Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, November 1899: Volume LVI, No. 1 — John Shaqi
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, November 1899: Volume LVI, No. 1Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, November 1899: Volume LVI, No. 1
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
The Fellows are in most cases chosen from those men who have achieved
the greatest success in an honor course. At Cambridge College
individualism has progressed so far that the Fellows of, say, Magdalen
must be Magdalen men, the students of Queens', St Catherine's, or any
other being ineligible save for their own fellowships. Oxford obtains
perhaps better men on the whole by throwing open the fellowships of
each particular college to the graduates of all, thus producing a
wider competition. A fellowship until recently was tenable for life,
but it has been reduced to about six years, the Fellows as a whole,
however, retaining the power to extend the period of possession. And,
further, the holding of a college office for fifteen years in general
qualifies for the holding of a fellowship for life, and for a pension
as lecturer or tutor. Thus a man is able to devote himself to research
with little fear that at the latter end of his career he will lack the
means of support. It is perhaps not too much to say that the offices of
college dean, tutor, and lecturer are more perquisites than anything
else. They are meant to keep and attract men of ability and parts.
However, their existence reacts upon the student body by augmenting
the expenses of the latter out of proportion to the benefits to be
obtained. For instance, instead of utilizing one set of lecturers for
one class of subjects, which all students could attend for a small fee,
each of the larger colleges, at any rate, pays special lecturers, drawn
from its own Fellows, to speak upon the same subjects each to a mere
handful of men from their own college only. The tutor is another luxury
inherited from the middle ages and therefore retained, and one for
which the students have to pay dearly. The chief business of the tutor
is not to teach, but to "look after" a certain number of students who
are theoretically relegated to his charge. He looks up their lodgings
for them, pays their bills at the end of the term, gets them out of
scrapes, and draws a large salary. The tutorships seem to the writer
to be a good illustration of how an office necessary to one period
persists after that for which it was instituted has ceased to exist.
When the students of Oxford and Cambridge were many of them thirteen
and fourteen years of age, as in the fourteenth century, nurses were
doubtless necessary, but they are still retained when the greater
maturity of the students renders them not only unnecessary but at times
even an impertinence.
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