further he has been given a spacious environment in which to develop these intellectual powers , and the atmosphere of discovery and inquiry with which he has been surrounded has been intended to stimulate his curiosity and capacity for independent judgement . given then , these two types of institution - the broadly general non-vocational university and the specialist vocational college - as the existing pattern of higher education , how do we see it in the future ? if the experience of the Robbins committee resembles that of the Crowther committee , it is pretty certain to find - at least , I shall be surprised if it does not find - that there is far greater scope and far greater need for higher education than we are at present providing in this country . if , as I suspect , there are many missing it for one reason or another who ought in their own , and in the public interest , to be having full-time education after the age of 18 ; and if we are determined , as we ought to be , that they shall have a more adequate opportunity , we could add the extra numbers to the universities and to the specialist colleges in a proportion similar to that already existing between them . by another choice , we could alter the existing balance and send a disproportionate number of the increase into either the universities or into the specialist colleges . thirdly , we could invent new types of institution and find a suitable method of determining how the total of young people qualified for higher education should distribute themselves in the most appropriate way between the different types of institution . I am inclined to suspect that any attempt to determine a priori the proper proportions of young people who should go to different types of institution would be of very doubtful value . it is , of course , true that the number of places - especially science places - in a university or a college is , in the short run , fixed by physical conditions . but it is also true that , in the long run , the numerical relationship between the young people in different kinds of institution will be determined by the choices of the young people themselves and by what their parents and their school-masters think they will get out of one kind of place rather than another . prediction about how these choices will be made is , at best , a mere guess . we do not know how much the attraction of students towards universities is the result of their monopoly of the degree-giving power . suppose , for example , that other types of institution than universities were given permission to award degrees , how would this affect the candidates &apos; choices ? it is impossible to say and only experience could decide . the moral , which it seems to me we ought to draw from these considerations , is that we should make as clear to ourselves as possible what the r&amp;ocirc;le of the different types of institution is : what each offers : what does each conceive its task to be ; if we do this , then the choice of the young and the advice of their parents and their schools , will be as well-informed as it can be , and those who seek to take the university road , or the other possible roads , will be self-chosen on the best information that is open to them . my subject is the universities ; and so I come to the question of what the university does or should do for the young . I want to spend a little time in seeking some answers to this question . of course , first of all , the university prepares them for their job in life - but not , as I have already said , by giving them a know-how which is restricted to any particular type of occupation . it does not nowadays prepare them only for the learned professions as it tended to do as recently as even fifty years ago . the function of the university is to bring the young people entrusted to it to the height of their intellectual powers by setting them to do a very exacting academic task . I emphasize the word academic because the practice of our universities has been based upon the assumption that young men destined for one of a great variety of tasks in life - in public life , in the schools , in law or in the Church , in the public services , in industry and commerce - will be better prepared if for three or four formative and very important years of their lives they undertake at the university courses of study in common with those who are going to be scholars . there can be no doubt that this tradition has left its mark indelibly upon the social , political , educational and industrial fabric of this country . it has given the universities public responsibility and prevented them from being what are called ivory towers . thus , the effect upon them has been profound ; they , in their turn , have deeply affected , through those whom they have taught , the course of public life and of our affairs in general . the member of parliament who has read his history at the university in friendly rivalry with the future historian , inevitably reflects in his parliamentary behaviour the academic experience through which he has passed . the fact that Mr Gladstone could have been a professor was profoundly important both for the university which missed his services and for the party and public life which gained them . the second thing which the university does is to give to its students a special experience in which they gain an abiding insight into a university &apos;s perspective . judged by the standards of ordinary daily life , university life is , in some senses , an odd one and university people seem , perhaps , to the layman outside , rather odd people . I need not try to explain at length why this should be so ; I will just say this : on the one hand , normal daily life is largely concerned with the problems of the present or those of the quite near future , with the hopes and anxieties of day-to-day existence ; on the other hand , the universities live in a world with a quite different time-scale , and the problems which exercise the academic mind belong to that world . for instance , they are interested in the past - not only of yesterday but of fifty , a hundred , even millions of years ago . they are interested , too , in the future , but they are as likely to be interested in the problems of many centuries ahead as in those of only fifty years from now . they are interested less in the day-to-day behaviour of men or things than in the laws that govern that behaviour or explain it . they are concerned less with the appearance of things than with the underlying nature of which that appearance is a reflection . I have perhaps said enough to indicate why the practical workaday man thinks that university people , are , as he would put it , out of this world . of course , they are . rightly regarded , the academic is indispensable to civilization only so long as he remains academic in the sense I have described . for his part , he is entirely right to be indifferent to the charge of belonging to a world of his own , in which the practical man of affairs would be ill-at-ease . one hopes , therefore , for the young man or woman who is to spend three or four years at the university that they will take something of this spirit out into the world with them . some , indeed , will be captured by the spirit of the place and will be at home with academic values and wish to spend their lives cultivating them . among these will be found the professors and university teachers of the next generation . others will fall under its influence only for a time and will then return to the world outside ; but not , one hopes , to be ever quite the same again . for we , in the universities , hope that they will see the problems of here-and-now - whether they are the problems of personal conduct , of public affairs , of art and literature , of science and its applications - illuminated by the studies of their university years . in other words , what the student needs from the university is not just a little ( or even just a great deal ) more competence in the subjects he has studied at school ; not just to have a few rough edges knocked off his mind ; not just to learn more elaborate intellectual skills ; not what , in the modern idiom , is called know-how . he is going to be a member for three or four years of a society which has its own characteristic way of life . from it , he can learn much that will enrich both his personal life and the service which he can give to his own day and generation . of course , the student must leave the university a master of the field he has chosen for his own , whether it be chemistry or history , oriental languages , or engineering science ; but in helping him to find that mastery the university must also help him to catch a glimpse and to acquire a taste for the other worldliness of which I have spoken . the third thing the university does for its young people is to give them their education and the experience of which I have talked , in a special kind of environment . it is , of course , a protected and , in some ways , an artificial kind of environment . but it is not , for that reason , without great power to impress itself upon their minds and to retain its impression upon them for the rest of their lives . the society to which I myself belonged in my own College at Oxford was , as I well recall , of this latter sort . from the day of our entry we were taught by the ethos of the place , rather than by any formal instruction , to feel that its strength lay in the diversity of experience which its members brought to the common stock . when we were joined by a new kind of undergraduate of a different nationality , race or colour from a part of the world which had never supplied a member before we felt that it was a stronger and better place . the first time that an extra-mural scholar arrived , fresh from his job as a &apos;bus driver in Bristol , we were prone to believe that the College had , in some way , been strengthened . when a German Rhodes scholar first returned to the College after the first world war we felt that it was a better place . we were taught in other words , that the ideal society was one in which every single member made his own unique contribution to the diversity of gifts which we disposed of in common . and , by implication , we learnt that uniformity and the repetition of identical experiences were a weakness and something to be avoided . we were , of course , free to accept or reject this philosophy which underlay our common life ; but looking back on it I feel that the young men of the &apos;30s , the successors of my generation , were , in fact , prepared in the most positive possible way to know their mind when the challenge of the dictatorships fell across Europe . for this part of our education there was no formal , overt teaching . what we learned cut across the boundaries of social groups , of religions , of nationality and of race ; it was a lesson equally on offer to arts men and scientists ; it was among the most effective teaching that I have ever known . another thing that a university should try to do for its undergraduates is to help them to become their own masters . as my experience of universities has widened , I have become more than ever convinced of the importance of this function . the university years , though primarily for the training of the intellect , have never been thought to be without their importance in the training of character . indeed , in some quarters it has been made a subject of reproach that our universities have laid too great an emphasis on the training of character . 