50 Years Ago

摘要

Sir Nevill Mott spoke about research in the universities and repudiated the view that university research is just an expensive luxury to stimulate the dons and keep them up to date … The third and last discussion ranged widest of all. There were those who took for granted, so it seemed, that the modern undergraduate at entry was fundamentally perverse and irresponsible, overdeveloped intellectually and socially as well as emotionally immature; those who defended him warmly against the criticisms of his elders; those who felt that he… was too much 'of the world' already and needed to be withdrawn during his university years from the pressure and hurly-burly of ordinary existence; for them the hall of residence on the university campus was the right answer; those, on the contrary, who felt that segregation-whether from family or other social ties-and an artificially high standard of living were wholly bad; these approved of the civic university whose students live with their own families… But all united in one aim-to prevent, if possible, the university from turning out a lop-sided individual, intellectually precocious but humanly underdeveloped.