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This paper explores the migration patterns of women who studied at Girton and Newnham prior to 1939 through whom dissemination of knowledge and values flowed from Cambridge overseas. It also considers organisations that fostered women's mobility in empire, particularly the Colonial Intelligence League for Educated Women and the International Federation of University Women. The former exemplified links with empire and Europe and dissemination of imperial values and practices, while the latter fostered women's international mobility around interwar notions of the 'international mind' and links with the League of Nations. It ends by looking at the work of Cambridge-educated women in League of Nations structures. The article addresses cultural transmission through a prosopographical approach to mobility to illustrate the larger patterns constituted by the myriad individual lives that formed themselves in networks, relationships, institutions and careers across a global canvas. For some Cambridge-educated women the notion of career included shifting combinations of paid employment, voluntary activity and domestic and familial responsibilities. While teaching formed their main occupation and the most direct medium for dissemination of knowledge and values, it must be seen alongside a more diverse range of occupations in which academic values might also be embedded. It is argued that values and practices of empire and commonwealth became inflected in internationalism in new ways, and the authors point to the need for further research into the role that Cambridge-educated women played in the tensions of empire, commonwealth and internationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The questionnaire survey reported in this paper is part of an ongoing evaluation of the effect of a bursary scheme on recruitment to Cambridge University. It sought to identify factors that encouraged or discouraged highly successful A Level students from applying to Cambridge. Findings reveal three main dimensions associated with the decision to apply to Cambridge, the nature of the courses, the prestige of the university and anxiety about the application process combined with fear of failure. Further analyses showed that there were complex interactions between these three dimensions which governed the decision to apply to Cambridge. These findings are relevant to other prestigious universities. The availability of a bursary did appear to influence the decisions of those who were eligible, but its influence was not as great as some of the other factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter describes the challenges and rewards of using Patchwork Texts to teach Greek Tragedy to Cambridge University English final-year students. Experienced writers as these students are, patchworking nevertheless demands that they engage in a different way with both the texts they have been reading and with their processes of writing and reflection. As one major objective of this compulsory paper is that students re-assess their established modes of critical thinking, the use of the Patchwork Text format proved to be not only a valuable but a peculiarly appropriate approach. Patchworking was also appropriately challenging in demanding varying types of critical reading (analytic, contextual, responsive, reflective) to be harnessed to the multi-voiced and multi-genre Patchwork Text. The article itself uses close reading of the students' texts, analysis and reflection to discuss both the products and the process of Patchwork writing. The teaching intervention led to rethinking many cognate issues. Particularly interesting, and worthy of further research, were the implications for the synthesis of reflective and 'academic' writing. Students found such a synthesis difficult — perhaps because the nature of the engagements (with the text, self and peers on the one hand and with 'academic' discourse and scholarship on the other) is fundamentally different. The Patchwork Text, unlike essays and portfolios, demands this double engagement; which although difficult and problematic forms a paradigm for writing at the heart of Literary studies and, surely, any other discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is an analytical survey of the history of higher education – primarily but not exclusively in England – as written in the last quarter of the twentieth century. It examines the history of liberal education, of the rewriting of the history of Oxford and Cambridge, and of nineteenth- and twentieth-century institutions. It addresses new methodologies and data, and the search for more comprehensive and less parochial and antiquarian approaches to the history of institutions. It examines how accounts of new sectors of higher education and national agencies relate to social hierarchies and developments. It includes discussion of the contribution of non-historians to the history of higher education. It concludes that historical writing has firm roots in historians’ contemporary environment. Bibliographical sources are suggested, and the references themselves constitute a bibliography of the historiography of the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]