Britain is to get a new ‘super university’, an enormous centre of higher learning that will, from the next academic year, under a single vice-chancellor, educate some 50,000 students. Under the cumbersome name the ‘London and South East Universities Group’, the new university is a merger of the existing University of Greenwich and the cash-strapped University of Kent with its campus at Canterbury.
A vital part of the new university’s campus will be the Old Royal Naval College at Greenwich, one of Sir Christopher Wren’s architectural masterpieces, and a World Heritage Site described as being ‘the finest and most dramatically sited landscape ensemble in the country’.
Wren’s fabulous and elegant twin-domed building complex contains such glories as the Painted Hall and the Queen’s House, and encapsulates much of Britain’s maritime and royal history. Originally built by Henry V’s brother, Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, in the 15th century, the palace called Placentia was the birthplace and favourite residence of the Tudor monarchs Henry VIII, Mary I and Elizabeth I. After the Glorious Revolution in 1690, Queen Mary II was moved by the plight of wounded sailors after a battle with the French, and had Wren’s newly built edifice converted into a naval hospital and retirement home for aged mariners, which operated until 1869.
The Royal Navy connection continued for more than a century when the buildings housed the Naval College where RN officers in the Victorian navy were trained. The college continued as Britain’s maritime power waned and finally expired. It closed in 1998, fittingly during the first year of Tony Blair’s Britain-hating New Labour administration.
Since then the Old College has housed an impressive maritime museum, with, among other items, the uniform coat Nelson was wearing when he was shot at Trafalgar. It has also played host to students of the University of Greenwich, and this function is to be expanded when the new university comes on stream. So what was once a home for kings and queens and a hospital for heroes becomes the place where the new elite of tomorrow will absorb the ruling ethos and gospel of our age.
So what was once a home for kings and queens and a hospital for heroes becomes the place where the new elite of tomorrow will absorb the ruling ethos
Will the Greenwich students of tomorrow prove worthy of the beautiful buildings around them? Their new partner, Kent, is one of the 40 per cent of UK universities currently facing financial deficit, thanks largely to a sharp decline in foreign student numbers and a fall in real terms of the value of tuition fees. In response, Kent has cut the number of lectures and lecturers and pooled its resources with Greenwich.
But the financial crisis besetting universities is as nothing compared with the fact that they have lost their very raison d’être: the fostering of free thought and the defence of free speech. Students and their teachers alike are intimidated and scared into silence by their fellows for voicing views that would have been accepted facts as recently as a decade ago. Biological facts are denied, and political opinions damned and drummed out of court in these new bastions of what Orwell called ‘our smelly little orthodoxies’.
So, if there is a huge gulf between the values summed up in the stonework of the Old Naval College and those that obtain in the closed minds of our educational class, is there some better purpose to which the Old College could be put? Now that our navy is but a shadow of its former glory, what new purpose can this glorious monument to our past serve? The royal family surely don’t need another palace, so should it perhaps be converted to a reception centre for those who cross the Channel in small boats – that would at least maintain the maritime link.
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