Education: Booming Redbricks | TIME

For centuries, caste-bound Britain regarded higher learning as a rite of the rich and a privilege of the few. Even by 1945, only one-tenth of 1% of the population attended universities—mainly the well born, who “went up” to Oxford and Cambridge and on to the “Establishment” that runs English culture and politics. But in 1948 came a dramatic change: for any poor youngster with a rich mind, Britain’s welfare state promised a free university education through a vast system of scholarships. “For the first time,” recalls Eton’s Headmaster Robert Birley, “the working class realized that universities belonged just as much to it as to the ‘others.’ ”

The result is a race for college more intense than the current U.S. competition. Though enrollment is still only two-tenths of 1% of the population (v. 2% in the U.S.), it has more than doubled since 1948, to 103,000; in four years, it may hit 175,000. “Oxbridge” has opened few doors. Shouldering almost the entire weight of the new students are Britain’s 15 “redbrick” universities, the shirtsleeve provincial schools that got their name from the red bricks with which most of them were built when they began as seedy local colleges in the late 19th century.

Padded Cells. Sprouting between steel mills and shipyards, in grimy Liverpool, Manchester or Nottingham, redbricks* were originally founded to nurture local talents. Amenities were few: Leicester’s main building (sooty yellow brick) was once the county asylum; the library still has padded cells. Redbrick graduates, generally 9-to-5 commuter students with no chance for donnish tea and tutorials, were hardly considered “educated”—though they included such talents as Novelists D. H. Lawrence (Nottingham) and C. P. Snow (Leicester). Oxbridge so scorned the breed that to this day it insists on calling redbrick Ph.D.s “Mr.”

Now full-scale national universities, redbricks are so besieged that they can accept only one out of seven applicants. Desperately, they are building airy glass-and-steel buildings without a single red brick—centers for chemistry at Leicester and Birmingham, for physics at Hull, for engineering at Liverpool. Entire new universities are due in Brighton, York and Norwich; four more are on paper from Coventry to Canterbury. Last week, Lancashire joined the queue of counties that want their own universities.

Something Missing. Redbricks have already surged ahead in many fields. Oxbridge has nothing like Manchester’s electrical-engineering course. Bristol’s physics and English are tops; so is metallurgy at Birmingham. Many redbrick universities are superior in modern languages, and three of them have chairs in modern American literature. “At Oxbridge,” sniffs one schoolmaster, “they teach such rarefied English literature that only recently have they reached 1900.”

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.

Redbrickers work hard—even too hard.

Anxiety drives them to sedatives, therapy, and unseemly panting after the diploma that wins white-collar status. “The type who browses intelligently is unknown here,” complains one don. “If you suggest that they make up their own minds,” says Novelist Amis, “they feel they’re being cheated. We are here to tell them what to think, not to show them how to think, as 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 of Oxbridge.

* The top five: London, Manchester, Birmingham, Reading, Bristol.

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