ridiculing the social habits of impoverished whites. A scene from the spring of 1937 graphically portrays the way that this dynamic helped to shape power relationships within the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union (STFU). During National Sharecroppers Week of that year, thousands of New Yorkers attended a meeting at the city's Mecca Temple and watched as three Arkansas sharecroppers, all organizers for the STFU, shared the stage with senators Robert LaFollette and Robert Wagner and Socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas. According to STFU cofounder and secretary H. L. Mitchell, one of the Arkansas sharecroppers stole the show. Mitchell arrived late at the meeting after LaFollette had already begun speaking, and he was chagrined to realize that Myrtle [Lawrence] was the center of attraction. She had her `spit can' covered with bright pink paper, and was busily engaged in using it. people down front who had the best view of Myrtle's performance were amused, laughing at the sharecropper woman, and paying no attention whatever to the speakers. What was even worse, from Mitchell's perspective, was that Henrietta McGhee, an African American organizer, afterward told him that she was never so embarrassed in her life as by that old white woman making everyone think the union folks were all just like those Tobacco Road people they had heard about.(2) When viewed historically, this scene, or Mitchell's account of it, reveals a universe of meaning involving culture, power, race, and gender--themes that are today so compelling to cultural historians of the South. STFU had been founded in Tyronza, Arkansas, in 1934 as a biracial effort to combat abuses stemming from local enforcement of the New Deal's Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA). Under the AAA program, tenants and sharecroppers legally retained their traditional share of the profits from crops they grew, but planters and AAA administrators in the cotton South often ignored this aspect of the national legislation. Owners frequently violated their AAA contracts by demoting tenants and sharecroppers to wage earners or by evicting them from their homes. In 1937 the STFU was at its high tide, claiming a membership of 25,000 in six states. In its first three years of existence, the STFU, along with Dorothea Lange's photographs, introduced the nation to sharecroppers, and it became the chief vehicle through which liberals like theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, civil libertarian Roger Baldwin, and activist Eleanor Roosevelt educated themselves on sharecroppers and rural poverty. …

The New Criterion Reader: The First Five Years (review)

194Philosophy and Literature This study is fuUy accessible to the unüingual reader as aU quotations are translated. UsuaUy, they are presented in French and foUowed by an English translation. OccasionaUy they are uniquely in English translation with a few French words scattered about in brackets. Unfortunately the typographical integration of both languages in the text condemns aU readers to the tedium of reading die quotations twice. MarshaU's fresh, clear style makes up in part for this disadvantage. Both the work and the notes bear witness to the author's considerable erudition. This is a cogent, incisive study which brings a sensitive and new interpretation to the texts studied. The diesis succeeds in drawing the diverse works considered together into a new, original pattern which is very logical both in the eighteenthcentury context and in the light of contemporary thought. MarshaU's book makes a very important contribution and wUl certainly be required reading for scholars of French and comparative literature, history, and phUosophy. York UniversityRoseann Runte TL· New Criterion Reader: TL· First Five Years, edited by Hilton Kramer; xvu & 429 pp. New York: The Free Press, 1988, $24.95. Criterion was founded by T. S. Eliot to advance the cause of modernism. TL· New Criterionwas founded by HUton Kramer, the artcritic, and Samuel Lipman, die concert pianist and music critic. Like its predecessor, TL· New Criterion is pubhshed à rebours. Eliot's aim was to establish modernism in the arts; the purpose of TL· New Criterion is to defend modernism against such enemies as Marxism, deconstruction, runaway postmodernism and the collapse of standards in art and in art-critical practice since the 1970s. TL· New Criterion has become indispensable for anyone interested in intelligent dissent from the "dishonesties and hypocrisies and disfiguring ideologies that nowadays afflict the criticism of the arts." The conservatism ofits contributors is political as weU as cultural; the editors regard "the radical legacy of the 1960s as a cultural calamity," and they defend the correct idea that democratic capitalism is more likely than its competitors to be the sort of society in which aU the arts can flourish, provided that art and criticism can be freed from dieir subjugation to the "reigning pieties . . . that now disfigure so much of our cultural life." But it should not be thought that TL· New Criterion seeks to rescue art and criticism from the pernicious forces that now dominate them only in order to subject the arts to democratic capitalist critera of value. They want to defend the "autonomy accorded to art by the tradition of modernism" because it is there that "we find the freedom of spirit that is die cultural analogue ofthe poUtical freedoms guaranteed us by capitalist democracy." OfficiaUy, the only parti pris of TL· New Criterion is truth. Reviews195 This anthology gathers forty-seven pieces, grouped in six sections: Culture and Politics, The Decline of the Academy, The Arts and Their Institutions, Artists and Ideas, Figures of History, and The Contemporary Scene. Twentyfive pieces deal with literature, the rest with painting, music, and television. Mood in these essays runs all the way from the grim to the hUarious. I especiaUy recommend Roger Kimball's "Debating the Humanities at Yale" for an amusing exposé of the grotesqueries of academic liberalism. I agree with many of the specificjudgments its writers make about particular works of art and the contemporary cultural landscape, but am dismayed by the absence of critical analysis of the first principles of modernism itself. It is arguable that the achievement and the spirit of modernism are defensible without recourse to the idea of autonomy. Various characteristics of modern art such as the abandonment of a slavish descriptivism and Ulusionistic realism, the emphasis on immediacy, the resort to bold form and color, bold experimentation in painting, literature, and music, and the emphasis on expression of personality and feeling are sufficient unto themselves for justifying modernism and for promoting its continuance; they neither entaU nor are entaüed by the dubious notion of autonomy. The idea of the autonomy of art is tantamount to asserting that the only artistic values are aesthetic ones, so that whatever other values may attach to a work of art are nonartistic...

From Strauss To Holtzmann and Meijboom

The discussion of the synoptic problem, which had been promoted by Griesbach's publication of a Greek synopsis in A.D. 1774, was largely intensified among German Protestants during the years 1830-70. It was a period of academic liberalism, historical positivism, national enthusiasm, and political consolidation. During these years German theologians produced critical and challenging studies of the synoptic question with an enormous assiduity. Their contributions gained wide importance for later generations occupied with the synoptic Gospels, and the circumstances under which the German discussion took place is therefore of interest.

Anglican Perspectives on Gender: some reflections on the centenary of St Hugh's College, Oxford

milieux. There were the university liberals, veterans of the campaign against religious tests, who supported Girton, Newnham and Somerville as part of a general movement to extend and improve national education; and there were also, at Oxford, men and women whose first commitment was to Anglicanism, and who took Archbishop Benson's view-What is wanted is for the Church to teach the teachers, and how is she to do this they are all to go to Cambridge? [1]. It was a visit to Girton that prompted Edward and Lavinia Talbot to say, if only there could be a Keble in this sort of Education [2]. Out of that idea came Lady Margaret Hall and indirectly St Hugh's, founded by the Hall's first principal, Elizabeth Wordsworth, to provide cheap accommodation for poor students. St Hilda's, though originally little more than an outpost of Dorothea Beale's Cheltenham empire, was modelled on L.M.H. as a Church of England community. The commitment of St Hilda's to Anglicanism has been less lasting, but was at first a positive one: at its opening ceremony the Dean of Winchester urged students to consider themselves a Sisterhood without vows [3]. Contemporaries often over-stated the differences in atmosphere and ethos amongst the early women's colleges. Neither Girton nor Somerville deserved their reputation as 'infidel' or Godless places. Girton was, in fact, nominally a Church foundation, and Anglican prayers were said daily at Somerville in its early years. The Oxford Church of England Halls-even St Hugh's which had no explicit conscience clause-did not impose religious tests on students, while L.M.H. was never the hotbed of ritualism [4] that some supposed it to be, given its Keble connexions. Nevertheless, the cultural influences that helped to shape the development of Oxford's Anglican women's Halls were distinctive in significant respects. Most important was the fact that the academic liberals were, as a group, much more whole-hearted than the Church party (if not altogether unanimous) in their support for women's colleges. The deep reservations which many Anglicans felt about women's higher education were well understood in the Church Halls. When Elizabeth Wordsworth was offered the post of principal, her brother John commented, If I thought your refusal would put an end to the whole