I fear Britain’s students no longer experience a true liberal education

In an admirable, though gloomy,  piece on the woes of universities – now with more gloom, it seems, to come – William Green wrote last week of “radical humanities tutors being more likely to strike, thereby reducing humanities’ students contact hours to an even more pitiful level; last semester my six contact hours a week dropped to around three during strike action.”

This took me back in both senses of the phrase. First, it surprised. Assuming, as I did, that “contact hours” did not include attendance at lectures, six such hours a week seemed rather many. Second, it took me back sixty years and more to my time as an undergraduate reading History at Trinity College, Cambridge. The expression “contact hours” not yet being in use, we spoke of “supervisions” and, very occasionally, of seminars, for these were rare.

Each year you had two supervisors whom you saw on alternate weeks, each supervision lasting an hour. You read the essay on whatever subject had been assigned to you. Your supervisor listened, not always concealing boredom. Then he criticised it, suggesting aspects of the subject you might have considered but hadn’t. Some discussion would follow. This might be fruitful. He would then suggest the subject for your next essay and, importantly advise you on what and whom you should read. He might ask you whose lectures you were attending, but lectures were voluntary and often you might get no stronger recommendation than a suggestion that you might find X or Y useful, while Z, though of little value, was entertaining, even stimulating.

Conversation with supervisors offered informal education of high quality. One was of course fortunate at Trinity. My supervisors in my first year were Peter Laslett, an outstanding social and intellectual historian preparing a new edition of John Locke. “Plato and Hobbes are exciting political philosophers,” he told me, “but Aristotle and Locke make better sense”. I found Dr Walter Ullman, author of a great work “The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages”,  difficult at first because I had done no mediaeval history at school. I did attend his lectures because they were easier to follow, despite his thick Austrian accent, than his books.

Once, eager to show I wasn’t completely ignorant, I asked if a book by Geoffrey Barraclough might be suitable reading for my next essay. “Barraclough!”, he said, and one could hear the scornful exclamation mark, “only a great man could have written so bad a book”.

John Elliott, only some ten or twelve years older than his students, but already well on the way to being the outstanding historian of Imperial Spain, could put you right whenever and wherever you were going wrong, and do so with sympathy and charm.

Best of all was Jack Gallagher, the best teacher at school or university I ever had. He deprecated enthusiasm, but nevertheless stimulated it. He was a master of the art of teaching by conversation. Like the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott, he regarded history as a conversation between the past and present.

Of course I went to some lectures, more in my first year when I was straight from school than later when one realised that several who lectured in my corner of the subject were doing little more than regurgitating what they had written in books or articles one could read in the library. Some lecturers merely read woodenly from their text; others, more agreeably, put on a show. G R Elton, working on the transformation of Tudor administration effected by his hero Thomas Cromwell, was a great performer, a showman, both witty and humorous. His lecture-room was deservedly packed.

William Green fears that the present crisis in the universities, accentuated and highlighted by the Covid-19 epidemic may lead to on-line learning becoming a regular” alternative  to physical lectures and seminars” and thinks that “if universities do adopt this, it will be the last straw for many students.”

He is probably right, and not only because attendance at lectures does at the very least impose a certain discipline, and indeed reminds one that the Humanities are studies in human, often very human, behaviour. Moreover, being communal occasions, they invite or provoke conversation with fellow students; and such conversation is an essential part of a university education. This is why lectures, though a mediaeval survival, were not made obsolete by the invention of printing, and indeed why they would not be satisfactorily replaced by on-line learning.

Yet it is reading which is at the core of the study of History or indeed any of the Humanities. “Read,” that fine historian of the Victorian Age G M Young used to say: “read till you can hear the people talking”. Nowadays of course you can do this on a screen and I guess it may already be possible to get a university degree without opening an actual book.

Yet libraries are comforting places and, reading History at Cambridge, one was richly fortunate. There was of course the University Library, recipient of every book published in the UK, but I didn’t like working in it and rarely went there. The Faculty Library – the Seeley – was preferable. I spent much more time there than in lecture halls. Likewise Trinity’s Reading-Room, a basement in Nevile’s Court adjacent to the great Wren Library. The reading room was a good place to work, and not only because ash-trays were provided – other times, other manners.

“Reading”, wrote Bacon, “maketh a full man, Conference a ready man; and writing an exact man”. By “conference” he meant conversation, and in this apophthegm he summed up the three essentials of a liberal education such as Cambridge in my day offered us. We were fortunate, very fortunate. How many of today’s students will look back on their university days and say the same?