ABSTRACT
The interlarded discourses of English university fiction and the Black Papers promised to be a sure guide in need, but they have brought us to a quicksand. In ‘Crawling from the wreckage’ Williams asserts the importance of Victorian arguments about university life for thinking through current difficulties. In Britain novel-writing university humanists have dug their disciplines’ graves by seeking to define and defend an ever-shrinking laager. The Black Papers and British university fiction’s dominant discourse helped open the road to Thatcher’s iron rule. The ancient Scottish universities taught science and medicine when these were ignored in Oxford and Cambridge, yet science in Scottish university education was blended in general, liberal education. The obverse of public control was strong public support for Scottish universities, and a clear purpose. Universities, it asserts, should seek to educate the largest possible proportion of the population.
