18th Century British Universities

One might expect, then, that the eighteenth century would have been an age of brilliance, or at least of solid achievement, in British universities. However, the contrary seems to have been the case, as reflected in both contemporary accounts and in modern scholarship. At the English universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the eighteenth century was a Dark Age of relatively few students and little scholarship. In the words of Adam Smith, the pioneer economist, it was a time when Oxford professors made "scarcely even a pretence" of teaching (Smith, 1976, p. 284).

The condition of the University of Dublin, commonly referred to as Trinity College, Dublin, appears to have been somewhat better. Dean Swift, a graduate, wrote in a letter that

. . . there is an university in Ireland founded by Queen Elizabeth with a much greater discipline than either in Oxford or Cambridge (Maxwell, 1946, p. 113).

Certainly Trinity College's graduates in the eighteenth century were not witho

. . .
s maintained a greater air of seriousness and did not decline as far, but has no special remarks on Trinity College Dublin (p. 12). Kneller dismisses the entire period from the end of the sixteenth century until well into the nineteenth with a brief chapter entitled "Centuries of Somnolence" (Kneller, 1955, pp. 14-19). Michael Sanderson, ed., The Universities in the Nineteenth Century, is concerned with the revival of the universities in the century following that with which we are concerned, and which he dismisses as the "nadir of lethargy" (Sanderson, 1975, p. 26). All of these authors paint a broadly consistent picture of the character of the English universities in the nineteenth century. The statutes under which they were governed were archaic, dating at Cambridge to Queen Elizabeth I in the late sixteenth century, and at Oxford to Archbishop Laud in the early seventeenth. They were widely regarded as training schools for the Anglican clergy  at a time when the status and influence of the clergy was in steep decline. The course of study  especially at Oxford, with its emphasis on grecoroman classics, was increasingly regarded as irrelevant to the practical educational requirements of men of affairs. The places s
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