On the 14th March 2011 Cumberland Lodge ran a conference entitled: Realising a Vision. The purpose of the day was to reflect on the work of the foundation since it was formed in 1947. What follows is an extract of one of the talks given on the day. The talk was entitled: Fighting Fascism with Philosophy.
The first Principal of Cumberland Lodge was Sir Walter Moberly. He had served in the First World War and was twice mentioned in despatches. After the first war he became Professor of Philosophy at Birmingham University, and then Principal of the University of the South West of England and then Vice-Chancellor of Manchester University. During the Second World War he was Chairman of the University Grants committee and after the war he became Principal of the St Catharine’s foundation at Cumberland Lodge.
His book, The Crisis in the University, published in 1949 is – along with Darkness over Germany by Amy Buller – a founding text for Cumberland Lodge. In it he points out that German universities suffered a moral collapse under the Nazi regime. German universities which had been, he says a “model to the world” showed little resistance to political extremism and failed to repel doctrines “morally monstrous and intellectually despicable”.
His major concern in the book is that British universities were also failing to safeguard moral and intellectual values. Universities have a duty to produce fully rounded people who are capable of thinking for themselves.But in universities “The common attitude,” he says, is that “study is a means to success in examinations, and success in examinations is the most practicable avenue to economic and social advancement”.
A Professor of education at Royal Holloway offered the following quotation from Moberly’s book at her inaugural address last year:
“For the vast majority of students… their university has been less an Alma Mater than a bargain-counter, at which certain specific articles are purveyed”.
When she asked her audience how old this quotation was, none guessed that it dated as far back as 1949.
Moberly denounced the consumer culture of the university system. You don’t buy education, he thought, you are transformed by it. Quoting Newman, Moberly endorses the view that education gives you a “clear conscious view of your own opinions and judgements, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches how to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is sophistical and to discard what is irrelevant." Most of all Moberly thought that education should enable you to accommodate yourself with the views of others, to throw yourself into their state of mind and to bring your own state of mind to the other person, and to do all this with patience.
When Moberly surveyed the British university system he saw too often expressed the motto that ‘the shorter the learning the sooner the earning’. An educational system with such a motto would surely collapse under the slightest social or political stress, just as the German universities had under the Nazis.
For Moberly, Cumberland Lodge was a modest attempt to correct the impoverished university system. Coming here and talking about how their various disciplines impacted on society would, he hoped, give students a better chance to fulfil what he felt an education should be.
Dr Owen Gower
Senior Fellow
Click here to hear talks by William Shawcross on Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother's role in founding Cumberland Lodge; Rt Hon Sir John Laws on the value of discussing the law at Cumberland Lodge; and Claire Fox, Sir Graeme Davies, and Sir Deian Hopkin on recent changes to higher education>>
To comment on what you read, email: comments@cumberlandlodge.ac.uk
