Item 90 - Letter from Richard Sheepshanks

RS's views on University and Trinity College reform: 'I have always objected to the course of the commissioners [Commissioners on University Reform] in mixing up, in one report, matters so dissimilar on the university, and the private colleges. I have never had any doubt that the university belongs to the country, generally; and that when the state was opened to all religious sects, the university should have been opened too'. The university is the Senate and it is in the capacity of members of this body that the necessary arrangements must be made. RS feels with regard to the college 'that we have left the right path which were clearly marked out by our statutes. The teaching was originally by persons appointed by the master and seniors and paid by the college. This is the form to which I would return'. RS gives his scheme for reforming the standard of private tutors. He does not want the college 'having any more intimate relations or communication with the university'. The students should be more rigorously selected in the first instance: 'The college was not founded for general education, but for the best and highest kind of education, and indeed for that kind of education for which there never has been, and never will be, a money compensation'. The college should borrow at a low rate of interest and not a high one. RS's aim is 'to make the college what it ought to be, not merely the best of existing institutions, (which it is very nearly) but a 'ne plus ultra''. He thinks 'we should do a good deal (more than we do do, and that is a good deal) for our really clever men, who are slenderly provided for'. Concerning 'the present constitution of Trinity College we have succeeded so much better than any other institution, that I should not like to make any innovation, (I consider what I have said above to be merely renovations)'. RS thinks it is 'a fault in our schools and universities to draw a very tight rule, and then to wink at exceptions; just as it is the fault of almost all parents to spoil their children by seniority or indulgence, and to expect the college to cure all that'. Teaching and discipline should be in different hands.