Preface

Summary

People work at Colleges in different ways. The Junior Bursar, as we call him at St John's—he may have other titles elsewhere—thinks of a College as a series of buildings, where roofs leak and taps freeze, and undergraduates complain of the bath system. The Steward thinks of a kitchen, a dinner committee of young men, a suggestion-book, cooks and commissariat. The Senior Bursar of St John's has written a valuable financial history of the College. Tutors live upon University regulations, the Reporter and the Ordinances, and think of examinations. Of all these things nothing will be found in this book; it cannot be used as a substitute for the Ordinances.

∏óλις γὰρ ἄνδρες—so I read in the first play of Aeschylus with which I wrestled as a schoolboy. If a state is to be thought of not as a series of monuments, trivial or magnificent, nor as a constitution, but as a human society of kindred blood and kindred aims, something of the same sort is true of a College; and that is the theme of this book. Perhaps—for I have friends across the Atlantic—my little book will cross the Ocean; and over there there may be those who will be ready to read in briefest outline (but, I hope, not without a human interest) how the University and its Colleges came into being as the result of the interplay of human needs, human passions and human hopes.