TRADITION STILL STRONG SAYS LEYS

"The modern gods of Efficiency and Vitality will get them yet: Oxford and Cambridge will one day be offering their graduates courses in business and instruction in industrial administration". So prophesied Mr. C. F. Adams '56, ten years ago in the Crimson of September 19, 1913, in an interview which sought to show the differences between Oxford University and Harvard University in part as follows:

"The horse-car hustle of Harvard and the scholastic quiet at Oxford cannot find place in the same category. In Oxford, man walks, talks, and has his being in an atmosphere of scholasticism.

"In America the tide has steadily set toward what may be termed the democratizing of higher education. Democratizing means always materializing and commercializing; it means the rush for business, for mere money making.

The English are more conservative, and their traditions are deeeper rooted than ours. Consequently their Universities are enjoying a longer immunity from the sweep and rush of modern conditions. But they will succumb".

Mr. K. K. M. Leys, exchange tutor from University College, Oxford, when asked last night to discuss Mr. Adams' assertion as to a traditional academic Oxford, and a modern commercialized Harvard, commented as follows:

"In the first place you must understand that I am too ignorant of condi- tions in America to express any opinion on them: I have but just begun to collect opinions of Harvard University. And even in English universities, my experience has been such as to enable me to speak with authority of but one of them,--and that one naturally enough, is Oxford.

Tradition for Liberalism

"However in regard to this forecast, I am puzzled to know just what were the traditions of which Mr. Adams speaks. If you live for a long time in the midst of traditions you soon cease' to be conscious of them. But if tradition means that the University should concern itself, as far as the teaching of undergraduates is involved, with a liberal education, then tradition at Oxford is still strong.

"It is true that in recent years teaching in the sciences has been developed. Several laboratories have been established in the University, and among them is one in Engineering Sciences. But so far as I know, opinion in the University has never encouraged the narrower kind of professional training. There have been, so far as I remember, few opportunities except in the three so called learned professions, law, medicine, and the church. The university has been the home of these studies ever since the Middle Ages. But there is no provision for the study of business administration, journalism, and so on, although there are occasionally lectures in the University by persons of distinction in practical questions such as modern economics, labor, or unemployment.

University Men In Business

"Although I have not much intimate knowledge of the busines world, I believe that there is a tendency among the better business men of Britain towards a distinct preference for men with liberal education rather than specialized vocations. It is a movement which I believe will grow. In the past, men of business have feared some lack of a steady habit of application among liberally-educated University graduates. Now they are finding that there is no reason to suspect this result: a man who has done well in one of the University's honor schools will probably do his work harder and faster than most men of his own age brought up in business.

"Oxford and Cambridge have never taken the opinion that they must turn out men equipped to win an immediate livelihood. Education should introduce a man into a particular kind of life; it may or may not bring him a livelihood.

"Differences in tradition then, and differences in the demands of business may possibly be the cause for the differences in instruction which Mr. Adams noted between the English and the American universities.