Universities in the UK and Ireland felt the impact of World War I In 1919 As a student at London University declared in the journal: "The whole earth is shrouded in shadow, and no place is darker than the university."
As young people volunteered to fight, large numbers of students were conscripted after 1916, school student numbers declined, and university buildings were appropriated for the war effort. In August 1914, a heated debate took place in the letters page of The Times over the wartime role of universities: university presidents asserted that their institutions would remain open, while other contributors sought to put pressure on all undergraduates to "show your duty to your fellow citizens" through immediate enlistment.
Important Idea: Sheldon Rothblatt described World War I as "a watershed in the relationship between the university and the state." Tomás Irish highlights the impact of the conflict on higher education in Britain, France and the United States, arguing that few institutions were as affected by the war as universities.
As Ireland points out, governments realized the importance of research and higher education to the nation's war effort, making World War I as much a scientific conflict as a military conflict.
During the war years and the post-war period, institutions similar to university and college departments were established in many countries, including the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (1915), the Council of Vice-Chancellors and Principals (1918), the University Grants Commission (1919), and the University Teachers' Association (1919).
In the years after the armistice, a large number of ex-servicemen began to pursue higher education. During the 1919-1920 session, nearly 17,000 ex-servicemen were enrolled in university institutions in Britain and Ireland, accounting for nearly half of the student population.
Ex-servicemen formed the core of student social services in the 1920s and were important in shaping the national student movement. However, scholarly work on postwar students remains limited. Although it has been noted that the "immediate influx of postwar students" was "driven by veterans' scholarships", there has been no systematic review of this phenomenon.
The retirement scheme is the first time the government has offered bursaries to individual students other than teachers, and the number of awards is unprecedented in UK higher education. David Fowler acknowledged that these measures affected "the social transformation of UK university systems".
The introduction of grants for ex-servicemen is a major development in the state's funding of students' higher education, with the presence of the war generation on university campuses raising questions about local commemorations. Furthermore, this group played an important role in rebuilding student life.
Related surveys are multi-layered, covering higher education policy and the development of the universities themselves. The literature on British higher education tends to be divided into surveys and institutional histories, with Oxford and Cambridge receiving particular attention.
By contrast, discussion of national developments can be combined with examples of specific institutions in London and England. Regarding London, the focus is on University College London (hereinafter referred to by the acronym UCL) and London Day Training College (LDTC, now UCL Institute of Education).
In the North East of England, consider the University of Durham, including one of its constituent institutions in Newcastle, Armstrong College. These examples have been chosen to reflect the diversity of the higher education sector in England.
Durham offers particularly rich material, both in that it attempted to imitate the model of the ancient university and, on the other, that its college in Newcastle had much in common with the civic universities that sprang up in several British cities in the nineteenth century.
The University of London was founded in 1826 and is the largest college in London. It offers a wide variety of courses in six colleges. On the eve of the First World War, there were 849 full-time students and 1357 part-time students.
The London Day Training College was founded in 1902 with the mission of training teachers for London's expanding school system. LDTC was jointly established by the London County Council and the University of London, and its emergence is related to national development.
Day training colleges have existed since 1890, reflecting the growing role of universities in education, and in this respect these colleges are "the ancestors of modern university departments of education".
In addition, after the Balfour Act of 1902, local educational authorities became actively involved in the training of teachers and established universities for this purpose. From 1902 to the outbreak of the First World War, 22 such institutions were established. By 1914, the LDTC had more than 300 students, most of whom studied the "four-year course", which consisted of three years at a college at the University of London, followed by one year of postgraduate training.
Durham University received a royal charter in 1832. With its university structure, Durham followed the example of Oxford University and Cambridge University . In fact, Robert Anderson (Robert Anderson) once said: "It was originally the Oxbridge of the northern gentlemen".
Well into the twentieth century, higher education in Durham was focused on theology and often had only a few hundred students, with many more attending the nearby University College, Newcastle upon Tyne, with 220 students in the medical school in 1913 and 722 in Armstrong College (founded in 1871).
Opinion: In some ways, Armstrong is similar to the "red brick" universities that emerged in the nineteenth century, as William Whyte said: "A different kind of education was expected to be provided in different environments for different types of students."
Armstrong's focus was on mining and science, and as a civil institution, it was established jointly with the local business elite and developed on the donations of the latter.
After the outbreak of war, student numbers across the UK fell sharply, although academic teaching continued, with more than 2,800 UCL members and more than 2,500 Durham members serving during the war.
At the time, the term "members" included students, ex-students, academic staff and other staff, including hundreds of young people who had been students or staff in the decade before the war broke out.
A large number of these never returned, with at least 301 UCL members and 325 Durham members falling during the war.
The situation of LDTC is somewhat different, which is related to its professional training. A shortage of teachers meant that timetables were revised to accommodate time at school, and female cadets were sent to boys' schools for the first time. However, there were also many male students in the LDTC engaged in wartime service.
By 1916, only 16 boys remained among the 211 students at LDTC, and a total of three staff members and thirty-seven students were killed in the conflict.
More than 25% of full-time students at Armstrong College and University College London are women, and among part-time students at UCL, women actually outnumber men.
Female students contributed to the war effort in many ways, with University College London's creation of the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) in 1914 being an example. Members served in the VAD's ambulance squad at St Pancras, some received care at military hospitals in France, and other female students supported the war effort in munitions factories and canteens, or joined the University of London's student body, working during the holidays.
Meanwhile, at Armstrong College, the fact that some women were leaving wartime service was brought up repeatedly in the student media.
Arms work is a very important job, which also reflects the prominent position of the arms industry in the economy. In December 1916, Armstrong's student magazine announced that a female Armstrong graduate had been killed while serving in the Scottish Women's Medical Corps, thus becoming "the first woman to give her life in the service of her country."
The university's support for the war effort went beyond the obligations of its members, and the research activities of many academic departments were directed toward the war effort, which also had an impact on teaching.
For example, University College London hosted more than 120 Belgian refugee students in 1915. Later in the war, the college founded the Canadian Khaki University London Campus, a YMCA-supported higher education program for members of the Canadian Armed Forces serving overseas, with more than 1,500 people taking such courses at UCL.
In addition, parts of University College London and several colleges in Durham were appropriated as military hospitals. The buildings in Newcastle and Armstrong were requisitioned at the same time, and they became the site of the Northern General Hospital, which provided medical services to more than 310,000 wounded soldiers.
Faculty, staff and students from the School of Medicine take an active role in the work of the hospital, and some students find themselves returning to their colleges as doctors. Meanwhile, lectures and courses were held elsewhere in Newcastle, with various local agencies "putting their premises at the disposal of evicted rough sleepers".
In contrast, the LDTC successfully resisted the War Department's attempts to expropriate buildings, and although the LDTC did provide temporary housing for several other training colleges, these were small sites and did not affect the normal operations of the LDTC.
After the armistice, demobilization led to a sharp increase in the number of students. Contemporaneous materials and historical records mention the words "flood" or "influx" of retired soldiers. Many students who took a break returned to their alma mater, while others started college courses for the first time.
By 1922, the total number of university students in England and Wales had almost doubled from before the war. The provost of University College London described 1919-1920 as a miracle in the history of British universities and said that 400 applicants had to be turned away from London universities due to lack of space.
At LDTC, more than 900 students took courses in 1921-1922, three times the number before the war.
But this situation does not hide significant regional differences. By 1921, the number of students at Durham University was approximately 1,100, of whom 900 were at Newcastle College, no significant difference from pre-war numbers.
This relative stagnation can be attributed to specific local constraints, with Armstrong College receiving little compensation from the War Office. Furthermore, as parts of Tyneside's economy struggled after the war, financial support from business proved unavailable.
Arms manufacturing is on a downward trend, followed by problems in shipbuilding and mining. As a result, Armstrong College found it difficult to accommodate the large number of new students, and temporary classrooms had to be housed in auxiliary army huts, which some teachers used until after World War II.
An article in The Northerner, the college's student magazine, commented: "We will be out of the classrooms sitting on windowsills." Space is an issue elsewhere, however, with growth in UCL's student numbers raising concerns about crowding and teaching capacity.
The national development is also a social expansion of the student body, with new funding arrangements enabling more young people to complete secondary education and go to university. Various private scholarships have been established by UK universities for ex-servicemen or their children, often to compensate for the loss of a son or father.
Of these, the Lord Kitchener Scholarship Scheme was by far the largest, however, the main measure to increase student numbers came from a national initiative, when in December 1918 the Board of Education announced a scheme to provide university bursaries to "former officers and soldiers of British nationality who had served in the Royal Navy, Army or Air Force during the war", using the appropriations provisions of the Fisher Education Act.
To understand the introduction of the bursary scheme for ex-service students, it is crucial to trace the schemes discussed before and during the war.
In 1913, the Board of Education established an advisory committee to examine the question of higher education scholarships. The committee was subsequently suspended due to the outbreak of war, but was subsequently resumed due to the urgency of postwar reconstruction planning.
The committee contrasted government support for university education in England and Wales with that in Germany and recommended a new scholarship scheme, which was not introduced until after the war.
German universities enjoy a high international reputation and have traditionally been a reference point in debates about higher education in the UK. Author's point of view: Keith Vernon believes that "Germany's steady encroachment of economic, imperial and military presence in the early twentieth century meant that their message was driven home to many people." And the conflict made this comparison more urgent.
About Scholarship Another stimulus for came from the field of adult education: the Workers' Educational Association (WEA), founded in 1903, a pioneering force in the field. Its activities range from excursions to summer schools, and university coaching classes have always been at the heart of its work.
These courses are offered by academics and funded by universities and authorities. From the beginning, Oxford's educational reformers were actively involved in the World Educational League, but the sparse number of undergraduates during the war raised further questions about the provision of higher education at Oxford and elsewhere.
References:
Balfour Act 1902
Fisher Education Act 1918
Armstrong State University student magazine "The Northerner" 1922
