Letters to a President

IV LONDON, 6 December 1960 DEAR BARNABY, We are a little stale after two and a half months, even though there has been much variety in them. We have seen eight universities, talked with unnumbered faculty, four vice-chancellors, a fair number of students, and several librarians. I have a file of clippings from the Times, Observer, Guardian, and other papers, and a collection of books, offprints, and pamphlets. This part of the academic sabbatical is now ending, and we shall, after the New Year, be pursuing the scholarly ends for which I have mostly come abroad. Southampton was excellent, and we have pressing invitations to come back, to talk to students, and perhaps to give a lecture or take a class. At dinner on our last night there, I met two historians, the professors of English Literature, Classics, German, and French, and the Bursar; with J. and myself we had a table where conversation was possible. I was asked to give my impressions of British Universities, which need not be repeated here; I was interested to see the variety of reactions to suggestions about the danger of too much stuffing as opposed to the stimulating of inquiry and research. The thought that expansion might be handled by the creation of new departments, Anthropology, History of Art, History of Science, Russian Studies, and so on, was strange also, and not exactly liked. J. is anxious to see the autonomy of departments broken down, more interchange between disciplines, the development of wider studies as opposed to the traditional pattern of Honours courses. Quite recently, Southampton has abandoned the general course; one comment we picked up was that it had not been much liked by students because the work was as hard as in the Honours fields, and asked for a scattering of effort, while in Honours one could concentrate and get better marks more easily. But I do not think the teaching staff quite appreciate the significance of the comment. On the way back to London we had about five hours in Reading, small but dynamic, a place to return to when I can. This University

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