Word: redbricks
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...Snow. "There is too little of it. It is too narrow both in spread and concept." Under fire is the sheltered snobbery of Oxford and Cambridge, whose 18,000 students so easily inherit British power and glory. Equally resented is the impersonal lecture system at the 19th century urban redbrick universities, whose 46,000 students often feel like social second-raters. Higher education has become a major British political issue. The Conservative gov ernment is about to produce a report, three years in the making, that is expected to recommend even further expansion, and the Labor Party cries that "Britain...
Sargent's suggestion is to group students and dons of a given field of study in the same college, in which they are then better able to specialize. This decision by faculty is already in effect at most of the "Redbrick" British universities, and at many American ones...
...glaringly evident in its educational system, which produces only 1,780 university students per million citizens-roughly Turkey's rate-v. 16,670 in the U.S. At that, the social chasm between the elite undergraduates of quasi-aristocratic Oxbridge and the more numerous plebeians who attend the provincial redbrick universities is such, in the words of Sir Alexander Carr-Saunders. former director of the London School of Economics, that "four-fifths of our undergraduates feel inferior for life." This snobbishness Sampson wryly labels the Pox Britannica...
...Redbrick Rebuttal...
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...