Record of the visit of the University of Paris, College de France, and French provincial universities to the University of London, Whitsuntide, 1906.
- University of London
- Date:
- 1907
Licence: In copyright
Credit: Record of the visit of the University of Paris, College de France, and French provincial universities to the University of London, Whitsuntide, 1906. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.
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![The third point to which I must call attention is that in the eighteenth century a sharp difference of opinion arose as to the best conditions of University education. At that date the Universities passed through a period of torpor. Adam Smith, the economist, inveighed very bitterly against them. ' In the Universities,' he said, ' the youth neither are taught, nor can always find any proper means of being taught, the sciences which it is the business of those incorporated bodies to teach.' He was thus led to the opinion that endowments are harmful rather than useful to education, and that the highest average of efficiency is attained by teachers whose emoluments are derived directly from the fees of their pupils. He also condemned the 'exclusive privileges' which were conferred on Universities and their colleges by compelling those who aimed at a degree to reside within them. It is noteworthy that precisely opposite opinions were held by Dr. Samuel Johnson. Far from thinking that the Universities were too rich, he held that they were insufficiently endowed. ' They have nothing,' he said, ' good enough to keep a man of eminent learning with them for his life. . . . Our Universities are impoverished of learning by the penury of their provisions. I wish there were many places of a thousand a year at Oxford to keep first-rate men of learning from quitting the Uni- versity.' Nor did he think that the place where learning is acquired is a matter of indifference. He held that the 'great advantage of a University [is] that a person lives in a place where his reputation depends upon his learning.' In the terminology of the Darwinian theory Johnson may be said to have insisted on the influence of the environ- ment, Adam Smith on the bracing effect of the struggle for existence. The one would mitigate the struggle by placing the student amid favourable surroundings in which learning is valued and secure of a moderate financial reward; the other, ' careless of the single life,' would](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24749631_0084.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
