[Illustration: _PORCH OF ST. MARY’S. Drawn by J. Pennell._]
It is hardly necessary to say that in nine cases out of ten comment on the proceedings of a learned University takes the form of censure: nor are censors far to seek. There are always plenty of young men more or less connected with the Press who have wrongs to avenge; who are only too glad to have an opportunity of ’scoring off’ the college authority which did its best--perhaps unsuccessfully, but still with a manifest intention--to embitter their academic existence; or of branding once for all as reactionary and obscurantist the hide-bound regulations of a University which did not accord them the highest honours. In these cases accuracy of facts and statistics is seldom a matter of much importance. Generally speaking, you can say what you like about a college, or the University, without much fear of contradiction--provided that you abstain from mere personalities. For one thing, the cap is always fitted on some one else’s head. It is not the business of St. Botolph’s to concern itself with an attack which is obviously meant for St. Boniface: it is darkly whispered in the St. Boniface common-room that after all no one knows what actually _does_ go on in St. Botolph’s: and obviously neither of these venerable foundations can have anything to do with answering impeachments of the University and its financial system. Moreover, even if the Dons should rouse themselves from their usual torpor and attempt a defence, it is not very likely that the public will listen to them: any statement proceeding from an academic source being always regarded with the gravest suspicion. That is why ’any stick is good enough to beat the Universities,’ and there are always plenty of sticks who are quite ready to perform the necessary castigation.
Moreover, these writers generally deal with a subject which is always interesting, because it is one on which every one has an opinion, and an opinion which is entitled to respect--the education of youth. Any one can pick holes in the University system of teaching and examination--’can strike a finger on the place, and say, "Thou ailest here and here,"’--or construct schemes of reform: more especially young men who have recently quitted their Alma Mater, and are therefore qualified to assert (as they do, and at times not without a certain plausibility) that she has failed to teach them anything.