ABSTRACT
Education was a focus of interest for many of the founding fathers of sociology. E. Ashby has described the university as ‘a mechanism for the inheritance of the western style of civilization. It preserves, transmits, and enriches learning, and it undergoes evolution as animals and plants do. Therefore one can say that the pattern of any particular university is a result, on the one hand of its heredity, and on the other hand of its environment. T. Parsons maintains that Ashby has given the clearest perspective on some of the principal phases of nineteenth-century university development which have provided a basis for contemporary university structure. As a result of the binary policy the universities do have a significant new factor in their environment, not previously present—and unforeseen by Ashby. Ashby contends that the nineteenth-century foundations could not compete with Oxford and Cambridge, and therefore had to imitate them.
