by Michael Wood

Years ago, when I was a university chaplain, I and several professors and a couple of others dreamed of being able to buy two or three adjacent houses and setting up an institute of learning concentrating on philosophy, theology, history, literature etc,. With its own small functioning chapel. Students would come for reasons of pure scholarship, or more likely to be properly tutored for their existing university degree courses.

I knew of one such college that had started out in the 1950s that way, and another that had bought a small dedicated teaching hospital and transformed it (I had been on its Board of Governors). We had all of us taught in several universities in several countries, and we knew full well the horrendous nature of modern degree mill universities, churning out students fit for industry, but not for life. The far-off memories of eighteenth and early nineteenth century classical degrees haunted us, we longed for the quiet oasis of true academe, free from the scramble and infighting. (There has, of course, always been a degree of genteel [and not so genteel] competition amongst academics, which may or may not be to the betterment of the education their institution may give.)

The trouble is, how to fund such small retrospective groves of academe. We thought that we might scrape along in such an institute on our pensions after we retired. I had once been tasked by a Vice Chancellor with seeing if it were possible to set up a faculty of theology (I came close), so we all had experience enough to know that while we were dreaming, there was a limited space for true, unpressured scholarship and education for life.

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