Why Bachelor of Arts and no Spinsters …, LSE degrees and titles, again?

Three matters concerning universities. The eminent botanist Dr. Upatissa Pethiyagoda asked (17/12) why there were Bachelor of Arts degrees and no Spinsters …. degrees. When universities were first founded in medieval times, the intelligentsia was almost entirely churchmen: priests, friars and monks. There were no women in the clergy. Churchmen held power in studium generale which about the 15th century came to be called universities.

Universities governed themselves, a common feature of many organisations in medieval Europe, where authority was fragmented. (The seeds of present claims for autonomy in universities, bolstered by new and other powerful factors, lay there.) Although graduates from the Arts Faculty comprised the overwhelming majority in universities, and the arts faculty was fons et origo ceteris (source and origin of all others), graduates of the Faculty of Theology controlled universities. For centuries to come this practice continued. The church and, more recently, laymen who governed universities, did not permit the admission of women to universities. In Dr. Pethiyagoda’s university in the UK, women were formally admitted to degrees only in 1948! In Oxford, women had been admitted in 1920-21. That explains why there are no “Spinster graduates”, even though, in some universities, women comprise the majority that graduates. However, change has been rapid since then. The present vice-chancellor of Cambridge University is a woman. The Master of Trinity Hall, one of the smaller but older colleges in that university, is a woman who was an academic in the US, previously.

Then it was asked whether LSE could offer a degree (in The Island, on the same day). LSE cannot, because it is not a university but only a School at the University of London, like the Imperial College of Science and Technology, King’s College or SOAS. Similarly, one cannot get a degree from the Harvard Business School. The model of the University of London was copied in India, when the British established universities there in 1857, the year of the mutiny. (Ramachandran Guha once remarked that two mutinies began in 1857; the other being the establishment of universities whose alumni were a force in pushing the British out of India.) As a result, Delhi University or Calcutta University has large numbers of colleges, where standards of teaching vary widely. The University of Bangalore is reputed to have hundreds of affiliated colleges.

Professor Jan-Melissa Schramm became Vice- Master of trinity hall on 1 april 2023 after filling the role of acting Vice-Master during Lent term 2023. She is Professor of Literature and Law in the english Faculty, Director of Studies in english at trinity hall, and was Deputy Director at CRaSSh between 2017 and 2020. (From Trinity Hall official website)

P. A. Samaraweera, philosophiae doctor, (20/12/24) insists on calling a university degree a title: ‘…(PD) is incorrect in his analysis of a Ph.D. as a title’. Well, of course, Alice (in Wonderland) retorted, ‘I mean what I say’ and Dr. Samaraweeera may assert that same privilege. But korala, muhandiram, maha mudali, professor, archdeacon and judge are titles, not university degrees. B.A., D.Phil., and D.Litt. are degrees and not titles. His appellation ‘Dr.’ is not a title, whereas he may hold the title ’professor’. I went back to history to explain what it is, not what the future should be. He might find it difficult to explain why he, a chemist (say) holds a degree ‘doctor of philosophy’, having never, even in school, studied philosophy. The explanation is in the history of universities. Well into the 21st century, President Emmanuel Macron, a few months ago, opened the University of Paris-Saclay and it will have deans, provosts, and other office holders whose titles derive from the University of Paris which started about 1210 CE. Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, Chancellor of Oxford, in the 14th century, had he miraculously been transported to the occasion, may have found the entire setup familiar as he was ‘a French poet, an agriculturist, a lawyer, a physician, and a preacher; ….’ ( Rashdall, Vol.III p.241). He may even have understood the proceedings. Modern universities follow procedures adopted in old Europe: wear your cappa (degree gown and cap) and compare those vestments with what a Catholic priest, a bishop or the pope wears. Need I say more?

Philosophiae Doctor