“The Professors of cognate subjects require also (at Oxford) to be grouped together into Boards, which should have the regulation of their respective studies, along with the Examiners of their school, and subject perhaps to some sort of veto at the hands of the Vice-Chancellor or the University. This would go some ways toward raising the position of the Professors and encouraging the formation of the ‘learned class,’ which the English are told they do not possess. To possess it in the German-University sense is, of course, on the principles already laid down, impossible. Professors are, in England, part of the teaching body. It it best they should remain so. A portion of them will, no doubt, advance the cause of learning by publishing lectures and writing books, over and above their regular work; but the modern University experience of ‘learned leisure’ is not encouraging.”
— John Taylor Coleridge, The Quarterly Review, (London: John Murray, 1809), 413.
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