Word: redbricks
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Redbrick Rebuttal...
...Redbricks abound in able professors, from Leeds's noted Chemist Frederick Dainton to Swansea's Novelist Kingsley (Lucky Jim) Amis. But not all redbrick dons are happy with their "exile" from cozy Oxbridge. Novelist Amis himself is shifting soon to Cambridge. Says Nobel Prizewinner Cecil Frank Powell, head of Bristol's topnotch (cosmic rays) physics department: "We've got Cambridge licked in our department-but Cambridge nevertheless has something we can never match...
Anxious Panting. That something is the ancient ambiance of Oxbridge-the sheer delight of living and jousting with England's finest minds. And redbrick students rarely match those at Oxbridge...
Livelier students are on the way: Oxbridge refuses to expand, and redbricks are beginning to get graduates of Britain's top private schools. But not for many years will redbrick products be Top People in the Establishment. Three-quarters of all university graduates in the House of Commons, for example, are Oxbridge products. Though industry and the foreign service are softening, they still snap up more Oxbrigians than redbrickers...
Decline or Survival? Purists complain that free tuition and redbrick expansion are debasing everything old and dear in English higher learning. "MORE will mean WORSE," wrote Novelist Amis recently. Expansionists reply that even the current boom in higher learning is dangerously smaller than that in any comparable country. Former Economist Editor Sir Geoffrey Crowther recently called Britain's backwardness "a formula for nation al decline," urged lowering degree standards to increase graduates. Most Britons are convinced that national survival depends on the future of the redbrick revolution-even if much British nostalgia still rests upon the ancient spires...