The ‘free’ university

In spite of a brief flurry of activity recently (in the form of a London conference and the announcement in The Times that ‘fund‐raising will now start in earnest’) it seems reasonably safe to assume that the Free or Independent university will never get off the ground. If this assumption is correct, one must be grateful for the rare opportunity thus offered to combine the writing of an epitaph with the heaving of a sigh of relief. Admittedly, as a solution to any of the problems of university education today, the whole project is about as significant as, say, the London Hilton considered as a contribution to the housing shortage. Nevertheless it is pleasant and may be instructive to speculate on two aspects of the whole affair; first, what kind of animal the new university might have been had it ever struggled into birth, and secondly, how it came about that a group of more or less sober‐minded academics could have conceived such a misbegotten chimera.