University fund-raising, while it can be done from a platform of advantage by both Oxford and Cambridge, also presents them with certain special difficulties. In Oxford’s case at least, the university’s need for money is now greater than that of the colleges. This does not mean that the colleges, even the richer ones, have no needs of their own and still less does it mean that they could, if they were so minded, meet all the needs of the university. What it does mean is that the colleges, broadly speaking, need money for new buildings in order to accommodate undergraduates for a higher proportion of their time, which is a desirable improvement, provided it does not mean spattering the university areas with second-rate buildings. The universities need money to maintain posts and research facilities, to prevent a damaging deterioration of performance. It is essential defensive need. The other is desirable and improving. But the colleges are much better placed for fund-raising. Their needs are more tangible and their contact with their old members is more intimate. There is a degree of mismatch.
In both our universities the need for money will in my view force some adjustment of relationships between colleges and the central core. We will no doubt continue - and desirably continue - strongly collegial. But even the strongest colleges could not be much more than conveniently sited liberal arts institutions without the university. Only the universities can discharge the knowledge guarding and the knowledge extending roles of Oxford and Cambridge, and they will not be able to do this without substantial sums of private money, which they will not be able to raise without a recognition by the colleges that they are essentially part of an archipelago and not isolated islands.
Glasgow’s Place in the Cities of the World
A lecture given in April 1990 to the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow to mark Glasgow’s year as European City of Culture.
The Two cities of which Glasgow never reminds me, whether spontaneously or by design, are London and Edinburgh. With many other great cities of the world it has some affinity, with New York, perhaps with Chicago. I have also found echoes of Glasgow in Barcelona, Boston, Lisbon and Naples. But I never thought it had much to do with Paris (except for the Scottish Colourists, and they, unusually for schools of painting, owe as much to the east as to the west of Scotland) until in one brilliant November sunset last year I stood on the Pont de la Concorde and suddenly thought that the line of the Seine, while utterly dissimilar to that of the Thames, was rather like that of the Clyde. The Pont des Arts aroused a thought of the Suspension Bridge, the Institut de France could be the Custom House, and looking in the other direction the slopes above the Place de Chaillot rose up in a passable imitation of the West End.
What does one mean by saying that one city reminds one of another? Not always a great deal could, I suppose, be a brutal answer. Sometimes there can be a certain logical basis for comparison, as when I suddenly realized that the reason brownstone New York, i.e. New York before skyscrapers or even large apartment blocks, seemed to me to have a considerable affinity with the less grandiose parts of Berlin was that, as great cities, they were contemporary with each other and with nowhere else. Both of them moved into the world league at almost exactly the same time, in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Equally one could say that Lisbon is more like San Francisco than it is like Marseille or Genoa because although southern it is not Mediterranean but oceanic. More frequently, however, the thought of comparison comes suddenly and irrationally, although it can none the less be powerful and even productive as with the little dunked madeleine cake that set Proust off on the whole evocation of his childhood and the greatest novel of the twentieth century.
Thus if I take the Glasgow/New York connection, which I find stronger than the link of either with London, it has most vividly come to my mind in largely irrational ways. As each week of the first autumn after I ceased to be Member of Parliament for Hillhead went by, I found that I increasingly missed Glasgow. It is paradoxical that I should have felt more nostalgic as the Glasgow evenings got even darker than the London ones. But I have always found that the special metropolitan quality of the West End best expressed itself at the season of twilights soon after lunch. If I had to choose a single most evocative vignette it would be of an autumn or winter Saturday afternoon in the Kelvingrove Gallery with the organ playing, and then, as one came out, the light fading over the silhouettes of Gilmorehill and the other hillocks of the West End.
In these circumstances I have several times experienced a stab of linking memory with coming out of the Frick Gallery on East 70th Street, in many ways the most attractive small museum in the world, and looking across at the setting of a December sun over the 1890s pinnacles of Central Park West. I cannot rationally say that Argyle Street is very like Fifth Avenue or Kelvingrove Park much like the granite outcrops of Central Park. It is not a direct physical resemblance that is at work. Few people if unblindfolded in the Byres Road would mistake it for Madison Avenue. It is more a common touch of metropolitan atmosphere and a feeling - that is why it being a Saturday is significant - that one is in both a city which in many ways is at its best at a weekend, and certainly not one which needs to be escaped from as soon as it has served its workaday purpose.