Tag: Cambridge

  • Higher education postcard: University of Cambridge, the Senate House

    Higher education postcard: University of Cambridge, the Senate House

    Greetings from Cambridge!

    Today’s card shows the Senate House at the University of Cambridge. Building started in 1722, the Senate House opened in 1730, and it was completed in 1768 (yes, that is the right order of events). It was designed by the Jameses Gibbs and Burroughs (the latter being master of Gonville and Caius); woodwork by James Essex the Elder; and ceiling plaster by Artari and Bagutti.

    As the name suggests, it was built as a meeting place for the university’s senate. And until 1926, the senate was a very big deal at Cambridge, being the governing body, in charge of everything. And since its members comprised everybody who held a Cambridge MA, it was a quite a thing to get a decision made. (I’ve blogged previously on the Microcosmographia academica, which is concerned with the politics of getting things agreed within the University of Cambridge senate).

    In 1926 things took a turn for the senate – its governance functions were given to the Regent House. Senate is now mostly responsible for electing the university’s chancellor and for electing the High Steward, who oversees senate procedure.

    There’s currently an election on for the University of Cambridge chancellor, which is all very exciting. For certain values of exciting. There’s ten candidates, including a big ticket HE name (Lord John Browne, he of the Browne review); big political names (former MP and cabinet minister Lord Chris Smith; Brexit campaigner Gina Miller); and the ubiquitous Sandi Toksvig. Voting takes place in person at the Senate House for two days in July; or online for about a week in July.

    When it’s not being used for cancellarial (it’s a real word, honest) elections – which is most of the time, in fact – Senate House is also used for graduation ceremonies at Cambridge. I’ve written before about one aspect of these; safe to say that there’s lots of other local peculiarities. At Cambridge, for example, each graduation is a separate decision of the governing body, so a special meeting of the Regent House (and before then, of the senate) is held for each ceremony. I suspect this may be where be get the notion of the degree congregation, which language I’ve heard used at other universities.

    There’s also an order of precedence for the colleges at graduation, established in the Statues and Ordinances. It is: King’s College, Trinity College, St John’s College, Peterhouse, Clare College, Pembroke College, Gonville and Caius College, Trinity Hall, Corpus Christi College, Queens’ College, St Catharine’s College, Jesus College, Christ’s College, Magdalene College, Emmanuel College, Sidney Sussex College, Downing College, Girton College, Newnham College, Selwyn College, Fitzwilliam College, Churchill College, Murray Edwards College, Darwin College, Wolfson College, Clare Hall, Robinson College, Lucy Cavendish College, St Edmund’s College, Hughes Hall, and Homerton College. And this isn’t strictly the order in which the colleges were established or admitted as colleges. If anyone knows why, please let me know!

    Senate House has seen its share of high jinks. Most notable, perhaps, is the 1958 incident where students contrived to place an Austin Seven on its roof. Here’s the Liverpool Daily Post, reporting with an admirable straight face on plans for its retrieval.

    Eagle eyed readers may remember that this stunt was followed by a similar, suspending an Austin from the Bridge of Sighs.

    Here, as always, is a jigsaw of the card – hope you enjoy it.

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  • Higher education postcard: Hughes Hall, Cambridge

    Higher education postcard: Hughes Hall, Cambridge

    Greetings from Cambridge – and unlike last week, this time we’re definitely in England.

    It is 1878, and the Cambridge Independent Press of 7 December reports that the university has taken steps to enable the training of teachers. The Teachers’ Training Syndicate (its Cambridge-ese for a committee or working group, I think) is to be established, to oversee programmes of training for students intending to become school teachers, and the colleges at which they train.

    Image: Shutterstock

    All of this took place in the context of increased state engagement with school education: the provision of schools for all children was becoming increasingly necessary, and local authorities of various kinds (it’s complicated!) were empowered to fund such schools.

    And it stands to reason that where you have schools, you need teachers. And by then the practice of teaching was becoming increasingly professionalised. Plus, it was one of the few professions open to women.

    And so in 1885 the Cambridge Training College for Women was opened. Initially based at Newnham College, there were fourteen students, under the guidance of the college’s first principal, Elizabeth Phillips Hughes. Hughes was the first woman to gain first class honours in moral sciences at Cambridge, having studied at Newnham. (She also helped to found the Barry Teachers Training College, which ultimately became part of the University of South Wales, and helped to draft the statutes of the University of Wales). She remained principal of the new college until 1899, steering it from its modest start to a new building – that shown on the card – in 1895.

    The driving forces behind the establishment of the college included Miss Frances Buss, champion of girls’ education, and one of the subjects of an anonymous verse of some fame:

    Miss Buss and Miss Beale

    Cupid’s darts do not feel.

    How different from us

    Miss Beale and Miss Buss.

    Miss Beale was Dorothea Beale, suffragist, headmistress of Cheltenham Ladies’ College and one of the founders of St Hilda’s College, Oxford. And it seems that the pioneers of women’s education had a lot to put up with.

    At this point Hughes Hall was not a college. (It wasn’t even Hughes Hall yet!) It was only after the university recognised women as full members (in 1947, less than a lifetime ago) that the college gained recognition as part of the university (albeit not yet a college) and was renamed Hughes Hall. This was in honour of Elizabeth Phillips Hughes, the first principal; its full name at that time was Elizabeth Phillips Hughes Hall.

    It began to admit male students in 1973: the first of Cambridge’s all-women institutions to do so. In 1985 Hughes Hall became an “approved foundation” of the university (it’s the step below being a full college) and in 2006 Hughes Hall became a college of the university, with a charter and everything. And a full name – for Sunday best or when it has been naughty – of The President and Fellows of Hughes Hall in the University of Cambridge.

    Hughes Hall admits only mature students (judged by age not attitude), to both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. It still teaches education, both as an academic subject and as a PGCE, as well as programmes across other disciplines.

    This post owes its origins to the eagle-eyed Professor Chris Brooke of Homerton, Cambridge, who corrected me about wat was shown on the card. I’d shared the card as one of my daily posts on Bluesky thinking it was Homerton. But it definitely isn’t!

    Here’s a jigsaw of the card – hope you enjoy it.

    Backstory

    A couple of you have asked about the #HigherEducationPostcard backstory.

    It started about ten years ago when I was in a Cardiff antiques mall, sheltering from the rain. One of the stalls had books and old postcards, and when browsing the latter I found half a dozen showing universities. Which I thought was quite cute. So I bought them.

    Fast forward to 2020 and the pandemic. The first few months were scary for lots of reasons, and if you were self-employed in the HE sector the question of how to do consulting without being on site was very much front and centre. And whilst sitting at my desk trying to solve this puzzle I noticed the small stack of postcards, and thought I’d share them on Twitter. They were really popular, so I thought I could carry on doing this. But where to get postcards? eBay, mostly. And so I started bidding. And then the collection sort of growed. Its at about 1200 cards now, in fifteen albums with a stack of a couple of hundred still to be scanned and filed.

    In the summer of 2020 I ran a #HigherEducationPostcard world cup on Twitter – 32 cards, paired off, the one with most votes went through to the next round. In the final, Swansea University beat van Mildert College, Durham; thousands of votes were cast, each institution getting its students, staff and alumni to join in. It was great fun!

    I’d been posting daily on Twitter, and when in summer 2021 Paul Greatrix retired from weekly Registrarism blogposts on Wonkhe, I suggested that I write a weekly higher education postcard blog. The good folk at Wonkhe towers said yes, and here we are, 170 posts later. My only rule is that I have to own the actual postcard; and I try to make them interesting and informative. And mostly true. I really enjoy writing and sharing them, and have no plans to stop just yet. I hope you like them too. Thanks for reading!

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  • Higher education postcard: Churchill College, Cambridge

    Higher education postcard: Churchill College, Cambridge

    It’s 31 March 1949, and Winston Churchill, now Leader of the Opposition, was visiting the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

    He was impressed by what he saw, and thought that the UK should have its own version, a postgraduate university focusing on science and technology. Fast forward six years, and Churchill had retired after his second spell as Prime Minister. His private secretary, John Colville, sought to progress the idea, but could not make as much progress as he had hoped.

    Parallel with, and unconnected to, Churchill’s idea, Shell Petroleum had since the early 1950s been hosting meetings at which leading British industrialists identified a need for a specialist institute to train people for the science and engineering industries. Again, this came to nothing.

    But then in 1957 the two schemes were revivified and brought together. Alexander Todd, Nobel Prize-winning chemist, worked with Carl Gilbert, chairman of Gillette and sometime US trade representative, to make the case for a Cambridge college which would focus on science and technology. And one which would stand as a memorial to Churchill. And so in 1958 an appeal for funds was made (as can be seen from the Scotsman of 21 May 1958, no public funds would be available at first), with some £3.5 million being raised to finance the college and its initial activities.

    The money was raised, with contributions from industry and also from the Transport and General Workers Union (which all confirms L P Hartley’s motto in The Go-Between: “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”). And it was a period of industrial largesse to higher education: in researching this piece I came across a wonderful article – in the Brechin Advertiser (29 July 1958) but no doubt syndicated more generally – by Richard Martin, on the donations to Churchill College, St Catherine’s Oxford, and for new buildings fore engineering at UCL. “The universities have been given the financial tools, and they will not fail to finish the job.”

    Very deliberately, although the college was intended to focus on science and technology, it would not exclude the humanities. This was the period of C P Snow versus F R Leavis, two cultures versus one. Snow – scientist, civil servant, novelist – argued in The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution that the problems of society were exacerbated by the failure of many who would be considered well educated (ie in the humanities and classics) to know anything about science:

    A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: ‘Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?’

    (To avoid embarrassment at this point, I will remind you that the second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy or disorder of a closed system is always increasing. Which you already knew.)

    Snow’s view was attacked (there is no better word) by critic F R Leavis in 1962: Snow was a philistine; his vision soulless technocratic utilitarianism. Viewed as an attack which played the man not the ball (but note here a defence of Leavis from 2013), the row did not do much to damage Snow’s view.

    The founders of Churchill College clearly thought there was merit in Snow’s views; hence the requirement that only 70 per cent of the entry be for students of science and technology.

    The college was given a Royal Charter in 1960, and admitted a few postgraduate students in that year. The first undergraduates arrived the following year. By 1966 Churchill had been admitted as a full college of the university and by 1968 all of the original buildings had been completed and opened.

    Churchill College was amongst the first of Cambridge’s all-male colleges to admit women (in 1972). Its senior tutor – Dick Tizard – sought to broaden admissions to focus on grammar school and comprehensive school students, not focusing on the public schools. He also worked to achieve the admission of students to membership of the college governing body, in 1969.

    In 1970 the Churchill College JCR, along with the University of Bristol Students’ Union, persuaded the NUS to take up an appeal by two students – Julian Fox of Bristol, and Hugh Nelson Ricketts of Churchill – against decisions of the local returning officers to disbar them from the electoral register because they were not permanently resident at their term time addresses. The Court of Appeal – with Lords Denning, Widgery and Karminski – on 12 May 1970 granted the students appeal. The OfS now requires universities to assist students in registering to vote: quite some distance has been travelled in this matter!

    Winston Churchill is not without controversy. In 2020 the college announced a working party which would organise a year-long programme – on Churchill, race and empire. The university archives hold some recordings from this. Not, perhaps, surprisingly, this attracted a considerable amount of media attention and criticism: Churchill is a revered figure for some in Britain. The college cancelled the series of events in June 2021.

    There’s a very readable history of the college on its website (click on “the college’s first decade” in the fuchsia box), by the way, from which I’ve drawn fairly heavily in this account.

    And here’s your jigsaw of this week’s card – enjoy!

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