The early nineteenth-century English university was a fellowship of
gentlemen, more precisely Anglican clergymen, who sought to imbue
their pupils with their own values by the subtle process of social osmosis
later dubbed ‘liberal education’. As bastion and bulwark of the state, the
university’s role was not to pursue knowledge but to protect it; tuition,
through the classical tripos, was about affi rming established truths, not
challenging them. This concept took on particular resonance in the wake
of the French Revolution: as Samuel Parr said in a much-quoted phrase,
the English university was a place in which ‘young men can be so largely
stored with principles that may enable them to detect the fallacy, and to
escape the contamination of those metaphysical novelties, which are said
to have gained a wide and dangerous ascendancy on the continent’.1
These ‘metaphysical novelties’ might be characterized as the ‘enlightenment
agenda’: an approach, a set of values, that espoused the cause of
Humanism, focusing on the achievements and potential of the human
race. Constructed in opposition to what was perceived as the hidebound,
static and oppressive doctrines of the Church and its political allies, the
enlightenment agenda posed a continual challenge to those in positions
of power, who saw it, with justifi cation, as ‘revolutionary’.2