The Modern University Movement' 



IT has been said that the future historians of England will 

 record the foundation of its five new universities as the 

 most noteworthy incident that has marked the opening of the 

 twentieth century. The movement has been spoken of, in 

 a picturesque way, as the Northern Renaissance. I think that 

 we who have lived through this period may be inclined rather 

 to date the genesis of the universities in the nineteenth century, 

 and to reckon it among the great movements for emancipation 

 of people and liberalization of institutions, which will make 

 that century and the Victorian age for ever memorable. 



The university colleges, out of which these new universities 

 have grown, seem to me to owe their origin not to anything 

 that can be properly called a Renaissance. University College, 

 London, and the Owens College, Manchester, were the first, 

 and I think there is the clearest evidence that their success 

 was determined, at the outset, by two factors; firstly, by their 

 providing higher education for those who were unable to sub- 

 scribe to the religious tests imposed by Oxford and Cambridge, 

 and secondly, by the liberal recognition which they gave to 

 natural science. At a later stage, they became distinguished 

 as the academic resorts of the poor in purse, and as the 

 nurseries of applied science. 



What has happened at the beginning of the twentieth 

 century, has been the conferment on single colleges of the 

 power to grant those greatly overesteemed certificates of 

 knowledge known as degrees, which previously had to be 



1 An address to the Leeds Arts Club, delivered November 10, 1906. 



