Oxford and Cambridge have the best teaching system in the world - in some colleges . Oxford and Cambridge are so incompetent in teaching that in spite of intense competition for entry nearly half the students leave with 3rd class degrees and worse . the standard of an Oxford 3rd only an Oxford examiner like myself could credit : there are some colleges which seem to specialize in producing them . or to take the matter which most affects the schools . Oxford and Cambridge by their competitive system of entry set standards to the schools which distinguish English education from all other systems except the French : only in France and England is it necessary for success to be in hard competitive training from the age of 8 or 9 and to be a mature and polished intellectual at 16 . treat them mean and keep them keen . or ( as a Bishop wrote in 1889 ) the English do everything by way of racing . the results for the successful are almost miraculous . the war horse saith among the trumpets ha , ha ; and he smelleth the battle afar off , the thunder of the captains and the shouting . it is really very pleasant indeed to be an examinee if you are a good one , and it is just as pleasant to coach good examinees . but how much harm is done to bad examinees ? how far have A level , S level , now the new U level ( or whatever it is to be called ) been affected by Oxbridge scholarship examinations , and by the need to give the rest something to do while the competitors are groomed ? so often in the provinces one has to face the problem of rescuing a boy , basically very able , who did well at O level , quite well at A level after two years in the sixth , went back for a third year as a potential competitor , and in fact did worse . there could be all sorts of reasons for this : the effect is that he arrives in a university stale and defeated , and it is often impossible ever to recover the boy as he existed at 15 . there is another contrast . in England it is only Oxford and Cambridge which set standards of prestige for universities . men come and go easily between cabinets , embassies , chairmanships of boards and the Oxford and Cambridge colleges . the Colleges are inside ; their lawns , their mahogany , their herbaceous borders ( not - alas - any longer their buildings ) are the real thing . we envy , but aspire ; the existence of these things in Oxbridge is the sole basis of our dream that they might exist in Manchester , Coventry , or Colchester . the English intellectual till the 19th century lived in Grub Street or in nonconformist rigour ; from this Oxbridge rescued him in the days of its great reforms . no wonder his dream is to be commensalis and socius in a great foundation , a freeholder in the inheritance of scholarship . his wife may not of course agree ; the cold collations of north Oxford on the evenings of College feasts have their place in the folklore . there are in Oxbridge as many outs as ins ; the democracy of the fellows is a little like the democracy of the Athenians , among their womenfolk , their metics , and their slaves . the whigs still rule ; democratic principles , a practice of oligarchy and conservatism . who would not choose to be a whig ? one ought not to propose remedies except for admitted evils ; and I find it hard to say that the popularity of Oxford and Cambridge is an evil . it is not exactly an evil , it is just a thing , an element in the extremely odd flavour of English society . clearly English society is changing : ducunt volentem fata , nolentem trahunt - things are moving , we had better move gracefully , rather than perforce . a few points about the future ( very few ) are clear in the clouded statistical ball . the proportion of Oxbridge students in the whole system ( apart from London , about one in two in 1938/9 , one in three in 1956 ) is dropping sharply . this drop is marked even in the traditional arts subjects ; but in these ( so far as one can make out from the U.G.C statistics , which one would call amateurish but that they conceal some things which it is convenient to conceal ) the 1958/9 figures for arts graduates were Oxbridge 2,740 , London 1,377 , the rest 3,436 . in other subjects the relative decline is precipitate ; in ten years &apos; time the Oxbridge mathematicians , scientists , and engineers ( though doubtless of high quality ) will not be much more significant numerically than the Oxbridge medical schools are now . to put the same facts in another way ; the more boys and girls reach university entrance standard the smaller the proportion of them who can enter Oxbridge . this is ineluctable ; Oxbridge could expand proportionately only at the cost of self-destruction . this is the situation to which we must adjust ourselves . the mechanics of a clearing house are probably essential to tide us over the transition . but the transition can only be achieved by a modification of the image , the simplified picture which governs action . we need image builders who will take the Oxbridge myth and weave it into a pattern with other English myths . there are plenty of myths to hand ; the myth of London , the great city , the myth of the north , which by its hardness made the modern world , the myths of the Cathedral towns , the leftish myths of Sandy Lindsay and John Fulton , Keele and Brighton . of course , if we were I.C.I or the steel industry we could have our myths built for us by a good firm of public relations men , at so much per cubic foot of cloudcapped tower . we are not thus endowed ; can we get on with the job ourselves ? two points about this , in conclusion . first , we have to face a quick transition in a matter where the natural pace of change is slow . it is not easy for universities to explain directly to young people in schools what they have to offer ( though of course we should try ) . the natural mentors are parents and teachers , on the whole those between 45 and 55 , who learnt what they know about post-school education in a world very different from that of the 1970&apos;s and 1980&apos;s , which is quite close to our students . parents perhaps fall into three sections ; those who were glad to finish formal education at 14 or earlier , those who obtained a professional qualification the hard way under the traditional English system , and those who remember their own University - and for most this would be Oxford , Cambridge or a London medical school . the teachers in public schools and grammar schools will have a strong bias to arts and pure science , a bias towards Oxbridge , which diminishes as one goes down the long ladder of social status , which is not necessarily a ladder of ability or even of success . it is to these customers , the advisors of students , the creators of ambition , that we have to sell a new picture of the system , as it will be , a system in which Oxbridge will have a special but not predominant place . my last point is that to me , as a professor in a civic university , interested in the growth and government of cities , with a young family growing up in a city , the civic situation seems a peculiarly advantageous one . there is of course a place for York , Canterbury and the rest : but the English picture of a university system can only be changed quickly by the universities with which the English live . Leeds University , Manchester University , Liverpool University and others are part of the re-building of cities ; new cities and new universities are being created together , and must in the process learn to live together . there has never been any doubt about this in Scotland ; there is some cause for uneasiness about the state of Scottish universities , but not on the grounds discussed here . Scottish people know about the Scottish universities ; they are familiar things , they fit easily into Scottish society , as English universities do not . a large responsibility rests on the civic universities for creating this ease of relationship which has existed in England hitherto only for the charmed circle of hereditary Oxbridge men . 2b . a pyramid of prestige . A H Halsey . senior lecturer in sociology , University of Birmingham . Sir Charles Morris is a splendid utopian . he believes that universities exist primarily for educational purposes and are attended by students for primarily educational motives . he finds weaknesses in Oxford and Cambridge as educational organizations and deduces the possibility of a relatively increasing future popularity for what he calls the modern universities . my own more melancholy assessment of the prospect for redbrick is based on a view of universities more as antechambers to the economy than as centres of higher learning . the key to popularity lies in the appointments board , not in the tutor &apos;s study . my fear is that the outcome of expansion in the sixties and seventies will be an academic hierarchy more securely supported by scholastic selection , more firmly maintained by occupational connections and more clearly recognized by public and participants than ever before . in an English context the evolution of education as a meritocratic selection and training ground for the ranks of the expanding army of professional , scientific and technical manpower seems peculiarly likely to result in a graded system of schools and colleges which reflects the power and prestige pyramid of the wider society . this is not necessarily to deny Sir Charles &apos; thesis that the redbrick universities stand for a pedagogical philosophy which derives teaching from scholarship and which is fundamentally different from the Balliol faith that scholarship will accompany well-organized undergraduate teaching . many will agree that the excellence of the tutorial system is not proven . the English have a penchant for living on untested myths which they call the lessons of experience . we simply do not know what are the best methods of educating different kinds of student for different branches of learning . it may be that the short weekly duet of essay and criticism is inappropriate as well as uneconomical in modern circumstances : perhaps it is more conducive to producing the amateur gentleman than the professional scholar . it may be that the irritated American description of public school and Oxford graduates as not the chosen people but the frozen people , is at bottom a criticism of the finishing school theory of higher learning . it may even be that as a distinguishing mark of Oxford and Cambridge , the tutorial system is no longer valid . enquiry might show that the student of physics at Manchester or Cambridge is more similar in his education , style of life and outlook than either is to a man reading classics on the same Cambridge staircase . it may very well be too that a B.Com undergraduate in Birmingham is better taught tutorially than a Cambridge college scholar who is sent out to an ageing , impoverished tutor clinging to a squalid gentility by supervising economics for 30 hours a week . the point is , however , that all this has nothing to do with the popularity of Oxford and Cambridge . in the minds of schoolmasters , parents and sixth-formers , the image of Liverpool and Leicester by comparison with that of New College or Newnham is such that ancient and modern do not begin to compete . Sir Charles is right to use the complimentary label modern to describe redbrick . he knows that the old provincial universities have been nationalized - that , for example , whereas in 1908 the proportion of his students at Leeds who were drawn from within thirty miles was 78 per cent , it was , by 1955 , reduced to 40 per cent . but the distinction between ancient and modern applies for most Englishmen only to hymn books . places of higher learning other than Oxford and Cambridge are provincial - a word conveying , in England as in France , the sense of inferiority , outsideness and rejection of those who belong to but are not accepted by the metropolitan culture . she may not get in to Oxford or Cambridge . 