Cinderella U.

Cinderalla U.

The colleges of the University of London sprawl across the face of London. Main highways and back alleys wind through its campus. Students of medicine and Marathi, English history and household work commute to classes. "Could anything be more absurd?" asked Educational Critic Abraham Flexner in his famed 1930 critique of American, English and German universities. "I confess myself unable to understand in what sense the University of London is a university at all."

Many a Briton shares Dr. Flexner's disdain. "Not one Etonian or Harrovian in a thousand," wrote University of Liverpool Professor Edgar Allison Peers, "would consider entering a shabby modern university, unlovely in appearance, unmellowed by tradition, and attended by men who actually live with their families and probably have only the faintest idea of the respective significance of a dinner jacket and a white waistcoat."

Cinderella sister of Oxford and Cambridge, London U. still holds its classes in workaday clothes. Its students are too busy with their books to be bothered about being gentlemen scholars. As they "came down" from the autumn term last week, they had few opportunities to wear dinner jackets, even if they owned any. Vacation meant little more than time for a trip on the underground to a Leicester Square movie rather than a Russell Square lecture.

Keats & Cripps. London's beginnings were modest. In the early 19th century, it was only the examining body for two new colleges (University and King's) that had been founded because, at that time, non-Anglicans could not take a degree at either Oxford or Cambridge. But soon Oxford and Cambridge men could have taken exams at London. And by 1858, the tests and degrees were thrown open to anyone in the Empire who wanted to take them. In 1900 the university began to take over the teaching and management of a growing roster of component schools. Today it governs some 65 different institutions, with control over both faculty and finances.

In the records of most of these institutions, noted names have begun to appear.

Sir Stafford Cripps was a student at University College, W. S. Gilbert studied at King's, and Lord Lister taught there.

Economist Harold Laski developed young Marxists at the London School of Economics, and the Imperial College of Science and Technology (Britain's closest rival to CalTech and M.I.T.) could boast such luminaries as Professor Thomas Huxley and Student H. G. Wells. Guy's Hospital and Medical School has also done well--with Alumnus John Keats and Teacher Richard Bright (discoverer of Bright's Disease).

Today the scattered university gets most of its support from an annual -L-5,000,000 government grant. It boasts one of the nation's largest cyclotrons, England's best medical and dental schools, research institutes of every sort from law to archaeology. The faculty has included such well-known Britons as Nobel Prizewinning Chemist Sir William Ramsay, Sociologist Barbara Wootton. Humorist Stephen (Gamesmanship} Potter, Philosophers C.

E. M. Joad and A. J. Ayer.

Beer & Sherry. The one thing London U. lacks is glamor. Its biggest tourist attraction is the fully dressed skeleton of Jeremy Bentham that still glowers from its glass case in the men's staff common room at University College. London students are likely to drink beer instead of sherry, and less than half of them live at their colleges. The rest live at home or in lodging houses about town.

All the same, London considers itself the largest university in the Commonwealth, larger than Oxford and Cambridge combined. When the autumn term began, its enrollment included one-fourth (18,-283) of all England's full-time university students. And the University of London is still expanding to absorb more of Britain's new generation of students. In Bloomsbury, the last daubs of paint are being slapped on Birkbeck College (for evening classes), and nearby the steel girders for a new student union are already in place. "We have it in our power," says Principal Douglas W. Logan, "to create in London a center of humanistic studies such as no city in the world can boast of."

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