ABSTRACT
Polytechnics, for those naive enough to believe what they read in the educational papers, are Johnny-come-lately to higher education: called into being by the wave of a White Paper. Most of the White Paper polytechnics are metamorphoses of institutions often older than their local university, indeed than all but the most senior of English universities. The polytechnics belong: whatever the precise date of their foundation they are culturally Victorian as the universities are culturally medieval. The peculiar amorphousness of the polytechnics may very well make them typical, almost instructive speciments of moral situation. The problems were not, and are not, those of academic freedom but of a peculiar institutional shyness not merely in matters of social and political conviction but, more interestingly, in moral and spiritual questions. Polytechnics because they are local, are or have been especially vulnerable to the economic fortunes of industry.
