Cambridge University and Clare College since World War 2

I am no historian, but it is my view that Clare College and the University changed more in the fifty years following the Second World War than in the previous 500. When I was elected a Fellow of Clare College in 1960, there were 34 Fellows – from young Research Fellows on three-year terms to get them started on the academic ladder, to retired professors – all of whom seemed to know each other and their families. Now instead of 34 Fellows, at a recent count there were 134! That is not just an expansion – that is a sea-change. We have seen developments not only in the make-up of the Fellowship, but also in the student body, in the organisation of the Colleges and the University, and in the physical infrastructure of Cambridge itself.

I think one can see the war as a catalyst for change in various ways. Radar and the atomic bomb were the ultimate symbols of high technology in the modern world, but research penetrated into much of the minutiae of the war. For example I can remember coming across a war-time research paper by my later PhD supervisor, Prof Sir Nevill Mott, about the theory attending an explosion: does the casing of a bomb or shell break up into a few large pieces or a wide shower of shrapnel, and how does one control which? Mott later became one of the leaders in creating the Cambridge Science Park for individual industrial research centres. In the post-war world, every country wanted to have an educated workforce, which was the driver behind significant government investment and the expansion of universities. Graduate education saw significant increases and subjects became more specialised.

Of course many changes had their roots in the 19th century. There was the admission of Quakers (such as I am) and others not baptised in the Church of England. Girton and Newnham Colleges were founded in 1869 and 1871 respectively with the admission of women to lectures, although they were not given University degrees until well after World War 2. The founding of the Cavendish Laboratory for Physics in 1874 was deeply significant. But here I will explore the changes that came in the wake of the Second World War.

Students during and after the war were of a different generation. Long after some ex-servicemen had passed through, our students still had personally known family members and others who had gone through the war, many not much older than themselves. Furthermore, compulsory military service continued until the 1950s.

Not long after the war, the legal age of majority in the UK was lowered from 21 to 18. Students were no longer kids, 'in statu pupillari' in Cambridge jargon, which altered their relationship to the academic staff and the College system. Previously the college Tutor had been legally responsible to the father for a student's behaviour, morally and financially!

Cambridge has not ceased to be a residential university (under normal circumstances), so the College still has to certify to the Vice Chancellor that each student has slept the nine terms of 60 nights within three miles of Great St Mary's church in order to get a Cambridge BA, but now an 'exeat' is not a permission to be away for a night but information for the Tutorial Office records. Similarly a student's room is private to the student. [However I knew one young Research Fellow, not at Clare, who carried this a bit too far when he had his wife and tiny baby living with him in his College room! Actually it was the Head Porter, that modern guardian of proper behaviour, who 'read him the riot act'.]

I think one of the biggest changes in our student body arose from a piece of legislation in the early 1960s which introduced County Council grants for all students who were accepted by a university. This was reduced according to the family income, but was still substantial when my children were going through higher education around 1980. Thus Colleges no longer had to worry about filling their beds. Especially during the depression years of the 1930s it had been important for Clare, through then Senior Tutor and later Master Sir Henry Thirkill to build mutually beneficial connections with fee-paying schools, particularly in the north of England. As a result of the change in funding, the number of applications for admission to Clare rose, with applicants coming from a wider range of social backgrounds. This had many effects – for instance the growth of Clare's current musical tradition arose in that way.

The 1960s, of course, was the decade of youthful rebellion around the world, felt less strongly in Cambridge than in some other places because of the relatively good contact between students and staff through the College and supervision system. There were some demonstrations and a few windows got broken (at the Garden House Hotel), but 99% of the change came quite peacefully, for example monitoring the quality of the lectures given.

A system of feedback had begun to germinate when I started lecturing in the early 1960s – I once got a little note from the Head of my Department saying "The students like your lectures, but you are not always heard well at the back of the lecture room." Later this was formalised with questionnaires at the end of each course, circulated by a Staff-Student Consultative Committee.

I have fond memories of that time. At the end of one lecture course I was presented with a lovely 'flower power' tie which I still treasure, with multiple delicate little flowers. In the final year Physics exam in the late 1960s we had a special option of Theoretical Physics for which I was the senior examiner, and at the start of one of my lectures I devoted a good five minutes to interpreting to the students a very minor change in the structure of the exam paper which we thought was to the benefit of the students. Then to my surprise after the lecture I was handed a piece of paper, headed "the following do/do not approve of the changes in the exam"! They in fact all approved – my care in explaining the change had not been wasted – but I was so impressed by the 'iron fist in a velvet glove' approach with which the student representative had acted that I promptly tried to recruit him to join my research group for a PhD (which he did!)

I have written elsewhere (Clare Review 2018-19) about the discussions leading to Clare changing its statutes to admit women students and Fellows. In fact, Clare was one of the first three Colleges to go co-ed (with Kings and Churchill) in Cambridge and Oxford, later of course followed by others which increased the proportions of women students in Cambridge.

The fact that Clare undergraduates put that change at the top of their wish-list in the discussions during the student unrest of the late 1960s I believe was crucial in achieving the necessary two-thirds majority in the Governing Body to make the change in the statutes. Clare is quite remarkable in the way the Governing Body has an almost visceral view of itself as 'one body', in which everyone may have their own ideas on any issue, but we are absolutely united in doing what we perceive, to the best of our ability, as best for the College in the judgement of future generations. And here the current students walking among us were part of that future generation.

There is one change that I very much regret, namely that undergraduates increasingly reported being 'stressed'. Of course opening entry to Cambridge to pupils in schools across the whole country automatically created competitive pressure, however I also noticed increasing academic pressure coming from staff, and tried to combat this when on the Teaching Committee in the Physics Department for over ten years. I believe there was a technological component to this. The technology of overhead projectors, for instance, was a factor, i.e. projecting one's lecture notes onto a screen compared with the earlier method of the lecturer writing everything of significance on the blackboard to be copied down by the students. This expanded the intellectual content of the lectures substantially, at least in science subjects, without giving the time to digest it.

Otherwise, however, the nature of undergraduate teaching continued much as before, maintaining its excellence, but changing of course a bit with the times. The supervision system is still a central part of the undergraduate teaching, and remains the central work of the Colleges. Even in a class of 20 it becomes difficult to maintain feedback, answer questions or deal with points of confusion. Imagine: I was lecturing to a class of 200 in first year Maths for Natural Sciences – a supplement of individual discussion is essential to a full understanding. On the Arts side, the supervision teaching remains the bulwark of the teaching. You don't learn literary criticism from listening to a lecture, but from reading the book and writing an essay on some aspect of it, which gets read by the supervisor and then discussed in person.

So how has there been the 'sea-change' mentioned in my opening paragraph? It all hinges around the huge development in the role of the University as a centre of graduate education and research, which has moved it centre stage compared with the Colleges. There have been a handful of graduate courses that have existed since soon after World War 2, such as the Diploma in International Law. This was introduced as it was too specialised a topic for it to be a part of the curriculum for every law student, but Britain needed a centre of expertise and training in International Law as a world-wide trading nation with world-wide diplomacy.

There are now a multitude of such courses straddling the line between undergraduate and graduate education. This has only increased as many undergraduate courses in Cambridge have added a fourth year of study to achieve "parity of esteem" with degrees given on the European continent. All this had of course to be reflected to some degree in the College teaching Fellowship. In both the sciences and the humanities there are whole subjects that hardly existed before World War 2, such as Sociology, Criminology, Bacteriology, Computer Science etc. The extent of specialisation can be astonishing.

In some sciences there had long been criticisms from employers that students coming out of universities had no acquaintance with ‘doing’ science, i.e. research, as well as learning science. Secondly they had no experience of communicating! Thus the process of extending undergraduate education to four years became widely used to spend a year full-time on a research project, including writing it up and giving a seminar talk about it to the other students. The Cambridge BA, so shrouded in history, is still a 3-year degree, with the extra year labelled M.Res. (Master of Research) or similar.

In terms of the disciplines themselves, changes since the Second World War have been no less marked. Especially the extent of computing has transformed whole areas of science. For example the research group that I have been a member of all my academic life now takes part in teaching a Diploma in Computational Materials Science. 'How rarefied can one get!' might well be your reaction. But, modern industry uses a most amazing range of materials with huge efforts to make better ones for specific purposes.

For example the solar panels on your roof turn only about half of the sun's energy that they receive into electricity, so there is a lot of scope for improvement. We have expertise to do what I call 'computer experiments'. One puts the laws of physics into a computer and throws in the particular atoms or whatever of interest, and one does any desired experiment in the computer that one would do in the laboratory. The result should be the same. The opportunities are endless, now recently even including drug design. Some of the computer methodology derives directly from research I was contributing to in the 1950s and 1960s, which illustrates the time-scale and relevance of modern basic research, and of teaching the tools derived from it.

When I arrived in 1954 to do my PhD I was surprised that there were no departmental buildings for the humanity faculties. Lecturers were dispersed, each in his College room, and I got the impression their meeting was much like ships passing in the night. I can remember meeting two New Zealanders returning at that time with PhDs in maths and a humanities subject respectively, who were deeply disappointed in the absence of any intellectual life in their subject for them. Their research supervisors worked in their rooms in College, and there was no way of meeting other graduate students in the subject, no seminar programme, nor lectures by academic visitors.

Having a faculty building is not just for ease of arranging some teaching, undergraduate or graduate. It can lead to talking together too! For example for my PhD project my supervisor, the aforementioned Prof Mott, suggested I should "go down to the Low Temperature research group and see if you can make yourself useful." Indeed I found a theoretical and computational project important for interpreting some experimental results being obtained, and I never forgot the lesson the incident taught me. Rubbing shoulders in the corridor and drinking coffee together can keep one up-to-date with the latest developments in and around one's subject. This, of course, has been deeply missed this year

This is crucial for avoiding what Prof Mott once described as "research that is very important for keeping staff and students intellectually alive, but its contribution to the furtherance of knowledge is practically zero". The research front can be a rather thin zone between what has already been done and what cannot yet be done with existing techniques and ideas. Actually the general point applies more widely than research: academic life is nothing if it gets ossified and does not relate to the flux of ideas in the world. Thinking is what universities are for.

I have heard it argued that in the earlier era before departmental infrastructure when lecturers in the humanities only had their College, their interaction with other College Fellows from different disciplines was much stronger. That may well have been so. But the Colleges have not disappeared. Lunching and sometimes dining in one’s College still gives opportunities for conversation across subjects, and a glass of port or cup of coffee in the Senior Combination Room may well be the right stimulus for it.

In the 1960s the Government was engaged on a massive building programme of new universities, such as Sussex, York and Bath, and it was at this time that many departmental buildings in Cambridge began to spring up – though not all at once! These were situated mostly around Sidgewick Ave: Economics, Modern Languages, History, Classics, English and Law, plus Clarkson Road for Maths.

Scattered among these Departments and Faculties there have grown up also some smaller, more specialised institutes such as Criminology and Applied Economics. These do not contribute directly to undergraduate courses, although some of their staff may be supervising for some Colleges and hence integrating with the traditional academic flow in Cambridge. Such specialised Institutes make important contributions to Cambridge as a centre for research and graduate education which is essential in the modern world.

The modern situation with regard to science departments is well illustrated by the Cavendish Laboratory, housing the Physics Department of the University. To reach it, you no longer seek in the centre of Cambridge but cycle out along the Coton Footpath past the University Sports Ground, with open fields to the left and the University West Cambridge Site on the right. There the Cavendish Laboratory nestles among other University buildings including two blocks of flats with the University Kindergarten. (Yes, a kindergarten!)

This West Cambridge Site off Madingley Road was designated in the 1960s as the future area for the physical sciences, while the biological sciences would remain in the centre of the city. Thus the Cavendish Laboratory moved out here in the early 1970s into three buildings that look like a (high grade) factory, with exterior of pre-cast panels and interiors of painted breeze blocks. The walls are therefore strong enough to support bookshelves, etc. and hang apparatus on, but can be knocked down in a morning if the research equipment requires a change of space, as happens occasionally. By the end of the 1970s the government's largess for university buildings had largely run out, and the money for the (then new) Cavendish Lab was only secured by virtue of the structure being a guinea-pig for a design at only half the cost per square metre of conventional science buildings at the time. The inside is, in fact, a very nice working environment resulting from much thought and consultation (except that the top floor overheats dreadfully in summer, due to skimping on roof insulation).

In the 1990s two further major buildings were added to the Cavendish Lab which illustrate well the connectedness of modern science. One building is for research projects undertaken in collaboration with industry, and the other one is named the Physics of Medicine.

Inside, these buildings have all the expected aspects of a university science department. It houses facilities for around 1000 graduate students, as well as many research assistants, academic visitors, senior researchers and regular staff members.

Associated with the expansion of graduate work and the coming of Departmental buildings was a change in employment. In the 1950s there were several Fellows in the Colleges who did not have University Teaching Officer (UTO) positions, and whose sole employment was in their College. They would do 20 or so hours per week of 'supervision' teaching, while typically holding also a Tutorship or other College position, living in their room free of charge as bachelors with two meals per day in Hall. They formed the core of the College. However their number declined as time went on. Bachelorhood went out of fashion, and it was expensive for a College to pay a full salary plus provide maintenance.

With the post-war expansion of universities, there came a substantial increase in the number of UTO positions in Cambridge. To these could be added a College Fellowship, with up to 6 hours per week of paid supervision teaching being allowed (paid by the state through the Local Authority where a student's home was located). Thus replacing one College Lecturer by electing two or three UTOs as Fellows was the new norm. Moreover a College Lecturer position became less desirable since it did not lead to a lifetime career ladder in an increasingly research-oriented environment. Cambridge has lost in that way some whom I would describe as wonderfully humane people, caring about their students, deeply steeped in all that culture and appreciation of human achievement have to offer, and wonderful colleagues to have around.

Those people were generalists, interested in the development of history or literature across the centuries, not just giving supervisions in one century or era. That contrasts with the current tendency to specialisation, with all the consequences it brings for the number of Fellows needed for the College teaching. This is not only driven by the focus needed in research, but also by the explosion of knowledge, particularly noticeable in the medical subjects, for example. (As a student in New Zealand, my three closest friends, whom I shared a flat with for two years, comprised of two medics and a dental student. I remember how fat their textbooks were, and getting anatomy and pathology over 'breakfast, dinner and tea'! Of course accuracy is important in those subjects: a mistake can cost a patient's life.) Thus the opening of the clinical medical school in Cambridge has had a noticeable impact on the number of Fellows needed by the College.

When I was appointed a young University Assistant Lecturer in 1958, my job according to the University Statutes was defined as "furthering Cambridge as a Centre for Learning, Education, Religion and Research", where a 'learned person' is not the same as an active researcher. Indeed, I remember a classicist friend saying vehemently to me, "I don't want to research the most minor work of the most minor classical Greek author which has not been researched before over the last 2000 years: I want to teach the Classics!"

In a way, that summarises the change from before to after World War 2: from 'learning' and undergraduate education to graduate education and research. The current attitude is beautifully illustrated by a poster in the main corridor of Addenbrookes Hospital which proclaims that "Addenbrookes aims to be the foremost centre for medical treatment, education and research – in Europe" (no less!)