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Arts Editor: Hugo Gye & Patrick Kingsley
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Friday January 25 2008
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Learning
by design
Does architecture affect the way we think Can we really be inspired by buildings Ed Blain investigates
ore will mean worse”,
“Mwrote author and
miserabilist Kingsley Amis in
1960, referring to the proposed
expansion of the British
university system. He felt
that there were very few clever
people in the country, and
that those that there were
already had the chance to go
to the old universities. “There
is a delusion”, he claimed,
“that there are thousands of
young people who are capable
of benefiting from university
training, but have somehow
failed to find their way there”.
His reasoning now seems
clearly wrong, writing off as
it does almost all women,
and most men, as
unteachable. Yet Amis
was right in a sense. In
some fields, more has
meant worse. In Britain,
whichever way
you look at it, older
institutions tend to
get better results:
only one of the twenty
universities which make up
the elite Russell Group was
founded in the past hundred
years. In Cambridge, there is
a close relationship between
the age of colleges and their
performance in the Tompkins
Table. The older they are,
the better they do. There are
remarkably few exceptions.
Selwyn, a young’un at a hundred
and twenty-something,
bucks the trend at fourth.
Peterhouse, the oldest of them
all, is fifth from last. But
then Selwyn was designed to
look ancient. And it would,
of course, be wrong to expect
any different from Peterhouse,
a college that has produced
more famous drunks than
academics.
Why does age matter
People disagree. The standard
answer is that applicants
flock to the old and famous
colleges, goes the stock answer,
and their interviewers
have the pick of the crop, and
an easy time of it thereafter.
The places most people have
never heard of have to use the
pool. This is a lazy argument.
It’s also demonstrably wrong.
Who had heard of Downing or
Selwyn before being sent off
on a day trip to Cambridge in
the sixth form They’re third
and fourth in the table. Who
hadn’t heard of King’s,
whose annual carol service
is one of the most popular
radio broadcasts in the
world, available in Barbados,
Bangladesh, and on
300 different radio stations
in the United States alone
Despite its fame and age
(founded 1441) King’s undergraduates
score more than
half way down the Tompkins
table. In fact, none of the top
five colleges in this year’s
Tompkins Table are on the
tourist circuit. Fame, even local
fame, does little to explain
success.
So what’s the secret The
quality of teaching and of
encouragement clearly plays
a part. This we know from
colleges like Pembroke that
have motivated their students
by motivating their fellows.
For six hundred years the
college was resolutely unacademic:
when the future Prime
Minister William Pitt arrived
in the mid-eighteenth century
he was left to teach himself. A
generation ago it was famous
for its rowers and its heavy
drinking, and had yet to
admit women. In only twenty
years a concerted effort from
ambitious fellows saw the
college rise to the top of the
“If your college puts you in a room with a
view, then you’re already one step ahead
of the bloke who looks out on the bins”
Tompkins table, and is has
stayed consistently in the top
ten since.
But improving the academic
environment does not
always work. Every college,
apart possibly from Peterhouse,
has tried to improve
its performance over the last
few decades. Not every college
has succeeded. There must be
other factors at work.
One influence on success of
all kinds is beauty. Not human
beauty, which at Cambridge
seems often to have