The story of educational reform and its relationship to the social upheavals that accompanied industrialization is familiar to most historians of modern Britain. The emergence of state-supported elementary schools after 1870, the rise of technical training, and the expansion of higher education all occupy at least a few sentences in standard accounts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet, the intertwined histories of state intervention, bureaucratization, and the rise of the modern university, as Keith Vernon rightly points out in his interesting new book Universities and the State in England, 1850–1939, have largely eluded close scholarly scrutiny. Taking the 1850 Royal Commissions on Oxford and Cambridge as his starting point and concluding with an assessment of the policy implications of the University Grants Committee (UGC; founded 1919), Vernon skillfully traces the contours of this history while introducing readers to the political machinations that punctuated this transformative era.

Building on the writings of institutional historians and the important scholarship of R. D. Anderson, W. H. G Armytage, and Sheldon Rothblatt, Vernon both delineates the reforming influences at work in England between 1850 and 1939 and illuminates the crucial role that the state played in creating universities that balanced humane learning with practical knowledge and an idealized sense of national mission with bureaucratic efficiency. In reconstructing this history, Vernon relies on an impressive range of sources drawn from institutional archives, government documents, and the writings of prominent political figures like Richard Burdon Haldane. His careful reading of this material and his insistence that historians investigate the links between government policy and university growth as a phenomenon with mid-nineteenth century roots enable him to explain how the British state made the transition from laissez-faire policies to tempered regulation.

While Vernon has chosen chronology and narrative as his primary organizing principles, the chapters of this study also focus on particular themes: beginning with a discussion of Oxbridge, proceeding to detailed examinations, respectively, of the origins and development of the University of London and various provincial institutions, and concluding with discussions of the state's expanding supervisory and funding roles. Along the way, Vernon not only outlines key administrative developments in England (with substantive nods to changes in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales) but also introduces readers to a variety of reform-minded personalities including Benjamin Jowett and Sidney Webb. In so doing, he draws his reader's attention to some of the key intellectual questions of the day such as: How might institutions guard against a creeping philistinism while serving the interests of British industry and the needs of empire? And, what should the relationship be between higher learning and religion?

As Vernon discovers, the answers to these questions varied enormously, depending on institutional goals and prevailing political winds. Oxbridge dons, while open to the prospects of reform by 1850, remained ambivalent about the prosaic demands of the modern industrial world and the motives of the state. Still, reform they did. By 1877, several parliamentary acts were passed that altered the system of awarding scholarships and fellowships, diminished the role of the established church, transferred wealth from the colleges to the universities, encouraged university extension lectures, and modified examination systems.

The University of London, as a new institution formally chartered in 1836, was a different kind of place. Directly the product of state intervention, London came to epitomize what, for many, the university should be: divorced from the religious controversies of the day, responsive to the demands of urban society, and ultimately receptive to change. By exploring government efforts to construct a proper vision for higher education in the metropolis, Vernon shows how the state (and reforming lecturers) not only struck commissions and enacted legislation but also how they transformed the university from an examining body into a thriving institution that elevated teaching, fostered research, and privileged the promotion of a student esprit de corps.

The most dramatic development of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was, undoubtedly, the emergence of universities in the provinces. Initially created by local benefactors like John Owens of Manchester to foster regional pride and expand scientific and technical education, these institutions eventually grew, with state assistance, into modern universities that borrowed as much from the continental research model as they did from the medieval precedents of Oxbridge colleges. Still, their very existence prompted numerous debates about the “true” role of universities in national life and the place that “applicable work” (122) should occupy in institutions of higher learning.

At no time were these debates more important, as Vernon notes, than when the government began to consider state grants in the late 1880s and, in the years after 1900, the role of centralizing bodies in coordinating policy. The conditions of the First World War and the need to compete with what reformers saw as an aggressively militaristic Germany resulted in the creation of a Department of Scientific and Industrial Research in 1916 and ultimately the establishment of a UGC, which both administered treasury funds and functioned as an intermediary between the universities and the state.

The interwar years mark, for the author, a time of reflection on the nature of university training, and it is while discussing this period that Vernon is at his analytical best. In noting, for example, the persistence of the Oxbridge model of humane learning (promoted by Oxbridge-educated reformers) and a general belief that the ancient universities had to be incorporated into any truly national system, he effectively illustrates how the UGC exhorted these institutions to “relate to the exigencies of modern life, while preserving a special and elevating ethos” (191). By the outbreak of the Second World War, a new relationship had been forged between the government and the universities, one in which a hierarchy of institutions persisted but also one in which the practicalities of the modern world (including subjects like oil engineering) were fully considered.

Vernon's narrative of educational change is ultimately a compelling one, driven by a desire to both illustrate the impact, on universities, of broader social, demographic, and economic transformations and assess the motives of reformers. The author's attempts at exploring the rhetoric of government officials, particularly in the latter sections of the study, hint at the great potential inherent in this kind of research. But it is on this front, indeed, that the author falls just a bit short. His apparent reluctance to push further his close reading of commission reports or parliamentary debates constitutes my only major reservation about this study. Fuller explorations of the ways in which officials both envisioned and discussed the national role of the universities (and understood the functions of the modern state and the place that educated elites occupied in promoting national values) would have given Vernon's narrative even more force. Still, as an overview of state intervention in university affairs and as an instructive reminder about the potential dangers of overspecialization and intrusive policy making (as noted in the conclusion), the author has produced an illuminating assessment of a key development in modern educational history.