We are in Cambridge... a town that has survived on being a centre of high quality training and research. We walked along the Backwater Canal of Cambridge looking onto the magnificent colleges that form the heart of the city. Today, the colleges can generate income by charging the highest fees and rely on a stream of spin-off businesses to offset their enormous expenses. But to establish the colleges and build their reputations for high learning required centuries of generous subsidies from the church and government. You have to wonder... why was so much resource allocated to Cambridge and Oxford... when education standards in other parts of the nation were (generally) grossly inadequate?
Cambridge was started as the expulsion destination for students who couldn't fit in at Oxford. Politics in Oxford was problematic... on a couple of occasions major defections occurred... instances where some of Oxford colleges lost one-third of dons and students over disputes that today, are difficult to understand.
Plagues were good for Cambridge... clergy seemed vulnerable to catching the epidemic diseases... perhaps because they provided spiritual comfort to the sick and dying. The 'Black Death' of 1349 and 1361 wiped out one-third of the clergy. The church immediately opened up four new colleges at the University to train new clergymen, namely Gonville Hall, Trinity Hall, Corpus Christi and Clare. The sweating sickness epidemic in 1517 was particularly devastating to Oxford and Cambridge where it killed half of both cities' populations, including many students and dons.
These colleges were established at a time the English church was trying to embarrass their European political leaders. In the 14th century, English and European academics were starting to translate the writings of Greek philosophers. These writings challenged ideology of the European church, inspiring scientific discoveries and advancements in the arts, as society began to see itself in a new way. These colleges at Cambridge were supported by the Church in the hope of reconciling Greek philosophy and Christian theology that could lead to less centralisation of dogma in Rome and greater latitude for regional interpretation. The English church had no desire to educate the English peasants... they certainly didn't want peasants reading the Bible and making their own interpretations... but they wouldn't mind taking those pious twirps in Rome down a peg or two. As a result, Cambridge (and Oxford ) received a reliable flow of donations.
The relationship between "town and gown" was often uneasy – as the St Scholastica Day Riots of 1355 testify (39 students and townspeople were killed). Goodness me... in Cambridge, students could be overheard talking wicked blasphemy... such things as questioning the infallibility of the Pope... and even worse... suggesting that some of the religious icons were not real! For the safety of the students, walls were built around the colleges with strong oak doors to control access... and students were required to sleep in the colleges. This 'humidicrib' of intellectual intensity delivered outstanding results... not just for a year or two... but continuously over the centuries.
What can we learn from the experience of Cambridge? In Australia, Universities should insist on all students being full-time boarders... and accommodation must be cramped so that students have no option but to keep bumping into one another all the time. Their curriculum must be narrowly focused... so that all students are talking about the same topic. Acclaim must be given to any student who identifies a fault in current dogma... and cash given to students innovating better solutions to current problems.
The Cambridge experience indicates that this learning environment will deliver breakthroughs at a dramatic rate.
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