R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

Cambridge in the 'Seventies 263Ordinary Degree to have attended the lectures of certainProfessors, and to produce certificates of attendance.This plan furnished some Professors with classes; andsome people fancied that this was in part its object. Butto enforce the rule was not a simple matter, and storiesof tricks and evasions were current, exaggerated nodoubt, but discrediting this solution of an awkwardproblem. So it happened that in 1876-7 compulsoryattendance at Professorial lectures became a 'live issue'in our academic politics, provoking warm controversy.Reports of syndicates, discussions in the Senate, and ashower of fly-sheets, signalised one of the most animatedbattles of opinion within my memory. Divinity lectureswere not those most directly in question, as the compulsionchiefly came from the Bishops in their conditions ofOrdination. Yet Dr Lightfoot put forth a portentous flysheet,a pamphlet of twelve octavo pages. Fawcett (forPolitical Economy was a subject in favour with Poll menas something of a novelty) wrote a characteristicallyfrank letter to his friend James Porter of Peterhouse,deprecating change. This the warm-hearted Porter rashlypublished to the Senate, and exposed Fawcett and himselfto the brisk censure of Blore and others. We youngmen looked on with amusement. Eventually the compulsionhad to be abandoned, and the questions thenraised had to be dealt with on other lines. The modernPoll Degree is worthy of a great University, and theabolition of order of merit has restored official teachingto efficiency and vigour.That this grave matter of educational policy was ofsufficient importance to claim a large share of the attentionof residents, is hardly to be denied. But we must notoverlook the fact that a series of striking events abroadhad in recent years aroused a special interest in whatI may call the 'professorial question'. A notoriously