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Competitive Examinations and the Culture of Masculinity in Oxbridge Undergraduate Life, 1850-1920

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Paul R. Deslandes
Paul R. Deslandes*
Affiliation:
Department of History at Texas Tech University
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Extract

As the primary means through which academic success was measured and professional credentials were established, competitive examinations for university degrees and civil service appointments became a frequently discussed topic among the Victorian and Edwardian elite in Great Britain. Students and dons (the term for college fellows with teaching and pastoral responsibilities) at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, as well as a whole range of outside observers, regularly commented on the importance of these exercises during the seven decades that passed between the curricular and administrative reforms of the 1850s and the conclusion of World War I, years in which these ancient institutions achieved their modern form and functioned, in the words of Jan Morris, as “power house [s]” and “conscious instruments of Victorian national greatness.” In an 1863 Student's Guide to the University of Cambridge, for example, J.R. Seeley, a famous Cambridge don and historian, celebrated the invigorating, youthful, and competitive nature of the Tripos (or Honors) examinations in a lengthy discussion of academic life: “Into these [examinations] flock annually the ablest young men … who during their University course have received all the instruction that the best Tutors, and all the stimulus that a competition well known to be severe, can give…. The contest is one into which the cleverest lads in the country enter [and] it may safely be affirmed that even the lowest place in these Triposes is justly called an honour.” By the 1860s, when Seeley first penned these comments, competitive examinations had become, in the words of one contemporary observer, “matters of … much interest and importance not only to those whose future success in life depended upon them, but to the public in general.” Public interest was further fueled, throughout this period, by numerous articles in the periodical press that discussed and debated the general value of competitive examinations and by the regular publication of test results in widely circulated, national newspapers such as the Times.

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History of Education Quarterly , Volume 42 , Issue 4 , Winter 2002 , pp. 544 - 578
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Copyright © 2002 by the History of Education Society 

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References

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