Sic Transit?

The officer in charge of university entrance examinations at Cambridge said tolerantly: "This proposal has been brought up intermittently for over the last 100 years. I don't imagine the arguments have changed much." The proposal: drop Cambridge's stringent entrance rule requiring knowledge of Latin or Greek. It had been put forward most recently in 1948, when the dons voted it down 250-155, and the clamor against enforced classicism was going strong again last week. Most clangorous clamorer: gadfly-sized (5 ft. 5 in., 150 lbs.), distinguished Cambridge Author-Astronomer Raymond Arthur Lyttleton (who lists among his recreations, in Who's Who, "wondering about it all").

Compulsory Spinach. Says Lyttleton of the Latin-or-Greek requirement, which he hopes to upset at the next meeting of the Cambridge Senate: "It's ridiculous. It reminds me of the Victorian dictum, 'It doesn't matter what you teach a boy, as long as he doesn't like it.' " As a boy, Lyttleton did not like Latin, flunked his Cambridge entrance exam the first time, barely squeaked into the university on his second try.

His particular peeve is that science students must cram themselves with a classical language. "I'm not saying there aren't minds that don't expand with the classics," he said. "But all real advances in knowledge come from people who are doing what they like to do. We all know the effect on children of compulsory spinach and compulsory rhubarb; it's the same with compulsory learning. They say, 'It's spinach and to hell with it.' "

Muscle-Bound Mind. The aroused astronomer carried his war to the BBC last week, got vigorous bene and male from the press. The Daily Telegraph cried O tempora, O Lyttleton: "There could be no worse argument in favor of this jejune and illiberal measure than that Latin is a dead language and should therefore remain dead . . . The truth is that the study of Latin is a training for the muscles of the mind." But the Daily Mirror's Cassandra argued that Latin had muscle-bound his mind. He began by declining mensa (table), then wrote: "This nonsense I have been carrying around with me in the lumber room of my mind for 40 years. Like the geese of Strasbourg, I was force fed . . . and I still can't unlearn to talk to a table or a squad of tables, addressing them correctly in Latin, saying: 'O tables . . .' It's about time the tables, O tables, were turned against this piece of scholastic witchcraft."

Can Lyttleton turn the mensas when the Senate meets in the spring? He thinks so, and at Oxford, where his campaign has been watched with interest, there are dons who think that if Cambridge cans the classics, so will Oxford. In the midst of the uproar, it seemed that, as usual, Old Harrow Boy Sir Winston Churchill had said it best (in A Roving Commission): "Naturally, I am biased in favor of boys learning English. I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honor, and Greek as a treat."

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