VI - MODERN TIMES

Summary

Very recent history, whether of a college or anything else, poses inevitable problems of perspective. It is all too easy, both for the observer and for those engaged in making them, to fail to discriminate between decisions of long and of short term significance, particularly in an era when changes are multifarious and momentous. The history of the modern college, therefore, is made all the more difficult to write by the fact that E. A. Benians could characterize the years between 1918 and 1940 as a period of change ‘unexampled in the history of the university’. At the same time, he summarized the scale of the transformation which took place in the years between the wars in words we will do well to mark.

Never before [he said] had there been in the same time so rapid an increase in the number of teachers and students, in the facilities for research in the arts and sciences, or such multiplication of buildings by university and colleges. The decisive power and leadership restored to the university in 1926 after centuries of subordination was followed by activities impartially distributed around the whole circumference of academic knowledge.… The colleges opened wide their doors to welcome a new stream of students.

Benians, of course, spoke as vice-chancellor and of phenomena marking the history of the university in general; but what he said is relevant to the history of St John's College as much as it is to the history of any other part of the university.