A lecture presented by Dr. Henry Mayr-Harting
Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History Emeritus, Oxford University
Lawrence University, Appleton, Wisconsin
November 9, 2006

 

Introduction

This lecture is by way of a thank-offering to Lawrence University for the great honour it did me in awarding me an honorary doctorate in 1998; rather in the way that Haydn composed the Oxford Symphony after receiving a doctorate at Oxford--si parva licet magnis componere! It is also something of a thanks to Professor Bill Chaney, a friend since the early 1970s, always a superb teacher and scholar. I have written a text, a) for fear that I might still be jet-lagged, and b) because the Provost (whose recent visit to Oxford with his wife, Marcie, and with Professor Chaney, my wife and I much enjoyed) said to me that your President would normally write a text in such circumstances, and what is good enough for her is good enough for me.

Two days ago I had a very useful conversation with Dr. Beth De Stasio, which made me realize how much I had left unsaid, particularly about the mechanical/logistical (but important) aspects of our tutorial organization: for instance, the relation of tutorials to lectures and seminars, the colleges' function in their organization, the relation of research to teaching, the reading out or not of written work. But I will say this one thing. A tutorial is 1 on 1, or 1 on 2. Anything more than two may be good or justified, but it's not a tutorial. The relative advantages of one or two is another thing I've left unsaid.

Except briefly, once towards the end, in what I have written I have not presumed to extrapolate 'lessons' for Lawrence. I have thought it best for you to draw your own conclusions about what is parallel, similar, useful, or irrelevant. If you wished, you could just take it as having an interest (or not!) on its own.

Oxford Tutorials

The Oxford Tutorial System has developed far more in accord with a muddle theory of history than with a conspiracy or idealism theory. At both Oxford and Cambridge there existed already in the Middle Ages some idea of a tutorial arrangement as an association of a master with one or two younger scholars, working and sleeping in the same room. Already then the importance of tutorial teaching within colleges set the colleges on course to become such a dominant influence in both universities. But all that became heavily overlaid in the C18, and in Oxford by the first half of the C19 the tutorial system was generally a system of class teaching. Even the best of the college tutors sat at the head of a long table with perhaps 15 students at it. They either addressed them, or, if it was Latin or Greek, called upon them to translate in turn. Many were the complaints about the arrangements, about the standards of the 'tutors', and the vast range of abilities in these classes, except at a few colleges such as Corpus or Oriel which had 'picked men'. One anonymous pamphleteer wrote in 1832 that he had spent 12 or 16 hours a week with 15 others listening to 'the dogmas of some blockhead called a “tutor”'.

Not surprisingly, then, serious students and those who wanted to do well in the university's examinations, sought out private tutors for themselves, on a one to one basis. In the academic year 1840-41, it has been calculated that some 150 undergraduates, about 1/5th of the total number of undergraduates then at Oxford, used private tutors, paying 40 to 50 pounds a year each (more than twice the cost of college tuition fees, and representing the annual income of a modest church benefice). You can see what an advantage this gave to the gentry as against the poor students among the undergraduates. And you can see what must have been the pressure on colleges to provide an effective system of private tuition themselves--not so much for financial reasons as for the serious loss of face which these institutions stood to suffer by reason of their neglectfulness. Between about 1850 and 1880--and only then--it became normal for colleges to appoint tutors to give private tuition.

If one man was more responsible than any other, not for the original development of this tutorial system, but for fine tuning it and gearing it to a particular ideal of education, it was Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol College, Oxford, from 1870 to 1893. In Jowett's time there was a party in Oxford who wanted the university to become a great research institution like the German universities. One of the early protagonists of this view was the embittered but intellectually forceful Mark Pattison, whose sour face was contrasted by one observer with the genial smile of John Henry Newman. But the idea of a research-driven university, with departments and professors rather than colleges taking the lead, was wormwood to Jowett. Jowett's ideal was to have undergraduates read out essays to tutors, particularly on ancient philosophy and history, and to discuss them with those tutors. He did not wish to train researchers, but to develop powers of mind and of clear, cogent expression, which would equip undergraduates to take their place in public life, in the civil service (remember that civil service examinations were introduced by the Gladstone government in 1873), in the church, and not least in the administration of the emerging British Empire.

The weekly essay, now decried as useless by some undergraduates, became the engine of the tutorial system, but how little it was regarded as an instrument of professionalization, rather than as an instrument for clarity and interest of expression, is shown by a Balliol institution of undergraduates reading out some essays to tutors in quite other subjects than their own. This institution, though now lapsed by reason of the advance of pluralism in the commonwealth of learning, persisted to my time as a Merton undergraduate in the mid-1950s. For I once bumped into a Balliol engineering undergraduate who had just read an essay on some complex engineering structure to Dick Southern, later Sir Richard Southern, certainly one of the most famous medieval historians in the world during the second half of the C20, who had himself been a Balliol undergraduate in the early 1930s. My engineering acquaintance had been deeply impressed by Southern, because after the reading of the essay, he had exclaimed, 'What a beautiful argument!'

At the present time in Oxford there is much talk about shifting the balance between graduate supervision and undergraduate tutorials, from undergraduate to graduate, as well as about cutting down on tutorial commitments and their expense. But many academics, and those by no means only in the arts subjects, would not be happy with this shift, because they still adhere to ideals shaped in the late C19. That is not out of nostalgia, but out of a perception of where Oxford's strengths lie. My friend and former history colleague at St Peter's College, Lawrence Goldman, a quarter of a century younger than me and now Senior History Tutor at St Peter's, and himself Editor of the Dictionary of National Biography and no stranger to the heartlands of research, speaks with pride about our pupils, and his own, who are making their way in the media, or the army, or publishing, or the Law, or the world of business, or as the heads of important charitable organizations, as well as in academic life. The Jowett ideal lives on!

I may seem already to have begged a vital question. If you want a liberal arts education and tutorials as a mode of teaching within that, you have first to ask how you can conceive of that education and that particular mode in relation to the needs of the society into which you're dispatching students.

Let me start with this question in the case of medieval Oxford colleges--how they conceived the answer. These colleges were often founded by men who had not been through a university themselves, or not much, had become top administrators in the King's government, and had made their fortunes by methods which would not bear close moral inspection. Walter de Merton had been King's Chancellor before he became Bishop of Rochester; William of Wykeham (founder of New College) was Purveyor of the King's Works, responsible for assembling the necessary labour forces and materials at the building sites of royal castles and the like, and Keeper of the Privy Seal, a top administrative post; William Waynflete (Magdalen) was also Keeper of the Privy Seal. In medieval Oxford, every student had to take a seven-year course in the liberal arts (Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic, Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy and Music--thus the range of arts and sciences as then understood) before they could go on to one of the (lucrative) subjects of higher learning, i.e., Theology, Law and Medicine. Had the founders not liked this, they would never have founded colleges at Oxford in the first place. What is most extraordinary is that Walter de Merton in his college statutes insisted that of his 20 scholars, at least 14 must go on to Theology when they had got their Master of Arts; William of Wykeham that at least 48 of his 70 must do so. What did these hard-bitten administrators and accumulators of wealth think that their scholars needed the liberal arts, let alone theology, for? What need of all this had men who would take responsible positions in church and royal administration? Well, I can see several possible answers to this question, but the most obvious is this. They thought that if their scholars could get their minds round the ten logical categories of Aristotle, or arithmetical superpartients, or the relation between the moon and the tides, or the relation of God's grace to human free will, they could get their minds round anything!

I find something very similar stated for our own time, in the context of a liberal education and the possible role of tutorials within it, by the present Warden of New College, Alan Ryan. He rightly denies that a liberal education is of its nature non-vocational, for it provides--to use government lingo--transferable skills. He writes:

This seems to me to say that what a modern society particularly needs from its most educated sector is mental flexibility. Some experience of specialization in higher education is of course necessary, partly to give people the flexibility to master various specializations in the world at large. But as the world becomes ever more professionalized, ever more specialized, ever more dependent on experts, and all that more and more rapidly, what society most needs from higher education is not to turn out the sort of experts already orientated to vocational employment, who are needed, of course, yet might become rapidly out of date, but to turn out people who can survive and adapt to rapid change, who can bend their mental powers to new fronts as they emerge. It requires the sort of ability that the best C18 armies had to wheel round and face sudden attacks on their flank. Alan Ryan adds to the above quotation the following:

Our modern society also requires judgment, judgment of a kind most likely to be developed not by listening to experts lecture, but in a tutorial situation where a student's own work is under regular scrutiny and discussion. Recently I heard Sir Nicholas Stern say a propos of his dramatic (but not over-dramatic) report on climate change and what needs to be done about it, that it was impossible to make precise predictions and that what was needed was judgment. He put his finger here on exactly the kind of power of judgment, which is another form of mental flexibility, most needed in those who have been through a humanities and science education. Incidentally, I cannot imagine a better example of this kind of judgment than Rik Warch's immediate response in Lawrence Today to the outrage of 9/11, and I'm sure your current President would also have made a fine job of it.

So much for the needs of society. Now to tutorials themselves. My own experience as an Oxford tutor comprehends some 8000 tutorials as well as countless conversations with other people about their or their tutors' tutorials. Nonetheless I am what the Germans would call an unspekulativer Mensch, very much an empiricist or pragmatist, who rarely uses a word like pedagogy. I gratefully acknowledge, therefore, a paper by Robert Beck called 'Towards a Pedagogy of the Oxford Tutorial' and a little book of essays, with which he is familiar, by various tutors, called The Oxford Tutorial (2001). They have helped me to put my thoughts into coherent shape at various points. All the same, the substance of what I am about to say is based on my own experience.

There are two axioms about tutorials which I take in tandem. One is that they are designed to help students think for themselves. That is common to all contributors to The Oxford Tutorial. The other is perhaps somewhat less in focus. It is that what distinguishes the tutorial from other forms of teaching, i.e., lectures and seminars, is that it turns on the discussion of the student's own work, and not on the agenda of a teacher. A friend of mine in my early days as a History tutor used to say 'no essay, no tutorial'. And although I have not found it always advisable to be as draconian as that, the general principle seems to me a sound one. Everything I have to say flows essentially from these two axioms.

Given these two axioms, what forms particular tutorials take, will depend very much on the individual student and the nature of his or her work. But I propose two principal models of a tutorial role which together, and generally in some kind of combination, cover most cases. These models are one, the coach, and two, the colleague.

As I have said, private tuition in early C19 Oxford very often began with the more serious students seeking out effective coaches. Almost no pupil, however intelligent, can nowadays do without this element of coaching. Every pupil, if he or she is to produce written work, needs a good reading list. Many tutors nowadays supply gigantic reading lists for each essay with no guidance as to what are the key items to read, or in what order one might read them (like saying, 'I suggest you read Snodgrass's article before you read Snooks's book'). I regard that as downright irresponsible, often mere vanity and show-off on the part of the tutor, and likely to discourage even the ablest of undergraduates. Then, every pupil needs a critique of their essays (or written work), how they've structured them, how good their grasp of the issues has been, how well they've caught the interest of the subject. A colleague once said to me that all that many students needed was to hear it said by a tutor: 'that was a good essay'. Perhaps that is why his own tutorials generally lasted well under an hour! I cannot agree with him. However good an essay is, a pupil needs to hear why the tutor thinks it a good essay. Students need to understand what makes a good piece of work a good piece of work, so that they can repeat the performance knowingly. I've never seen a pupil look bored even if I went on at length, while I was talking about the merits of their essay! If the essay is rather a curate's egg, a tutor needs--to change the metaphor--to build up the credit column all he or she can before going onto the debit column. Many pupils, even able and interested ones, need instruction in how to structure an essay. I used to say to my pupils, 'You want to start with an introduction which is not an unexplanatory mis-en-scène, but which tries to show up the interest of the question to which you're writing. After that, most questions are susceptible to treatment in one of two scholastic modes, both going back to the C12. Either you can expound them in the form of a dialectical quaestio, e.g., 'Snooks and others think this, Snodgrass and others think that, and my view is such and such'. Or you can do it by breaking a subject down into its subdivisions, e.g., stating the four points you most want to make in answer to the question, each in a self-contained paragraph perhaps beginning by making the point directly, then elaborating it with evidence, and perhaps ending with an exit line--the kind of thing you'd like to say as you were leaving the room. Finally, you want a conclusion, which might be like the cadenza of a Mozart piano concerto movement, which both sums up the main musical material of the movement, and takes it just that little bit further.

Now you may ask what such coaching has to do with teaching people how to think for themselves. It has a lot to do with it. Everyone needs to know something, whether the facts of history or the arguments of philosophers, to be able to think for themselves, and they need to know how to develop a structure to express their knowledge and thoughts. So a tutor has to coach them in these things. For a pupil to be without them is like an excellent fighting army up front, which fails for lack of effective logistics in bringing up its food supplies.

You may also ask why such instruction as mine cannot be given just as well to a class of twenty all together as to a single individual. The answer is that a tutorial is about the student's own work. Some students don't need such instruction at all (I'm coming back to that), while for many it has to be varied. In any case, a student cannot develop structure and a sure discernment of the most important issues without experience, week after week of experience. It cannot be achieved from one week to the next at the click of fingers. The advice of the coach needs to be persistent, but finely tuned from week to week. That is why I think a very minimum of a series of four tutorials with one tutor is necessary.

Now to the other side of the coin, or the other model: the tutor as colleague. Here again there is already a hint of senior and junior colleagueship as a vehicle of education in medieval Oxford. For the Merton College Statutes of 1274, the earliest full college statutes in Oxford or Cambridge, stipulated that a senior scholar and one or two junior scholars should share a room for sleeping and working in (people at that time were not so hung up as we are now about the darker possibilities in such an arrangement!).

Rather than attempting definitions of colleaguely mode, I'd like to quote from the obituary of Alan Raitt, one of the finest of Oxford tutors (his subject French), which appeared in The Times of London on 21 September of this year. It seems to me a perfect expression of the tutorial relationship as colleaguely, albeit between senior and junior colleagues:

I do not see a sense of equality as the key to this colleaguely relationship, although pupils are sometimes more than the equal of their tutors intellectually and even in knowledge. I prefer the idea of Robert Beck that mutual respect is the key. Allow me to illustrate the sort of respect I mean symbolically, with a delightful little anecdote. When my late friend, Margaret Gibson, came to Oxford in 1960 to read History, having taken a degree in Anglo-Saxon at St Andrews University in Scotland, she was sent to the formidable Naomi Hurnard to be tutored for the rigorous course in medieval constitutional history called Stubbs' Charters. In their first tutorial, there was frequent reference to a kind of Anglo-Saxon fine called the king's wite, Miss Hurnard pronouncing the word like the colour white as historians did, Margaret like 'weeteh' as a true Anglo-Saxonist should. During the following week Margaret thought to herself that although Miss Hurnard was no Anglo-Saxonist, she was the great authority on Stubbs' Charters, and so her pronunciation ought to be adhered to. But when it came to the second tutorial, it was clear that Miss Hurnard too had been doing some thinking--along the lines that Gibson may know nothing of Stubbs' Charters but she had read Anglo-Saxon at St Andrews. Thus for the whole of that second tutorial, roles were reversed and Margaret referred to the king's 'white', Miss Hurnard to the king's 'weeteh'!

There seems to be an idea abroad in Oxford, amounting in some quarters almost to a fetish, that questioning a student about his or her work is the proper mode of conducting a tutorial. The argument runs that if there is to be any equality (I prefer colleagueship) between tutor and student, it means that the students have to be pushed, as it were, into the role of teacher. Out of their lips rather than the tutor's must come what needs to be said. And what needs to be said can best be elicited from the student by questioning according to the Socratic method. That is the way to get students thinking for themselves. I entirely accept that questioning the student may have its uses in a tutorial, especially in philosophy tutorials; but the kind of tutors who are doctrinaire about its usefulness, are sometimes also equally doctrinaire about what they want the student to say in answer to their questioning. Indeed questioning at its worst can become a form of brainwashing. At its less bad it can often be embarrassing to students, particularly as not all tutors are gifted in conducting it and can seem inquisitorial. It can also underestimate the interest and pride of students in their work, to assume that having just written something about a subject themselves, they would not be interested to hear, or could not learn from, what a senior partner in learning (so to speak) had to say about that subject. Taciturnity does not necessarily mean that a student is not thinking for him or herself.

I envisage many other equally legitimate modes of tutorial teaching to questioning: e.g., discursive conversation, a genuine argument between equals, the wish of pupils to do the questioning themselves, genuine inquiries from either side about books or articles or policies or hypotheses or personalities, and even sometimes, yes, a tutor's monologue.

Robin Lane Fox has contributed a short piece to the book, The Oxford Tutorial, in which he points out that there were two Socratic methods, not one. In his younger days Socrates questioned the young, in order to show up their confusions and errors, but as he got older he resorted more and more to the monologue. He would 'drone on', occasionally stopping to ask whether his pupils agreed with him, to which the inevitable answer was, 'How not, O Socrates?' Lane Fox says that his own tutors when he was an undergraduate tended to the older Socrates, but he maintains that he learned a lot from them and developed a power of critical scholarship with their help.

One cannot see reputable educationalists, or pedagogicists, ever recommending the monologue as the universally best tutorial mode. But its most vocal detractors are prone to exaggerate its uncolleaguely, or its de haut en bas, character. For Karl Leyser, one of the most renowned and successful of Oxford History tutors, it was almost his only mode. There were four reasons why it worked in his case. One, the monologues themselves were frequently inspired. Two, they emanated from a charismatic person. Three, he often referred appositely and interestingly to points made by his pupils in their essays; his talk was by no means only about his own preoccupations. And four, behind these tutorials lay his transparent kindness and concern towards his pupils. He would go to the ends of the earth to help a pupil in trouble. The last of these points is important because it highlights the pastoral dimension which has helped to make the tutorial relationship work, at least since the time of John Henry Newman at Oriel College, and maybe earlier. But the most important point is probably the third, Leyser's frequent references to what pupils had said in their essays. That at least half fulfills one of my axioms about tutorials, that their starting-point is the work of the student.

A rather similar tale was told me by my fellow student Bill Armstrong who went for medieval history tutorials to Trevor Aston of Corpus Christi College. Aston was another tutor who tended to hold the floor. But in the fifth week of Bill's tutorials with him, he alluded accurately, appreciatively, and with great lateral thinking, to a point that Bill had made four weeks previously in his very first essay of the term. Bill had found Aston a fine tutor from the start, but after that he worshipped him. I do not think one could say of someone who later rose to be Chairman and Managing Director of the highly-reputed publishers, Sedgwick and Jackson, as Bill did, that he had not learnt to think for himself.

So there are two models of a tutor, the coach and the colleague. How any tutor combines the two is a matter of judgment and experience, and a mistake of judgment can be costly to the tutorial relationship and damaging to the pupil. I am reminded in this of Pope Gregory the Great's Pastoral Care, one of the finest treatments ever of how to deal with people, written when Gregory was pope in the 590s. Most of this little book is taken up with the need for people in responsible positions to exercise discernment of persons. But there is nothing rule of thumb about such discernment. The rich and the poor have to be treated differently from each other, as have for instance the arrogant and the meek or the intelligent and the stupid; but sometimes the rich need to be treated more gently than others, occasionally the poor more strictly. I have often thought of this when faced with pretentious undergraduates, for instance. Pretentiousness springs from various sources, often in people of 20 from experimenting to find their true selves. One should not come down too hard on such undergraduates. Again, I have said that the coach-tutor often needs to help students to structure their written work. But occasionally a tutor must discern that it suits the style and personality of a student, particularly a sensitive and imaginative one, to be discursive, and it can be a mistake not to let them be. Once in a while one must engage with a pupil in colleaguely discursiveness!

A tutor should not 'cluck' around his pupils too much. I remember a friend of mine telling me how when he succeeded the delightful New Zealander, Doug Gray, as a college tutor on the latter's appointment as a Professor, he went to Doug (who had been a highly successful and well loved tutor) to ask him what the job was. Doug answered with two words: 'creative neglect'. And we must always remember Newman's observation in his Idea of a University that if the worst came to the worst, undergraduates could do without tutors but never without each other. At the same time, undergraduates do need their tutors. They need them for encouragement; they need someone to believe in them, however unbelievable they might occasionally seem, and to set before them their true potential. For all that they have reached the age of majority, they need affection, even sometimes a little affectionate teasing. I had once a pupil, now already quite high up in the Civil Service, to whom I used to say that if only he could transfer some of the boldness of his doomsday knock on my door, to his rather tentative essays, the essays would be much better for it. Sometimes undergraduates need some conversation about other matters than History or whatever to make them feel more relaxed--about music, or sport, or food and drink, or their families, or their accommodation. One must watch them, and be ready to shift ground if they look uneasy or bored.

But the watchfulness should not be entirely one-sided. Students are in an adult partnership with their tutors. A tutor may be shy, or unwell, or in trouble. A wise and perceptive student will see that occasionally he or she needs to make more of the running if they want to get the best out of a tutor.

The scientists among you will be feeling justifiably disappointed that I have shown myself to be so much a 'humanities' person. But I have spoken often with science colleagues about their tutorials, and although these are bound to take a lesser place in their educational scheme (compared to lectures and laboratory work) than in the humanities, particularly through lack of similar possibilities for open-ended discussion, which so often makes a tutorial, I believe that much of what I have said is not irrelevant to science tutorials. For instance, problem-solving of the kind discussed in many science tutorials is clearly an occasion for discussing students' own work and helping them to think for themselves, as well as injecting some pastoral oversight into their studies on a one-to-one basis. Moreover in Oxford, essay work is far from unknown in the studies of science students.

Finally, what are the pressures on the tutorial system in Oxford today? Money, of course. It is a very expensive form of education, but I will say no more about this. I am no financier, and my view is that as long as it continues financially viable in any form, it is worth keeping. Research Assessment Exercises: these tend to make tutors feels that they can benefit their university and their own careers better by research publication than by teaching. But I am amazed how many devoted tutors there still are amidst these pressures, explicable only by their sense of vocation to concern themselves with undergraduates, even if this does not bring them the richest rewards. Also, for many, this pressure is alleviated by a symbiosis between their teaching and research which so many Oxford academics manage to develop.

Money, or too little of it, and Research Assessments are, if you like, two enemies without. But there is an even more pernicious and unseen enemy. In the outside world this enemy takes the form of the specialization, professionalization, and pluralism arising partly from the way the whole of society (in businesses, sport, government, etc.) is going, partly from the multiplication by many, many times of the number of practitioners the world over in every academic discipline compared to 50 years ago, and partly by the pressures on those practitioners to publish which involves the turning out of a mass of literature. Tutors cannot keep up, let alone their hapless pupils. And so the tutors are more and more fortifying themselves in their own specialist castles, strengthening their keeps and refurbishing their curtain walls. We are coming close to a situation with some college tutors where they will gather within their walls everyone in the university studying Marx and Lenin, and send out to another castle everyone, even of their own college pupils, studying Bentham and Mill. No! That is fortunately still an exaggeration, but increasingly tutors feel that undergraduates need to be tutored by specialists. Increasingly also lecture courses, or 'circuses' of lectures, are put on by faculties or departments which are regarded as conveying indispensable specialist knowledge, or understanding of the 'latest state of the issues', lectures to which undergraduates are made to feel they have to go. The great specialist swags often choose to lecture at 11 o'clock in the morning, nicely breaking up an Oxford undergraduate's morning's work. And if students are going to produce work worth discussing in a tutorial, they need to put in a solid morning's work on several days in the week. Pluralism and specialism is the way that the whole academic world is going, but in so far as it tends to make tutorials conceived of as vehicles for the conveying of specialist knowledge, that is a pressure on the system that it has never been designed to bear.

The enemy within: in the arts subjects, this pressure is often made heavier by the examiners in the university's public examinations. In Oxford these examinations will usually be set by academics other than undergraduates' own tutors. This is where pluralism can hit hard. A great Oxford paradox is that some of its most devoted tutors, when they come to set questions in the exams, set questions which often make a virtue of the very kind of specialization, which if carried too far, would inevitably undermine the function of tutorials, making them of necessity vehicles for imparting comprehensive and specialized knowledge. Moreover, one tutor's/examiner's specialized knowledge is not necessarily the same as another's in this pluralistic world, and so requirements in examinations for specific specialized knowledge can easily exclude a number of able candidates. One of the younger essayists in The Oxford Tutorial (2001) conducted a survey of current student opinion of tutorials. More than one student replied that while tutorials might teach one to argue, they were poor preparation for the exams. Well, whose fault is that? The implication is that it's the tutors', or the 'older tutors', fault. The examiners sometimes seem to me to enjoy a sort of privilegium fori when it comes to student criticism!

You of course will not have this problem, or you will only have it minimally, at Lawrence; your tutorials, which I gather will relate particularly to course work, will not be at the mercy of the arbitrary or pluralistic whims of examiners totally external to other people's tutorial relationships. But as well as the obvious upside, there is a downside to this. Our situation means that the tutorials are still, if sometimes shakily, related to a common culture of education and knowledge. With yours there is the opposite disadvantage woven in to your advantage: the danger of tutorials developing a kind of in-speak of their own.

I can imagine what many of you are thinking about this last jeremiad: 'the poor fellow is 70--and it shows'! But in fact I am full of hope, as you ought to be. First, I believe that the tutorial system has such intrinsic value, recognized still, if not by all Oxford academics, by a goodly majority, that it will not be allowed to become fatally corrupted or fall by the wayside. Second, it has so powerful a pastoral and a collegiate element built into it, that the undergraduates themselves would, I suspect, if necessary come to its rescue. Third, and perhaps most important, younger academics seem so adaptable to the world they live in, so resilient, that I'd trust them to see how the tutorial cloth can be cut to suite the new coat, where I personally cannot necessarily see it.

Postscript

At lunch after this lecture Professor Bob Williams and I discussed the matter of the relation of tutorials to examinations and grading, which I had raised, a matter too little discussed in The Oxford Tutorial and elsewhere. I think we both agreed that Lawrence and Oxford had almost the opposite advantages and disadvantages in this respect. In Oxford undergraduates being examined and classified depended hardly at all on the good will or agreement of their tutors (or any one of these tutors) for the questions in their exams and for their classification. But they were vulnerable, anyhow in many arts subjects, to the growing pluralism of their subject, so that the examination questions, even if they represented fairly what different undergraduates had covered, could sometimes come from such strange angles or be cast in so alien a language to some, that it put them at a disadvantage compared with others. Whereas in Lawrence, so much responsibility lies on their teachers for the way undergraduates are examined and graded, that the problem of pluralism hardly arises. The reverse side of this, however, is that undergraduates could be more dependent on the thinking, the agreement and the good will of their teachers (or at least think themselves so), or even that there might be a kind of collusion (though not of a dishonest sort) in the grading.

We both agreed that these were structural matters which could not be fundamentally altered, but that if there were awareness of the possible problems in both cases, much could be done to mitigate them by common sense, restraint, and perhaps in some aspects by more consultation.

 

Conference Papers

Researching Assessment Methods in Tutorial Education