Considerations on the Suggestions of the University Commissioners

Considerations on the Suggestions of the University Commissioners is a pamphlet by Henry Latham, the nineteenth century Cambridge tutor and mathematician, responding to one of the various royal commissions on the English universities that occupied so much attention during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Latham was associated with Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and was an active participant in the long debate about university reform that produced substantial changes to both Oxford and Cambridge across the second half of the century.

The pamphlet engages with specific recommendations made by a commission on the reform of the English universities. The Oxford University Commission of 1850 and the Cambridge University Commission of 1850 had produced major reports that led to substantial reforms in both institutions during the following decade. Later commissions in the 1870s and 1880s extended the reforms further. Latham’s pamphlet probably belongs to one of these later periods, although the exact dating depends on which specific set of commissioner suggestions he was responding to.

Latham’s general position in the university reform debate is recognisable from his other writings. He was a working tutor at one of the smaller Cambridge colleges and was generally sympathetic to gradual practical reform while opposed to the more sweeping institutional changes that some of the commissioners and outside reformers favoured. He defended the college system as the central organizing principle of Cambridge education, defended the role of the tutor as the primary point of educational contact for undergraduates, and was sceptical about proposals to shift authority away from the colleges and toward the central university administration.

The pamphlet is short and is mostly of interest now to historians of nineteenth century English universities and of higher education reform in the period. The university reform debates of the mid and late nineteenth century produced an enormous literature of pamphlets, responses, counter responses, and committee reports, of which Latham’s contribution is one of many. The detailed positions taken in any individual pamphlet are best understood in the context of the broader debate.

For readers interested in nineteenth century university reform, this pamphlet contributes a particular Cambridge collegiate perspective. It pairs naturally with the various official commission reports and with the parallel reform literature from Oxford and from the new civic universities being founded during the same period.