Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: Some Preliminary Conjectures
- Chapter 1 University Clubs and Societies and the Organization of Knowledge
- Chapter 2 Learned Societies, Clubs, and Coteries: Some Knowledge Nodes
- Chapter 3 Members of Learned Societies
- Chapter 4 Matter: The Work of Learned Societies, Clubs, and Coteries
- Chapter 5 Manner: The Formation of Commensurability
- Chapter 6 Knowledge and Power
- Some Concluding Observations
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 1 - University Clubs and Societies and the Organization of Knowledge
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 May 2021
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: Some Preliminary Conjectures
- Chapter 1 University Clubs and Societies and the Organization of Knowledge
- Chapter 2 Learned Societies, Clubs, and Coteries: Some Knowledge Nodes
- Chapter 3 Members of Learned Societies
- Chapter 4 Matter: The Work of Learned Societies, Clubs, and Coteries
- Chapter 5 Manner: The Formation of Commensurability
- Chapter 6 Knowledge and Power
- Some Concluding Observations
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Oxford is the most cosmopolitan University in the world. A man can make his way at Oxford if he has the will; it does not depend upon birth or social status, but work.
Joseph WrightIt was Cambridge, and Cambridge alone, that in fact brought [Henry Maine] into the light and placed him within reach of the opportunities adequate to his power. He started without any advantage of birth, fortune, or interest. He entered the University an unknown young man; he left it marked as one of the most brilliant scholars of his time.
Frederick William PollockThey welcomed me cordially, and almost immediately introduced me to a small society which then I think formed – with the exception of the well-known ‘Apostles’ – the only thing in the nature of a speculative club or gathering in Cambridge. It has been termed the Grote Club, but we knew it by no name; indeed its small size and brief life, hardly deserved that it should have one. Still, I for one, owe it much, if only for the friends I made there, and for the incalculable advantage of my being there first introduced to keen and perfectly free discussion of fundamental principles – an experience rarer forty years ago than many would now believe.
John VennJOSEPH Wright, an autodidact, the son of a quarryman and poacher, began work as a donkeyboy at the age of six. He got himself a German education and then returned to Britain to become Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford. When Wright rather peremptorily sacked a lecturer at the Taylor Institution, Paul Vinogradoff remarked acidly, ‘put a peasant in power and you create a tyrant’. Henry Maine, the son of a physician, became Regius Professor of Civil Law at Cambridge and later Master of Trinity Hall. As their careers illustrate, the universities in the nineteenth century opened some ways out of the ancien régime. The triposes at Cambridge and the honours schools at Oxford, with their finely tuned classification of candidates for degrees, identified talent and certified merit. The great accomplishment of the universities in the nineteenth century was the revolution of the dons. In response to enhanced examinations in the honours schools and the triposes, reforming senior members clawed teaching back from coaches in the towns into the colleges. The effect was to prepare junior members for offices in church and state.
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- Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2015