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This chapter discusses the early education of William Thomson. It covers the influence of his father James Thomson in his education, his experiences at Glasgow College, at Cambridge University, and preparation for the Glasgow chair.

This chapter presents a biography of William Thomson. Topics covered include his early years in Glasgow College, his experiences at Cambridge University, his election as the Chair of Natural Philosophy at Glasgow, creation of the Physical and Chemical Laboratories of University College North Wales, and his scientific achievements.

The Quakers founded their own schools to ensure that their children learned Quaker values and would not be contaminated by, say, Anglican principles. Science played a significant role in Quaker schools, especially Bootham School (York), which had a flourishing Natural History Society and an observatory. Jewish children often attended the Jewish schools (where science was not so prominent) or the public schools. With Oxford and Cambridge closed to non-Anglicans until the mid-19th century, Quakers flocked to Scottish universities, especially Edinburgh Medical School. Some Jews also attended Scottish universities, but the study of mathematics under Augustus de Morgan at University College London proved particularly attractive. With the opening of Oxford and Cambridge to non-Anglicans, the first cohorts of Jewish and Quaker science students are traced.

This chapter discusses the New College, founded by William Wykeham in 1379, which was the seventh secular college to be established in Oxford since the inception of the English collegiate movement in the second half of the thirteenth century. It has been regarded as something of a landmark in English collegiate history. It enumerates several preferences in the recruitment of scholars for New College. It explains that Wykeham's purpose for establishing his Oxford college was his concern for the increase and dissemination of the faith; more specifically his college was designed in part to combat the fall in numbers both of the secular clergy and of the student population of Oxford. It details that the King's Hall branched out from an extension of the chapel royal set in the University of Cambridge. It also evaluates Wykeham's contribution to the college tutorial system.

In January 1867, Emily Davies paid a visit to Sir Benjamin and Lady Brodie, in the house in Cowley Place that was later to become St Hilda’s Hall, in order to test opinion on her project to found a college for women. Miss Davies’s father and brothers were Cambridge University men and there was good reason to believe that her scheme would find more favour there. Cambridge had agreed in 1865, four years ahead of Oxford University, to open its school examinations to girls. The attitude of friendly reserve that Miss Davies found in liberal Oxford circles merely confirmed the wisdom of affiliating her college to the ‘other place’. But Oxford people brought home to her the difficulty of introducing women students into a university with monastic traditions, rowdy undergraduates, a lively interest in gossip, and a large population of prostitutes.

Don McKenzie, Professor of English Language and Literature at Victoria University of Wellington and later Professor of Bibliography and Textual Criticism at Oxford, argued for the place of bibliography at the centre of literary and historical understanding. The Cambridge University Press, 1696–1712: a bibliographical study (1966) led to a transformation of bibliographical studies. McKenzie edited the plays of Congreve and was elected Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 1980 while he was still living in New Zealand. After moving to Oxford, he was elected Fellow in 1986. Obituary by David McKitterick FBA.

Historians, even those specializing in the history of higher education, have traditionally been reluctant to undertake an exhaustive study of the curriculum at Oxford and Cambridge. Far more appealing was concern with the religious and political culture at Oxford and Cambridge, its roots in the larger national setting, and the varieties of its local manifestations. It was assumed that the chief studies at both universities were logic, physics, and metaphysics, and that the authors studied in the process were principally those indigestible commentators on the works of Aristotle. But in fact the curriculum was quintessentially devoted to the humanities. Of all the factors that contributed to the misinterpretation of the curriculum the most obvious, and most detrimental, have been the university statutes.

The reputation of Oxford science deteriorated sharply in the half-century following the Commissions of the 1870s. The Devonshire Commission had bestowed qualified praise on both Oxford and Cambridge for their efforts to promote the natural sciences. But the Asquith Commission was to contrast the distinction of Cambridge University in science education and basic research with a catalogue of Oxford University's defects. After the high hopes raised by the opening of the University Museum and the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford science failed to keep pace with developments at Cambridge. Schoolmasters had long advised their pupils to go to Cambridge for mathematics, but the tradition ‘Cambridge for Science, Oxford for Arts’ — which retained its hold in the public and grammar schools long after the 20th-century revival of the science departments at Oxford — had its origin in the late Victorian era. From a national perspective it could, of course, be argued that netther university responded adequately to the growing industrial need for scientists.

For the historian of 20th-century Oxford University it is tempting to regard the years before 1914 as belonging to an ancien régime. Yet a sociological perspective on Britain's system of higher education suggests, in A. H. Halsey's words, that ‘the modern university…began with the Victorians’. From an international standpoint, again, the years between the 1860s and the 1930s are recognized as a transformative phase in the history of Western universities, marked by professionalization, diversification, and a dramatic expansion — occurring most rapidly in the pre-war era, when admiration for the achievements of German universities was at its peak. If we narrow the focus to Oxford and Cambridge, there is no doubt that in the three decades before World War I they moved perceptibly closer to their modern form, as communities of professional scholars, in the business of education and the advancement of knowledge across an increasingly wide range of disciplines. Public image problems were compounded by an issue that primarily affected the resident academic community: the deficiencies in Oxford's machinery of governance and administration.

The introduction makes a case for the significance of the Scrutiny movement on the grounds of the highly varied, often opposing, programmes for literary education and cultural critique that it supported or influenced. It explains the dual focus of the book, on the movement of ideas and people from Cambridge and into schools and other settings, and on the ways Scrutiny approaches were reworked as they were redeployed. The introduction argues that the movement cannot be analysed convincingly without archival research and an examination of institutions and processes as well as texts. The book's methodology draws on social and cultural history and models an intellectual history concerned with intellectual practice as much as with ‘thought’.

The first chapter provides an interpretation of Scrutiny's literary criticism: it introduces the ideas, styles, narratives, and analytical procedures whose appropriation and extension is the main theme of the book. The chapter takes Leavis's college entrance examination papers as a way into understanding the sorts of criticism he sought to teach. His teaching materials and his published manifestoes marked out a critical discipline whose concern with the texture and operations of language at once focused on the text and claimed a wider cultural remit. This approach drew on the insights of I. A. Richards and T. S. Eliot, but developed them into a pedagogy. For Leavis the practice of criticism was inseparable from the pedagogy of criticism.

Charles Francis Digby Moule (1908–2007), a Fellow of the British Academy, was probably the most influential British New Testament scholar of his time. The youngest of their three children, he was born in the same house as his father, and spent a happy if often solitary childhood in China. Moule spent three years studying theology and training for Holy Orders in the Church of England at Ridley Hall. He soon had to take on leadership of New Testament teaching at the University of Cambridge for the Regius Professor, A. M. Ramsey. Moule was also fascinated, without losing his head as a critic, by the associated question of interaction between liturgy and literature in the early church, posed by such cultic interpreters of the gospels as G. Bertram. He joined the Evangelical Fellowship for Theological Literature, founded in 1942, an impressive body of younger authors that came to include Henry Chadwick, G. W. H. Lampe, S. L. Greenslade, and F. W. Dillistone; the moving spirit was Max Warren.

Charles Hilliard Feinstein (1932–2004), a Fellow of the British Academy, worked out the structure and size of the British economy from 1965 and back to mid-Victorian times. Beyond scholarship, his life subsumed a longer arc: the quest for an equitable South Africa in his youth, and its resumption in his final years. The economics that appealed to Feinstein were those of Karl Marx, and he submitted an honours dissertation on the labour theory of value. He was attracted to the University of Cambridge by the presence there of the Marxist economist Maurice Dobb, and the two remained close for years afterwards. In 1958, Feinstein took a research position in Cambridge's Department of Applied Economics, where he adapted national income series for immediate use. In 1963, he became an assistant university lecturer in economic history, and fellow and director of studies in economics at Clare College. Feinstein published a book entitled National Income towards the end of the heroic phase of historical national accounting.

Shortly after turning eighty, the Savilian professor of geometry John Wallis penned his apologia pro vita sua, in the course of which he indicated that during his student days at Cambridge University mathematics was hardly considered a proper university subject and experimental philosophy was nowhere to be found. Another octogenarian, Thomas Hobbes, recalled in his autobiography an Oxford system of education based on incomprehensible logic and sterile physics. For his part, John Locke regaled his admirers with how he, too, had misspent his time at Oxford, the upshot of which was that he was to lay the blame for his lack of application on the reigning tyranny of Aristotle. These and similar recollections need to be taken seriously in any historical study. In their haste to judge the universities as unenlightened institutions, incapable of contributing appreciably to the intellectual formation of great thinkers, scholars fail to realize that deprecatory expressions by aged alumni often recall events after a lifetime devoted to extending the frontiers of their respective fields.

This chapter describes John Stott's childhood and his education at Rugby School and Cambridge University. It recounts his evangelical conversion and the ways this shaped him. It explores his decision to embrace pacifism and consequent refusal to serve in the military in the Second World War.

Terence Wilmot Hutchison (1912–2007), a Fellow of the British Academy, was a historian of economics, methodologist, and acerbic critic of hubris and pretension amongst economists. He was born at Bournemouth and grew up in London. Hutchison's father was the flamboyant and much married Robert Langton Douglas, while his mother was Grace Hutchison. It was as a classicist that he went to the University of Cambridge in 1931. But Hutchison quickly lost interest in a subject that seemed to him to have little relevance to the economic turmoil of the world, and switched to economics, graduating in 1934 with a First. He left Cambridge in 1934 and registered as an occasional student at the London School of Economics (LSE). This chapter presents a biography of Hutchison and also narrates his trips to Germany, Iraq, and India, as well as his stints at the University of Hull, LSE, and the University of Birmingham.

Malcolm MacNaughtan Bowie (1943–2007), a Fellow of the British Academy, was appointed from an assistant lectureship at the University of East Anglia to one in the University of Cambridge in 1969. At Cambridge, he worked as a specialist in difficult poets in French beginning with ‘M’, particularly Henri Michaux and Stephane Mallarmé. These are writers of involuted complexity, to read whom both a sensitivity to how word play plays and to how French prosody in poetry or prose works were essential. These studies by Bowie were followed by work on mind-altering psychoanalysis: on Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. He was the first director of the Romance Languages Institute, ran its vigorous seminar programme, and gave this a strong international profile by his invitations. At the University of Oxford, Bowie set up the European Humanities Research Centre, followed by an associated publishing venture, Legenda.