Bristol University Gives New Meaning to Having to Read for a Degree

Civitas, 9 November 2006

‘I thought I was paying to be educated by leading academics, not for a library membership and a reading list’.
So complained one final-year history undergraduate at Bristol University, according to a story in today’s Times, upon learning that all he would receive by way of formal tuition this year for the £1,200 he had just been charged in tuition fees would be 2 hours a week of lectures.
When his cohort of history undergraduates first arrived at Bristol, they had reportedly been informed they would receive a minimum of six hours a week tuition in their final year.
The head of the history department invoked ‘incredible pressures on resources’ to justify that reduction.
The nineteenth century theology don the Reverend Charles Spooner used to complain of his students having hissed all his mystery lectures. Today’s undergraduates are complaining of missing all their history lectures in a quite different sense from that which dear old Spooner had had in mind.
On what are their tuition fees being spent is the question one cannot help asking on reading the story. One would like to hope on bulk purchases for the University library of
Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall’s Our Island Story . From today’s story, a read of it sounds likely to give far more instruction to Bristol’s history undergraduates than they shall be receiving from their lecturers.