[Vwoolf] University education

[Stuart N. Clarke]

G. Lowes Dickinson was surprised to discover in 1916 that:

“Colleges are an investment to Americans, and educate only as a means of getting on. And in this country if you’re going to get on you must have a college education, and almost anybody can get it. They work their way through, at incredibly little cost.”
(quoted in E. M. Forster’s biography, 1962, p. 168)

Forster in 1915 was shocked to see 

“some young Welsh soldiers [in Cambridge].  A solitary undergraduate in a cap and gown came round the corner upon them, and the soldiers naturally burst out laughing.  They had never seen anything so absurd, outlandish.  What could the creature be?  To me the creature was the tradition I had been educated in, and that it should be laughed at in its own home appalled me.”
(ibid., p. 162)

In the years following the end of the Second World War, local education authorities (LEAs) paid student tuition fees and provided a maintenance grant. But there was still not mass higher education.

In about 1954 Somerset Maugham fulminated on “Lucky Jim”:

“I am told that today rather more than 60 per cent of the men who go to university go on a Government grant. This is a new class that has entered upon the scene. It is the white-collar proletariat. They do not go to university to acquire culture but to get a job, and when they have got one, scamp it. They have no manners and are woefully unable to deal with any social predicament. Their idea of a celebration is to go to a public house and drink six beers. They are mean, malicious and envious. They are scum.”

So, when we read Virginia Woolf on universities, we have to think back to a very different world: a world where class divisions were extremely rigid, where going to university was a right/rite of passage for the privileged.  And the exceptions are remarked upon:

“there was the clever little Jew-boy from Birmingham ... The rain ... smeared the window where the Jew-boy from Birmingham sat mugging up Greek with a wet towel round his head”.   (“1880”, “The Years”)

Prior to 1900, only five universities had been established in England and one in Wales. These consisted of the University of Oxford (founded between 1096–1201), University of Cambridge (founded c. 1201), University of London (founded in 1836), Durham University (founded in 1832), and the federal Victoria University (founded in 1880); the University of Wales was founded in 1893.

The University of Leeds was granted a royal charter in 1904 – just in time to be excoriated in “Jacob’s Room” (ch. v): 

“Professor Bulteel, of Leeds, had issued an edition of Wycherley without stating that he had left out, disembowelled, or indicated only by asterisks, several indecent words and some indecent phrases. An outrage, Jacob said; a breach of faith; sheer prudery; token of a lewd mind and a disgusting nature. ... Great play was made with the professorial title, and Leeds as a seat of learning was laughed to scorn.”

Stuart
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