Higher Education Reforms

University education in England was monopolised by Oxford and Cambridge Universities before the nineteenth century. Remarks about Oxford in 1800 included "inert, almost moribund professoriate" providing "superficial qualifications" to the well-born, holding examinations that "had become a farce", and "examiners were expected to ask, and did ask, traditional questions, the answers to which were learned by heart from schemes" (Mansbridge, as cited in Berdahl, 1959). Among the questions that were being asked at that time were:

Could the much-maligned eighteenth-century level of education at Oxford and Cambridge be raised by improving their curricula, their examination systems, and the character of their faculties and student bodies?

Could the administrative structures and statures of these universities and their constituent colleges be changed so as to remove existing ... restrictions and to make these institutions more easily adaptable to new national needs which might arise?

If the reforms implied by the [above] questions were not forthcoming from within the universities themselves, was it necessary, proper, or desirable for the state to intervene to bring them about? (Berdahl, 1959, p. 20)

Could similar questions be raised in Australia? The quality debates and various review processes in recent times were not unlike the debates in the nineteenth-century British Parliament that led to the setting up of royal commissions to investigate the functioning of Oxbridge universities and to suggest ways to improve them.

• Berdahl, R.O. (1959). British Universities and the State. In G. Lenczowski & E.B. Haas (Vol. Eds.), University of California Publications in Political Science (Vol. 7). Berkeley: University of California Press.