Abstract
In his encyclopaedic A history of the University of Oxford, Mallet has claimed that the commitment of the Oxford colleges to supervise ‘the conduct and instruction of their younger colleagues was a natural development of the collegiate idea’ (1927, p. 57) and, likewise, the emergence of the college tutor ‘was a natural development of the college system’ (1927, p. 134). What is fascinating about the history of the European universities is how in the middle ages, having ‘constituted an intellectual community embodying the same ideal’ (Ashby, 1966, Universities: British, Indian, African, p. 4), they acquired very different characteristics in response to the Reformation and the rise of nationalism (Halsey & Trow, 1971, The Decline of Donnish Dominion, p. 34).
What an Oxford tutor does is to get a little group of students together and smoke at them. Men who have been systematically smoked at for four years turn into ripe scholars … A well-smoked man speaks and writes English with a grace that can be acquired in no other way.
(Stephen Leacock as quoted in Morrell, 1997)
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Tapper, T., Palfreyman, D. (2011). The Tutorial System: The Jewel in the Crown. In: Oxford, the Collegiate University. Higher Education Dynamics, vol 34. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0047-5_6
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