The argument that supports and opposes the expansion of university was the norm in public life in Britain in the 1950s. In the 1954 novel by Kingsley Amis, Jim Dixon's roommate and English colleague, Alfred Beesley, joined the debate.
He first praised a professor in his department because almost half of his first-year students failed, "all provincial universities go the same way..." he complained, "It would be easier to go to most places and try to get a person out and fire a professor just because he was too stupid to pass the exam.
This is the trouble of having so many people here to get grants from the education authorities, Dickson agreed with Beasley, but "not enough interest to say that." W Somerset Maugham (W. Somerset Maugham, while praising the " ominous meaning " expressed by Lucky Jim, condemning the role lineup of this new generation of men who rely on government-sponsored to college.
"They are mean, malicious, jealous..." He wrote on " Sunday Times " : "They are Amis 's point of view closer to Maugham than many people realize, and he quickly identified Beasley 's point of view as his own.
"Lucky Jim" (Lucky Jim) is often regarded as a red brick satirical work , more accurately a satire of university colleges, a subordinate of the educational hierarchy, and the fear of expansion is often directed at these institutions. Some universities located in disgraceful provincial cities are more likely to allow first-generation intruders to enter higher education.
"Lucky Jim" is not so based on Swansea , but rather on Leicester University College , Amis 's friend Philip Larkin (Philip Larkin) is a librarian, and Larkin's girlfriend Monica Jones (Monica Jones) teaches in English.
According to John Sutherland, all three of them are bothered because they " is destined to work in these humble non-Oxford institutions".
July 1960, in "Escape" , Amis slammed "College Digital Scam ", i.e. " has thousands of young people who can benefit from college training but somehow fail to find their own way out ", about the expansion plan of the university, Amis warned: "More means worse.
Amis 's work relies more on memorable wording and anecdotes than arguments, he has two key assumptions, first, academic ability is rare and limited , unlike "canned cars or salmon", students cannot add at will in a productivity drive, they are like "poetry or bottles...you can't decide to have more good people.
Secondly, students need to enter the university with enough knowledge to start learning meaningfully. In the past, his students might discuss “the subtleties of the pope’s use of caesarean section”, but now he has to spend time discussing “whose beauty of the pope is”, and if a student knows nothing about the pope from the beginning, he shouldn’t be there.
Although the example of Amis comes from his own topic, his broader goal is to defend humanities from future science-oriented universities through the command of the " quantitative thinker " who fears that Britain "lagged behind" the United States and Russia and needs to "catch up".
In February 1961, Amis and four Swansea colleagues published an article on " Observer " , which was a response to an article by Oxford University's Department of Education Peterson (A. D. C. Peterson), which called for the expansion of the university and the creation of more "related" courses, "aligned with the reality of the outside world" .
Amis and his colleagues opposed this "sharp remark that emphasizes the importance of science for the practical purposes of science" , and believed that "'s biggest threat to education at present is practicality" .
These fronts are already familiar. One side of the battle was led by C.P. Snow . He criticized the British elite's scientific illiteracy in the 1959 " Two Cultures" lecture. Left-wing writers such as Anthony Sampson, Michael Shanks and Anthony Crosland (Anthony Crosland) believe that the recession in Britain was accelerated by contempt for science and lack of national planning for skills shortages.
Sit on the same side most university presidents, such as Swansea president John Fulton , who was an enthusiastic supporter of expansion and later became the first vice president of Sussex University , Armis believes his move in Swansea was " scorching and inexplicable" quite common complaints about university leaders, then and now.
The other side is led by F. R. Levis, who defended the idea of university as “ Human Consciousness Center: Perception, Knowledge, Judgment and Responsibility” in his mean reply to Snow , Levis placed humanities, especially English at the heart of the university as an antidote to soulless utilitarian .
As early as 1953, before the expansion of post-war higher education really began, Levis criticized the egalitarian tendency of in 1944, believing that "Oxford and Cambridge made the country creamy " and that " Very long before the famous post-war education reforms related to welfare states, few people in the UK were able to prove their existence in universities were justified ".
must retain the excellence of ancient universities, because they not only make “ cloister vegetation possible, but also make the free play of the spirit and the concentration of humanitarian power possible, which is impossible anywhere else” .
This is roughly the position of Amis . Universities should not become tools for human planning or vocational training, but should become the center of autonomous learning, a moral and intellectual beacon for other parts of society. Amis and his colleagues clarified that they do not oppose science itself , but strive to judge science, "not through it to increase the ability to understand, but through contributions to our prosperity."
Snow's argument for " two cultures " mainly tends toward elite university and metropolitan literature life. At this time, the UK continuing education and higher education actually mainly focus on science - especially in red brick , red brick college has always been more open to applied science and connections with local industries than Oxford and Cambridge. After the war, the proportion of students participating in mathematics and high school courses increased steadily, reaching a peak of 64.5% in 1960. This share of the increase translated into universities. From 1949 to 1961, the number of students in science and technology increased by 63%, and the number of students in humanities and science increased by only 30%.
Since most science students are male , this exacerbated the gender gap, and in the early 1960s, women accounted for 23% of students, down from nearly 30% in the 1920s.
However, since the early of 960s, the proportion of humanities and social science students began to rise. In 1960, abolished national service was a factor because science graduates entering the industry were tax-free.
Another is 962 Education Act , which requires local authorities to pay tuition and maintenance grants. This support broadens young people's choices to stay away from careers. working-class students no longer need to receive teacher training to learn humanities .
Women who could have attended Normal College are now in college. By 1966, women accounted for more than 40% of students in Kent University , York University and East Anglia University .
As Peter Mandler points out, Amis admits in his Encounter that he doesn't like "a place called a university, but actually a rather less charming and authentic training academy" which is "a clear feminine accusation".
Amis refers to Normal College , where about 70% of the students are women. In Lucky Jim, Armis lamented "the pressure of throwing the first aside like a teaching diploma", which also has the same gender color .
Education historian Harry Armitage (Harry Armytage) complained that most 18-year-olds "like lemming...jumping into already overcrowded waters of art and social sciences under some kind of compulsive hallucination, leaving the dry land of pure and applied science. But it is nothing like lemming. "
New knowledge and service economy does not depend on the skills of a particular discipline, and graduates have flourished in the years, with teaching, social work, law, accounting, business, industrial management mostly willing to accept art and science graduates in the media, local and central government.
Kingsley Amis' intervention in college continued until the 1960s.
1961, Amis became a researcher at Peterhouse College in Cambridge, and later wrote, " hopes for a displacement return to Oxford, an echo of its romantic view, which is enhanced by the enhancement of time."
But he was disappointed with Cambridge and resigned in 1963 to become a full-time writer, and to some extent he still cared about educational standards, targeting the 1963 Robbins report, which called on the university to use undeveloped talent in the population, and he complained that university teachers were already dealing with the " undeveloped talent pool ".
In an April 1965 letter to The Observer, Robbins criticized an article about college dropouts that ignored "the almost constant reason for failure - inadequate ability, or overly stupid" .
Robbins claims that in today’s college class, lecturers take up valuable time to explain who T.S. Elliot is, “thick people get what they need”, while “smart people doodle” do nothing in the classroom, these are more grumpy and colorful versions of what he has said before.
But Armis 's focus is now shifting, from 's fear of scientific domination to the ideological ideology of arts and social sciences axe grinding.
July 1967 " Daily Telegraph " article " Why Lucky Jim Turns Right" , he explains how his contempt for left-wing thought spread to his contempt for , from " Chelsea poetry attacks South Africa's apartheid" to "the first swing of protests against the song industry."
Three months ago, the first student sit-in was staged at London School of Economics . Over the next two years, about half of British universities held demonstrations, and the riots originated in the departments of arts and social sciences, and other science students were rarely involved.
Amis is not the only one who sees university courses as a breeding ground for subversion and evidence of stupid expansion. In a speech in June 1968, Conservative MP Enoch Powell (Enoch Powell) refuted the Labor government's idea of increasing the number of students leading to economic growth.
This happened two months after Enoke Powell's 's "Blood River" speech, which led to students holding demonstrations against Powell in several university towns. In the case of growing student dissatisfaction, he believes that viewing students as " means of providing future economic growth " led them to bargain on the terms and conditions of willingness to provide the service, replicating the union's strike and shutdown methods.
Powell 's solution will be proposed more and more in the next few decades. He said that only the market can determine how universities develop : " If a lecturer is incompetent, then his lecture hall will be empty; if a course is futile, the number of applicants will be small; if qualifications are irrelevant, the method will not be sought, or things should be like this."
The same month as the speech of Powell , the current librarian at Hull University Philip Larkin wrote to the novelist Barbara Pim (Barbara) Pym), tells the story of a student sitting in a silent office in an administration building, who was briefly imprisoned in an administration building.
He told her that the university had expanded “ suicide ”, “ now has to change to fit the kind of people we take in: exams become easier, places become like factories ”, in his letter, Larkin has long hated humanity, perhaps over-eating for comedy effects, about students invading the place and destroying his peace. Now, he connects this naive idea with a feeling that the country is being ransomed by decadent and ungrateful young people, and as students become increasingly striking, they concentrate their anxiety about wider social change. "It may sound snob," Larkin wrote to Pim again in March 1973, "but I do think that now we are educating children of the strike class.
