Discipline and Power ─ The University, History, and the Making of an English Elite, 1870-1930

Discipline and Power is an intellectual, cultural, and social analysis of the ways in which universities successfully transformed a set of values, encoded in the concept of "liberal education," into a licensing system for a national elite. From the mid-1870's until the rise of totalitarianism and the Great Depression challenged prevailing habits of mind and conduct, the universities, especially Oxford and Cambridge, achieved unrivaled influence upon thought and conduct in every sphere. In their independence from external interference, the universities and colleges evolved by regulating the contents and purposes of new subjects.
History, more than any other discipline, reflected and reinforced a broad Victorian consensus about God, country, and the good. Among the contending fields of study, history provided the most consistent moral panorama able to satisfy a variety of intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic needs. History was taught, studied, and tested by a set of assumptions deduced far more from a patriotic agreement about duty than from critical methods or from the weight of evidence.
A wide reading of materials not previously consulted allows the author to demonstrate how the writing and teaching of history shaped the ethos of graduates who guided domestic and imperial government, secondary and higher education, the professions, religion, letters, and - contrary to conventional interpretations - even business and industry. These materials include administrative, faculty, and student notes; examination papers; examiners' reports; and correspondence about standards, grading, curriculum, and teaching methods.
The book begins by explaining the emergence of the modern university and the English identification of history with truth, objectivity, and continuing traditions associated with national character. It then discusses the debates over the form and content of history that pitted a rigorous training in the historian's craft against history as the teaching of character and conduct. Two chapters examine how university teachers, despite differences in their roles at Oxford and Cambridge, agreed in defining history within conventions that were to inform teaching and learning for half a century.
The author then investigates both the tutors - how they taught the history honours candidates and often became a surrogate family - and the students - their courses of study and extracurricular organizations. A final chapter, a unique comparison of the subsequent careers of all first- and second-class history honours graduates at Balliol College, Oxford, and King's College, Cambridge, demonstrates that the majority of those graduates affirmed what was taught to them in lectures, tutorials, and historical writing, by choosing high-minded careers in public service.

Reba N. Soffer is Professor of History at California State University, Northridge.