International Students 1860–2010: Policy and Practice round the World [1st ed.] 9783030499457, 9783030499464

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International Students 1860–2010 Policy and Practice round the World

Hilary Perraton

International Students 1860–2010

Hilary Perraton

International Students 1860–2010 Policy and Practice round the World

Hilary Perraton Independent Scholar Cambridge, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-49945-7    ISBN 978-3-030-49946-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49946-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Images of Birmingham Premium / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

By the same author A history of foreign students in Britain (Palgrave Macmillan) Learning Abroad: A history of the Commonwealth Scholarship and Fellowship Plan (Cambridge Scholars Publishing) Open and distance learning in the developing world (Routledge)

Acknowledgements

As always my first and deepest debts are to my wife Jean, for her continuing support and encouragement, and next to our children Jonathan and Claire, for theirs as well. Those who encouraged me on the route to this book include Trudy Harpham, Peter Hennessy and Rémy Tremblay. In writing it I have benefited from help and advice from, among others, Will Bevan, Charlotte Creed, Joan Dassin, Brian Donnelly, the late Christine Humphrey, John Kirkland, Nick Mulhern, Tamson Pietsch and Reehana Raza. It would have been impossible to do it without the work of archivists at the National Archives at Kew and of librarians particularly at Cambridge University Library, the Institute of Education in London and the British Library. Interpretations and errors are all my own.

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 Part I Narratives  13 2 Origins: Student Travel before the First World War 15 3 Rise and Fall: Between the Wars 45 4 Thirty Glorious Years: Postwar Ideology and Development 75 5 Cooperation or Competition: Into the Market105 Part II Themes 137 6 Children of the Gorgeous East: Indian Students and the British Empire139 7 Profitable Work for Uncle Sam? American Two-Way Traffic169 8 Warm Welcome in the Cold War: The Competition for Students195 ix

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9 Get Them Young: Children across Borders225 10 The Soldiers’ Tales: International Military Training249 11 Follow the Money: Who Has Met the Costs and Why267 12 Conclusion299 Index319

Abbreviations

ANC CIA CORB CPSA DAAD Erasmus FBI FCO FEANF GUF ICS IIE IOR IUS KGB KUTV MIT NA NATO OCAU

African National Congress Central Intelligence Agency Children’s Overseas Reception Board Communist Party of South Africa Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (German Academic Exchange Service) European Community Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students Federal Bureau of Investigation Foreign and Commonwealth Office Fédération des Étudiants d’Afrique Noire en France (Federation of Black African Students in France) Gruppi Universitari Fascisti (Fascist University Groups) Indian Civil Service Institute of International Education India Office Records International Union of Students Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security) Kommunisticheskii Universitet Trudyashchikhsya Vostoka imeni Stalina (Communist University of Toilers of the East) Massachusetts Institute of Technology National Archives North Atlantic Treaty Organization Office de Coopération et d’Accueil Universitaire (Office for University Cooperation and Welcome)

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ABBREVIATIONS

OECD Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development OTC Officers Training Corps RAF Royal Air Force SOA School of the Americas UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization USAID United States Agency for International Development vuzy vysshiye uchebniye zavedeniya (institutions of higher education) YMCA Young Men’s Christian Association YWCA Young Women’s Christian Association

List of Tables

Table 2.1 Table 2.2 Table 2.3 Table 3.1 Table 3.2 Table 3.3 Table 4.1 Table 4.2 Table 4.3 Table 5.1 Table 5.2 Table 5.3 Table 5.4 Table 6.1 Table 7.1 Table 7.2 Table 7.3 Table 7.4 Table 8.1 Table 8.2

European student numbers in main host countries 1870–1914 20 Russian students in western universities 1893–1912 24 US students in Europe 1860–1914 26 University enrolments in selected countries 1920–1938 48 Foreign student numbers in selected countries 1920–1938 48 Geographical origins of foreign students in Britain, France and the United States 1920–1938 49 University totals in selected countries 1950–1975 77 Most popular host countries 1960 and 1975 78 Countries sending most students 1964 and 1975 80 University totals in selected countries 1980–2010 107 Most popular host countries 1980–2010 108 Countries sending most students 1980–2010 109 Erasmus students 125 Indian students in British higher education 1873–1948 140 Estimates of US student numbers enrolled abroad 1870–1938171 Estimates of US numbers on study-abroad programmes 1923–2009174 Foreign students in the United States 1904–2010 176 Estimates of US student numbers enrolled abroad 1955–2010180 Foreign students in USSR 1952–1989 208 Students from Middle East and north Africa in the United States and USSR 1960–1989 210

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List of Tables

Table 9.1 Table 11.1 Table 11.2 Table 11.3 Table 11.4

Some foreign school enrolments 1960s–2010 Funding of foreign students in Britain 1921–2010 Funding of foreign students in France 1931–1995 Funding of foreign students in the United States 1950–2010 American foundation scholarship programmes 1919–2010

237 268 269 269 284

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Once, Brahmandatta, the King of Benares had a son named Prince Brahmandatta. Now kings of former times, though there might be a famous teacher living in their city, often used to send their sons to foreign countries afar off to complete their education, that by this means they might learn to quell their pride and high-mindedness, and endure heat or cold, and be made acquainted with the ways of the world. So did this king. Calling his boy to him (now the lad was sixteen years old), he gave him a pair of sandals, a sunshade of leaves, and a thousand pieces of money with the instruction ‘My son get you to Taksasila and stay there’. (Jataka tales, 4th century BC) The [Athenian] Academy was a school not only of philosophy but also of political science; it was a seminary that provided councillors and law-givers for republics and reigning sovereigns – Plutarch gives a list of the statesmen Plato helped to produce, and they were to be found in every part of the Hellenic world: Dion of Syracuse, … Aristonymos the law-giver of Megalopolis in Arcadia, Phormion of Elis, Menedemus of Pyrrha, Eudoxus of Cnidus, Aristotle of Stagira, and, lastly, Xenophon, adviser to Alexander. (Henri Marrou 19561)

In the nineteenth century Gandhi crossed oceans to study and returned home to transform India. Rutsherford travelled and stayed in England to transform physics. In the twentieth, Ho Chi Minh studied in Paris and Moscow and Nkrumah in the United States and Britain, both returning home to transform their countries. Watson crossed the Atlantic as a research student before sharing a Nobel Prize for determining the © The Author(s) 2020 H. Perraton, International Students 1860–2010, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49946-4_1

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structure of DNA.  At least some of their successors in the twenty-first century, numbered in their millions, can be expected to match their achievements. The stories of students who travelled abroad are part of the world’s intellectual history. More than that, their records, and that of their reasons for travelling, are intertwined with the history of the countries and institutions that sent them and received them and widen our more general understanding of the past 150 years. Our story begins in 1860, a year of intellectual fertility and ferment. The origin of species, published in the previous November, was on the book stalls. Thomas Huxley and Louis Pasteur were transforming the life sciences in Britain and France. To the west, Lincoln was elected president as the United States drifted to civil war. To the east, Russia was enjoying one of its brief spells of openness and reform in which Alexander II removed his predecessor’s restrictions on universities and allowed students to travel abroad. They could even do so on government money, with 100 funded to travel to western Europe over two years. Russian universities were built on a German model and employed German teachers, creating links that took students from Russia to Germany and Switzerland. Among them a small circle of Russian students in Heidelberg included the chemists Alexander Borodin, who was to achieve greater fame as a composer, and Dmitri Mendeleev, who was to formulate the first periodic table six years later, and the physiologist, Ivan Sechenov. He returned to Russia the same year and gained his doctorate at the Medical and Surgical Academy of St Petersburg with a thesis on the enduring topic of the physiology of alcohol addiction. His research interests in the behaviour of nerve cells took him to work at the meeting point of physiology and psychology and to become one of the new men of resurgent Russian science, described by Ivan Pavlov as ‘the father of Russian physiology’.2 Travel to a foreign university was a route to good scholarship and academic advancement for Sechenov. In the same year, in very different settings to the east and the west, two writers were developing their own arguments for study abroad. In China, the Taiping civil war that had been devastating the country was nearing its end, with a re-establishment of the power of the Qing dynasty and a revival of plans to modernise the country, seen as demanding closer contact with the west. Yung Wing, one of America’s first Chinese students and Yale’s first graduate from China, had been back there for six years, working as a businessman, and was pressing for others to follow his path across the Pacific, although it took another 12 years before he could lead a mission of 30 boys to study in the United States.3 Meanwhile an American, William Everett, was at Cambridge and

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concerned that few of his fellow countrymen were studying in England. He attributed this partly to its cost, partly to the ‘general persuasion that English scholars are inferior to German’ and partly to the shortage of information in America about the English universities. To help put things right he returned home, gave a series of lectures on studying in Cambridge and turned them into one of its early student guides. He combined a warning that the races at Newmarket were ‘indeed a fruitful source of temptation, being only sixteen miles from Cambridge’, with an explanation that mathematics and the classics were all-important. Students were not only travelling to study but making the case for others to follow their example. Over 150  years hugely increasing numbers of students crossed the world to follow the example of Sechenov, Yung and Everett. They were helped by improved transport, encouraged by university development and change, and they played their part in the intellectual developments that followed the ferments of 1860. As numbers grew, foreign students moved from being a rare exception, numbering perhaps 1500 to 2000 in 1860, to becoming the stuff of big business, amounting to almost four million by 2010. Their stories make it possible to identify the factors that forced, drove or encouraged students to travel abroad. They included not only family hopes and fears, influenced by opportunity and reputation, but also the policies and practices developed by governments, institutions and agencies. The history of the movement of international students, the theme of the following chapters, is of the interplay between personal decisions by families or individuals and institutional or governmental policy and practices. Individual choices and formal policies changed as higher education expanded and the scale, patterns and geography of student movement changed in response. Before 1914 student movement was predominantly a European phenomenon, across European frontiers, and tending to be from the east and south to the northwest. Borodin, Mendeleev and Sechenov were succeeded by increasing numbers who travelled, with or without government blessing, as the tsarist governments blew hot or more often cold on student travel. Women and Jews went without the blessing, with Zurich a preferred destination. Romanians and Germans, as well as Russians, travelled to France. But travel was not limited to that across European frontiers. Egypt sent students to Britain and France. The Humboldtian university made Germany a magnet, drawing students from north America as well as Europe. The United States sent more students abroad than it

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received but had begun to recruit from within its region. Empires, and cheaper shipping, drove Indians and Australians to Britain and Filipino students to the United States. Everett’s guide to study in England was followed by one for his Indian compatriots by Samuel Satthianadhan, published in Madras in 1890.4 Numbers rose sharply between 1900 and 1914 as the world economy strengthened and higher education expanded in the industrialised world. After the First World War international student numbers generally stabilised, at a higher level than before 1914. Much of the previous pattern remained, with movement within Europe continuing to be important and imperial ties remaining strong. The United States recruited more students than it sent abroad. Russia left the stage as a host country; the numbers travelling to Germany initially recovered but then fell after 1933. There were three main changes in the 30 years after 1945. First, the United States became the dominant host country, accepting more foreign students than anywhere else, although they formed a smaller proportion of the total than they did in much of western Europe. Second, the countries of the developing world sent increasing numbers of students to the north, in the interest of their national economic and political development. While movement between industrialised countries continued to grow and remain a major element in international student movement, it was increasingly dominated by this movement from the south to the north, with Asia very much in the forefront. Third, the cold war reshaped policy with eastern and western blocs encouraging movement within their areas of influence and competing for students from the south. As the Berlin wall fell, the geography and the scale of student movement changed. Travel between east and west became easier, while the number of students travelling north and west from Asia continued to grow. After moderate expansion in the 1990s international student numbers then rose more sharply in the new century. New directions opened up: South Africa regained its role as an African host; in Asia, a new policy of creating educational hubs took foreign students to Malaysia and China, even as they continued themselves to send students abroad. To their south, Australia, which had once held down foreign numbers as a potential threat to the white Australian policy, became a major host country, third in the world rankings by 2010. * * *

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Personal and family choices shaped the movement of students across borders and oceans. They were usually from elite families and to return to elite occupations: these were the ones who could afford to pay. Ambition of various kinds played its part. Sechenov and many gifted scholars who followed him used their foreign study as a springboard to scientific advance. Their travel was influenced by the reputation of distant scholars and institutions. Political ambition also played its role so that, from the late nineteenth century, future political leaders were also to be found among foreign students who travelled to universities and military academies in Britain, France, the United States and later the Soviet Union. Whatever their ambition, international students, like more permanent migrants, were encouraged to study abroad by circumstances that pushed or pulled them. Many were pushed by limits to their opportunities at home and pulled by their perceptions of better or more appealing opportunities abroad. Limits to local opportunities pushed students. They encouraged Chinese students in the late nineteenth century, wanting to westernise their country, towards American universities. In the same period, Jewish and women medical students travelled to Switzerland from both Russia and the United States because they could not get to university at home. Until the early twentieth century, Egypt had no national university on a modern model which led its middle-class parents to send their children to French and British universities. Students were pushed to travel by fear as well as hope, most notably from central Europe in the 1930s and from South Africa in the apartheid era. The factors pushing students to travel were often reinforced by those pulling them. The quality of German education drew one circle of Russian men to Heidelberg while restrictions on studying within Russia sent a circle of women to Zurich. The Indian students following Satthianadhan’s advice were pushed by limits to their opportunities at home, pulled by better prospects abroad. In the early twentieth century, Nehru travelled to Britain to study with his family’s blessing and money and a shrewd sense of the professional reasons to do so. Under British rule, in order to practise in the higher courts in India, lawyers needed to qualify at the Inns of Court in London, Edinburgh or Dublin. The requirement provided a powerful incentive for aspirant lawyers, or politicians, to see British education as a good family investment. The strength of the push and pull factors was always affected by class, race and gender. Scholarships helped a fortunate minority but family money was more important. In terms of family and class, Sechenov’s father

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was an army officer while Everett came from a Boston family prosperous enough to send him to Harvard and across the Atlantic. Perceptions of race affected both the recruitment of foreign students and the quality of their daily lives. At different times and in various jurisdictions, it created barriers and complications for Jewish, African and Asian students, sometimes encouraging them to study abroad, sometimes preventing their doing so. Gender was always at play, sometimes preventing foreign study for women, more often restricting it. The first woman doctor in Europe, the Russian Nadezhda Suslova, studied in Zurich, whose progressive citizens accepted women to their university from the mid-nineteenth century. Women students were already travelling from India to Britain before 1900 and from China to America before 1914. Universities slowly followed Zurich’s example and abandoned restrictions on women students. The legislators of New Zealand forgot to write in a gender restriction for its university in 1870 and others followed their example over the next 80  years. Changes in practice came slowly and foreign women students remained a minority in most statistics until, and in some cases beyond, the end of the twentieth century. Information, whose flows were influenced by status, played its part in encouraging student movement. It helped students to travel to institutions they knew about, either because of an international reputation or because others from their own institution or home town—less often village—had already been there. Beyond class, race and gender, students were influenced by geography, language and culture. While some students were crossing oceans, for many years most travelled within continents, often across a single border. As they did so, universities teaching in a familiar, or later an international, language were at an advantage. The international as well as imperial languages, English and French, drew students to universities that were using them as languages of instruction. American and Australian universities have appealed to international students, in part, because of the perceived value of education in English. The importance of German as a regional language, as well as the strength of German scholarship, attracted students. The shared culture of its universities sent students round the British empire and later Commonwealth while students, and military officers, from Romania and francophone countries went to France for education and training. In the present century students from central Asia have continued to travel to universities in Russia. Cultural and linguistic ties have outlasted the political structures that created them. * * *

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The presence of foreign students, and their demands or expectations, forced institutions and governments to develop practices and policies towards them. Policy decisions were needed where there was a wish either to recruit internationally or to restrict international enrolment. Policies were developed at three levels: by institutions, by governments and by international agencies. Academic, economic and political priorities influenced college or university policy. They sought good students, could benefit from their fees and could see political reasons for recruiting them. Universities, and especially those with a strong commitment to research, have long wanted to recruit academically able students, making intellectual capacity more important than nationality as a criterion for student admission. Foreign students have been seen as bringing intellectual diversity and evidence of quality. Institutions, from the London School of Economics in the early twentieth century to leading Chinese universities in the early twenty-first, saw the presence of foreign students as a mark of distinction. Policies and practices were needed both to attract them and to resolve the demands they posed in areas such as criteria for admission, the recognition of unfamiliar qualifications, language and the practical need for accommodation. Where there was competition for places in higher education, policies were required to balance the claims of local and distant students. Money mattered: where universities depended on student fees, they had good reason to recruit and often to recruit internationally. Swiss and French universities before the First World War saw foreign students as a way of raising revenue and filling places. Economic pressures continued and late twentieth-century changes in the way universities were funded led to international students being increasingly valued as a source of revenue. By the twenty-first century foreign student fees were meeting over 20 per cent of the teaching costs of British universities.5 Alongside economics, the political sympathies of academic decision-­ makers could influence policy. One nineteenth-century English college head wanted to recruit Indian students at a time when his peers were more interested in restricting them. British and French universities opened their doors to Belgian and Serbian students in the First World War out of political sympathy. Universities in western Europe and north America welcomed students as well as university staff fleeing Nazism in the 1930s. Before 1914, while universities were shaping their own policies for foreign students, governments had little interest in them and government policy often bore lightly on universities. Where there were policies they were sometimes mainly negative. The Russian government intermittently

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discouraged or banned student travel abroad. The British government would have liked to discourage ‘the wrong sort of Indians’ but lacked the means to do so. Imperial powers drew some students from their empire and the governments of newly created states paid for small numbers of potential lawyers, engineers and doctors to study abroad. But these were exceptions in a general pattern of state indifference. After the First World War government policies were more clearly articulated as foreign study or foreign students were seen as having political and economic significance. Immediately after 1918, as after 1945, the exchange of students was valued as a harbinger of peace and international understanding. Host countries also increasingly saw the enrolment of foreign students as a route to soft power and to gaining future friends, political allies and trading partners. At the same time the pursuit of modernisation, and the creation of national pools of expertise, made policy demands on sending countries. The search for soft power remained a staple of government policy after 1945 but assumed new forms as the drive towards political independence and economic development took fast-growing numbers of students from the south to the north. Governments responded to the numbers and, in the aftermath of the war, increased their expenditure both on higher education and on funding international students. Policy then took a new ideological turn as the cold war deepened and east and west launched a competition for students, played out in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Policy changes necessarily followed the collapse of the Berlin wall and dissolution of the eastern bloc. The political changes did not lead to a resurgence of claims that student mobility could create a more harmonious world, as after 1914 and 1945, but coincided with an increasing emphasis on the economic significance of foreign students. Alike in Britain, China, France, Russia, the United States and others, they were by the end of the century seen not only as potential trading partners and friends but also as bringing immediate economic and financial benefits. Policies were reshaped to attract them. For most of the last century and a half, international agencies played only a minor role in relation to international students. The League of Nations had aspirations to encourage student movement but little finance to do so. UNESCO then gave its backing to student exchanges and UN agencies developed scholarships mainly to support developing-country students. The biggest change in this picture came within the industrialised north when the European Communities created Erasmus, the European

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Community Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students, which went on to support the movement of over three million students across borders, in the interest of strengthening the European economy and developing the new European citizen. * * * Sechenov, Yung, Everett and Satthianadhan were early movers whose experience helps sketch the nineteenth-century pattern. They were not the pioneers of international student movement as that role had been preempted by Erasmus and his contemporaries or, earlier still, by the classical scholars travelling to Taxila and Athens and by Europe’s medieval wandering scholars. But as transport improved, international trade and its accompanying vigorous imperialism all took more students across frontiers with long-term consequences for themselves, their home countries and their host countries and institutions. Their movement across borders shaped their lives and they in turn shaped the institutions they attended. Documenting and examining how students were recruited, what they studied and what policies were adopted towards them is, then, part of the history of higher education but also has a bearing on the history of migration, of government finance, of the role of higher education in society and of the search for social, political and economic development. Where students were recruited in the interests of soft power, and to meet the demands of the labour market, policies towards them bear on major issues of foreign and domestic policy. To explore these themes the following chapters set out to document student mobility—who travelled where, why and to study what—and, in the light of that, to examine the policy decisions that influenced the process and what these reveal about their societies more generally. Shifts in policies and in the geography of student movement have brought changes in language and traps for the unwary. A distinction is sometimes drawn between international students, who have crossed a border to study, and foreign students, who have a different nationality from that of their host country. Some authorities have used residence as the key criterion in defining a foreign student, others nationality, so that consistency and interpretation is inevitably tricky. The concept of foreignness can be slippery. British statistics long distinguished Commonwealth from foreign students while, years after Irish independence, its students were often lumped in with those from the United Kingdom. Political status can

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change the identity of a foreign student so that, until July 1962, a student from Algeria in Paris was French but after that date a foreigner. The following text has tried to achieve reasonable consistency without unnecessary pedantry. Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 set out the narrative of international student movement over 150 years and of the evolution of policy during that time. The years up to 1914, discussed in Chapter 2, saw world foreign student numbers rise to between 25,000 and 35,000; France was already recruiting around 15 per cent of its students from abroad by the outbreak of war and Britain 10 per cent. Students headed to western Europe, from the continent and beyond while, in the heyday of imperialism, Britain, France and the United States began developing imperial policies for higher education. Between the wars, discussed in Chapter 3, foreign numbers initially rose but stagnated as the slump hit the whole world economy. Policies continued to reflect the demands of formal and informal empire. The shadow of the approaching Second World War then fell not only over Europe but as far as China and Latin America. Britain and France sought to counter German and Italian propaganda in the Middle East, Chinese students stopped travelling to Japan as war broke out there, and Roosevelt introduced scholarship programmes in Latin America to counter German activities there. The 30 glorious years of the postwar world are the theme of Chapter 4. They saw foreign numbers reach new heights and new hopes for international study in the interest of peace and good international relations. The cold war then increasingly shaped policy, while travel in the interest of economic and political development in the south became a major driver. Empires fell, but decolonisation brought new demands for foreign study and policies by the governments of new states to encourage and control it. Beyond the cold war, beyond imperialism, Chapter 5 looks at a new world in which governments and universities increasingly perceived the contest for foreign students in market terms. They had always been seen as potential long-term friends but were now increasingly also seen as valued short-term customers and consumers. The following six chapters explore the same landscape but from a thematic rather than chronological perspective. Imperialism is a dominant theme in the story and is illustrated in Chapter 6 by the students from south Asia who travelled to Britain, in increasing numbers from the late nineteenth century. From Nehru to Benazir Bhutto they travelled to Britain and returned home to shape their own countries, but had already influenced their host country and its institutions: Oxford and Cambridge

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introduced examinations in Sanskrit for their imperial students while governments tried to find ways of attracting the loyal and holding back the disloyal. Chapter 7 also has a geographical focus in looking at the United States’ record both in sending students abroad and in hosting them. The scale of US host activities, and the exuberant visibility of its students abroad, demand attention. For the 45 years of the cold war, discussed in Chapter 8, east and west developed competing circles of student mobility. Both then recruited across the developing world with each accusing the other, with some justice, of policies marred by hidden motives and actual malpractice. Before, during and after the cold war, governments and institutions recruited students at other levels of education and for other purposes: Chapter 9 looks at school children, small numbers of whom have always travelled abroad to study, with the children of the elite sent in pursuit of family ambition and of the fearful and poor as an escape. War has been prominent in the story; over my grandparents’ lifetime there were three wars across the fault lines of Europe, two of which became world wars, and almost unnumbered and forgotten imperial wars. The effects of these recur throughout the 150-year history but Chapter 10 concentrates not on their consequences but on the soldiers sent abroad by their governments in the interest of hard or soft power, often to military academies, with numbers that sometimes exceeded civilian foreign students at universities. Chapter 11 completes the thematic chapters by examining who paid for students to travel abroad and why they did so, looking in turn at families, institutions, governments and scholarship agencies. The concluding Chapter 12 reviews the evidence and examines the ways in which state interest and student choice and changing ideologies shaped the history of foreign students and the parts they played, both in their own and in their host countries.

Notes 1. Cited in Lowe and Yasuhara Origins, Chapter 2; Marrou History, 64. 2. Vucinich Science, 119ff, 155, 315. 3. Bevis Higher education exchange, 26, 44. 4. Everett On the Cam, 9, 28, 80; Satthianadhan Four years, 21. 5. Migration Advisory Committee Impact, 60.

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Bibliography Bevis, T.  B. 2014 A history of higher education exchange: China and America, New York: Routledge Everett, W. 1867 On the Cam: Lectures on the University of Cambridge in England (2d edn), Cambridge: Sever and Francis Lowe, R. and Yasuhara, Y. 2016 The Origins of Higher Learning: Knowledge networks and the early development of universities, London: Routledge Marrou, H.  L. 1956 A history of higher education in antiquity, London: Sheed and Ward Migration Advisory Committee 2018 Impact of international students in the UK, London www.gov.uk/government/publications/migration-advisory-committee-mac-report-international-students downloaded 28.10.2019 Satthianadhan, S. 1893 Four years in an English university (2nd edn), Madras: Srinivasa, Varadachari and Co Vucinich, A. 1970 Science in Russian culture 1861-1917, Stanford University Press

PART I

Narratives

CHAPTER 2

Origins: Student Travel before the First World War

Criticism has sometimes been directed at this characteristic of the [London] School [of Economics], but provided that the number of foreigners is not excessive – and at present it does not appear so – there are two great advantages in their presence. They carry the reputation of the School over the world to the advantage of all its students, British as well as foreign, and they enrich the student life, both in the Common Room and in the Union. (Halford Mackinder 19051)

Nadezhda Suslova, who went on to become the first qualified woman doctor in Europe, was born in 1843 in the village of Panin, some 200 miles east of Moscow. Her mother came from a free peasant family but her father, Prokofii Suslov, was a freed serf who worked as an agent to a wealthy landowner, Dmitri Sheremetev. With support from Sheremetev, Suslova was sent to school, though she was unsurprisingly bored in a single class of 80 girls from 7 to 17. Along with her education, she embraced nihilist and feminist ideas and wrote fiction for the journal Sovremennik (Contemporary) which drew the attention of the secret police. In 1861, when the emancipation of the serfs seemed to promise a freer Russia, she was allowed to attend the St Petersburg Medical and Surgical Academy as an auditor, only for women to be excluded from universities two years later. She rejected the idea of becoming a teacher, as teachers could do more harm to the minds of their charges than doctors to their bodies, and instead travelled to Zurich to study medicine.2

© The Author(s) 2020 H. Perraton, International Students 1860–2010, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49946-4_2

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By this time railways crossed Europe; they had reached Switzerland in 1844 and by 1860 Russia had more than a thousand miles of track. With travel easier and cheaper, Paris might have seemed the obvious destination for a Russian woman educated in French, but the new University of Zurich had a reputation for openness, an open-minded faculty and a medical school. Foreign students enabled the university to build up its numbers as it established itself alongside the centuries-old University of Basel and the academies of Geneva and Lausanne. The university reflected the values of its town: its schools were opened to all in 1860 and over the next half century ‘The town and canton continued to be on the Liberal, or Radical, or even Socialistic side’.3 Suslova was pushing at a potentially open door when, continuing neurological research on the muscle activity of frogs that she had started in Russia, she applied to enter the university. In December 1867, before a large audience, she successfully defended her doctoral dissertation and went home to write in her diary: ‘I am the first but not the last. After me come thousands’.4 Back in Russia she established a specialist practice in gynaecology and paediatrics and soon saw her prediction borne out: by May 1873, 153 Russian men and 103 women were in Zurich, most of them studying medicine. Some then mixed study and politics to an extent which so alarmed the Russian government that it recalled students later the same year, threatening any who disobeyed with a ban on employment or higher education. Most returned but, despite this setback, some 500–700 Russian women followed Suslova’s footsteps or railway journeys and travelled west to study between 1865 and 1900.5 The year after Suslova graduated, three young men, among the earliest of a growing flow of Indian students, travelled together down the Hugli River to take the mail steamer Mooltan from Calcutta and study in London. One of the three, Romesh Chunder Dutt, had embarked without the knowledge of his family where at least his grandfather, with an orthodox Hindu objection to sea travel, would have stopped him. Dutt’s family had thrown in their lot with the British raj, embraced liberal ideas, had both Indian and British friends and valued English education and culture alongside Bengali. His father was a deputy collector and sent his son to Presidency College in Calcutta, where he had a scholarship of 14 rupees per month (about 18/6d. or 2010£88).6 While there the young Dutt conceived the idea of taking the Indian Civil Service entry examination for which education in Britain was almost a necessity. Having matriculated—and had an arranged and apparently happy marriage at the age of 15—his friends Surendra Nath Banerjea and B. L. Gupta booked

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berths for all three without revealing his name. After the secret departure, leaving his family, wife and child, Dutt realised how rash they all were: For we have left our home and our country, unknown to our friends, unknown to those who are nearest and dearest to us, staking our future, staking all, on success in an undertaking which past experience has proved to be more than difficult. The least hint about our plans would have effectually stopped our departure; our guardians would never have consented to our crossing the seas; our wisest friends would have considered it madness to venture on an impossible undertaking.

Arrived in London, they signed up at University College, arranged to get private tuition for the next year and, by Dutt’s account, worked as model students: We passed our days in the University College, either in the classroom or in the library. In the evening we returned to our lodging houses, took our dinner, went out for a stroll, returned and took a cup of tea, and then resumed our study which we kept up as long as we could.

A letter of support from their tutor reinforces this picture of diligence, confirming that they worked long steady hours ‘as well men might who had staked as much as they were staking on success in the required examination’. The hard work paid off and in the examination, ‘one of the stiffest in the world’, Dutt’s marks put him third in the order of merit despite handicaps such as the examiner in electricity not being ‘a fair examiner’ and, yet more unfairly, that it was possible to gain up to 1500 marks in Latin and Greek but only 500  in Sanskrit. The examination pass made entry to the Indian Civil Service possible but, before returning to India to take up the post, two more years were needed for further examinations in law, political economy, history and Indian languages. During this time Dutt was also admitted to the Middle Temple and qualified as a barrister. In 1871 he and his two successful friends returned to India where he attempted a reconciliation with his family and embarked on a career of noted but thwarted distinction. He was the first Indian to reach the rank of divisional commissioner but, seeing British juniors appointed over his head, took early retirement in 1897, freeing him to enter politics, preside over the 15th annual Indian National Congress and become revenue minister in the princely state of Baroda.7

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Neither Suslova nor Dutt was a typical student. At the least they were among the most determined. But as forerunners of later, and larger, generations, they exemplified the process of travelling abroad to study as they set out on their travels. Their stories have elements in common with those of the many more who followed them. They were travelling west, the dominant direction of student travel at this time, seeking qualifications they could not obtain at home, and to universities that were themselves rapidly changing. In doing so they were helped by changes in transport on land and on sea. Those changes, in universities and in transport provide the context for student movement before the First World War. * * * Universities were changing all across western Europe, with the number of students increasing. German universities grew in intellectual strength and reputation from Wilhelm von Humboldt’s creation of the University of Berlin in 1810. As they did so, student numbers, which had changed little between 1830 and 1865, began a rapid rise, increasing fivefold between 1865 and 1914. Governments were willing to invest in higher education with expenditure rising by 1000 per cent in Prussia, Bavaria and Saxony between 1877 and 1910.8 Some of that expenditure went on the creation of a new group of institutions, its technical institutes or Technische Hochschulen, which in 1900 acquired equal status, if not the same ancient prestige, as the universities. Their numbers rose from below 3000 to over 12,000  in 1914 with the institutes’ recruiting about half of all foreign students in 1900 and a third in 1914.9 Student numbers rose nearly as dramatically in the British Isles and France, with growth accelerating as the world emerged from the great depression of the early 1870s. French student numbers rose by a third between 1900 and 1910 and British probably by nearly a half between 1900 and 1914. New institutions, and new kinds of institutions, were being established and attracting students with new interests. The British Isles had long managed with two universities in England, four in Scotland and one in Ireland. They were joined in the nineteenth century by the new universities of London and Durham and then by universities and university colleges in the major provincial cities. Old and new institutions had differing values so that London began without religious tests which Oxford and Cambridge pared away in the 1870s. New institutions introduced new academic subjects. After years of torpor and neglect Oxbridge

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began to take the sciences seriously. In France Napoleon had swept away the old university system and, while Paris retained its status and international appeal, universities in the provinces were replaced by a network of faculties. In 1896 they re-emerged as universities with a new measure of autonomy and control over their finances. European universities had, from their origins, recruited students over long distances and nineteenth-century Germany and France remained key destinations for many of their neighbours. The international reputation of German scholarship and of its universities enabled Germany to recruit more foreign students than France at the beginning of the twentieth century. A surge in demand for education in France then drove its figures up, from 1800 to 5200 and from 6 per cent to 13 per cent of its university student total between 1900 and 1910, surpassing the German numbers. Austria had seven universities stretching from Vienna to Cracow and Czernowitz which together by1890 had 2300 students, from outside its borders, many of them from German-speaking families in the region and more than half of them from Hungary.10 More surprising Switzerland was a major player, enrolling more foreign students to its universities than Germany in 1900 and 1910. Foreign students made up between 35 and 50 per cent of total students in Switzerland as compared with 5 to 15 per cent in France and Germany. The liberal reputation and autonomy of the University of Zurich and of its peers, which had drawn Suslova, continued to draw in students. It was in the interest of the canton of Zurich, which had to pay the bills, and of the university teachers, whose jobs depended on student enrolments, to recruit as widely as possible. Meanwhile Britain lagged behind its continental neighbours. Scottish universities, more internationally minded than English and with respected medical schools in Edinburgh and Glasgow, were recruiting 10 per cent of their students abroad in 1892. By 1910 some 10 per cent of students in Great Britain came from overseas with the largest group from India but a growing number from continental Europe. German matriculants at Oxford rose from three at the turn of the century to 23 in 1906–1907 and 33 in 1913–1914.11 Although the data on student numbers are patchy before 1914, as of limited interest to national agencies and not yet collected internationally, they suggest that the number of students travelling to a foreign university in Europe rose from between 6000 and 7000 in 1870 to exceed 25,000 by 1910. Numbers grew most rapidly in the new century, rising by 75 per cent in Switzerland between 1900 and 1910, by 81 per cent in Germany and by 195 per cent in France (see Table 2.1).

Student total

France

c10

n/a c10

n/a c2,770

1,779 5,241 6,187

1,532

19,587

29,377 41,044 42,037

500

11,200

6 13 15

6

5

31,588 49,403

25,482

21,871

12,050

Foreign Student Foreign Foreign Student (%) total total (%) total

c640

Foreign total

United Kingdom

2,202 3,975

1,916

1,129

735

Foreign total

Germany

7 8

8

5

6

5,240 8,354

3,031

Foreign Student (%) total

2.351 4,116

1,061

Foreign total

Switzerland

45 50

35

Foreign (%)

Source: Karady ‘Student mobility’, 269 except for: Scotland, United Kingdom: Perraton Foreign students, 41, 56; France: 1876, 1914, Weisz Emergence, 241

1870 1876 1880 1890 1891 Scotland 1892 6,488 United Kingdom 1900 20,589 1910 27,728 1914

Year

Table 2.1  European student numbers in main host countries 1870–1914

20  H. PERRATON

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Changes in technology, and demands for a more educated workforce, helped drive the expansion of higher education. They also made travel cheaper and faster, to the benefit of the expanding economies and to students aspiring to travel. Before the railways, carriages would travel at 10 to 11 kilometres per hour while early trains achieved 30–40 kmph and already in the 1830s were reaching 60 kmph. In the early 1870s, even with much slower trains in Russia, Suslova could have travelled from St Petersburg to Warsaw in a day and a half on her way to reach Zurich, at a fare, depending on the class of travel, of between 13 and 32 roubles (then about £2–5 or c2010£185-460). Travel became cheaper as well as faster. Rail fares in Britain and in France fell to about a quarter of their previous rate between the middle of the nineteenth century and 1914. Third-class fares in Britain and Prussia were about 1d per mile with lower rates in France and Italy.12 Steamships go back to 1819 when the Savannah crossed the Atlantic and produced dramatic reductions in journey times. Travel to India in the early nineteenth century could take from four to six months. By 1842 the P&O’s Hindostan had cut that time to 91 days. Once the Suez Canal was open it was possible to reach Bombay from England in 23 days in 1873; faster ships then cut that time to 16½ days within 15 years. Students from Australia, who began to travel to Britain towards the end of the century, could get there in 35 days. Costs came down. Transatlantic fares fell in real terms so sharply that by the late nineteenth century they could be as low as £3. 3s. (2010£310) in steerage. In the 1840s P&O fares from Calcutta to Suez had been £140 (£13,280) for a gentleman, £150 (£14,220) for a lady and £40 (£3,800) for a native servant but within 40 years second-class fares between Europe and India were being advertised at £35 (£3,500) and then fell to £27 (£2,800) in the 1890s.13 Cheaper fares, industrialisation and expanding economies all encouraged students to travel, to universities that were themselves changing and expanding. * * * Although the number of students travelling across borders before 1914 was a fraction of the totals a century later, there were enough to discern the pattern of their movements before going on to look at the policies that would influence their movement. Much student movement was within Europe and was driven, or at least eased, by geography, language and culture. Early in the new century

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between 20 and 28 per cent of foreign students in France came from northern, central and southern Europe.14 France saw travel in both directions as it was as easy for a student in the north to go to a Belgian as to a French university. For Belgium, as for Switzerland, with limited local demand for university education but universities using international languages, foreign students helped make up the numbers. German-language universities attracted the children of German-speaking families in the Baltic area, in Hungary and around the Volga. Language influenced travel over longer distances so that a majority of the American students completing a full medical degree in Austria, Germany or Switzerland came from families of German origin, even though most American medical students in Europe, for short courses, had an anglophone background.15 A sense of cultural affinity as well as language influenced travel so that Romanians tended to prefer French universities to German; in 1910 there were over 450 Romanians in France, Belgium and Switzerland but only 120 in Germany.16 Language and culture could also have a negative effect so that resentment against Hungarian power led Serbs and Croats to prefer Vienna to Pest.17 Travel was in turn influenced by the availability of mother-tongue teaching: the proportion of Czech-speaking students in Vienna fell from 15 per cent of the total in 1871 to 3 per cent in 1914 after study in Czech had become possible in Bohemia.18 Faster and cheaper travel helped students travel further. By 1910, Belgium, France, Germany and Switzerland all drew more than half of their foreign students from outside western Europe.19 Four groups of students travelled in significant numbers, dominated discourse and shaped policy: Russians, and others from the Russian empire going to western Europe, Americans crossing the Atlantic most often to Germany and overseas subjects of their empire travelling to Britain with those from India to the fore. Beyond Europe, smaller, but significant numbers, travelled to America from countries within its spheres of influence. Many of the students in all these groups had in common that they were travelling to escape from blocked opportunities at home and with an aspiring sense of better possibilities abroad. * * * The contrast between blocked and open opportunities took students like Nadezhda Suslova out from the Russian empire. Its educational system suffered from the empire’s alternating periods of reform and repression

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and, in the mid-nineteenth century, was restricted in size: in 1860 it had only 5000 students in its nine universities. These numbers were to rise sharply, doubling between 1880 and 1900 and reaching 37,000 by 1910. But even at the turn of the century, Russia had less than half the student enrolments of Germany for more than double its population. In the nineteenth century the aristocracy dominated student numbers, providing two-thirds of the total in 1865, and, despite university expansion and middle-class search for education, its proportion remained at over one-­ third in 1914.20 An expanding economy, and a middle class that had benefited from a better-developed secondary-education sector, would in any case have driven students abroad but Russian policies fuelled the process. Suslova found the doors that had been briefly open to women were closed again in the next wave of repression. New restrictions, including quotas for Jewish and poor students, were placed on universities after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. ‘When the state made it more difficult for those from the petty bourgeoisie, the middle class and Jewish communities to study, their sons and daughters went abroad in droves in order to obtain their university diplomas’.21 Many of these students, identified by the western authorities as Russian subjects, saw themselves as Polish, Finnish and above all as Jewish. By 1887 quotas allowed Jewish enrolments of 10 per cent in the Pale of Settlement and 5 per cent outside, but only 3 per cent in St Petersburg. Restrictions on women students remained into the new century. The number of students travelling west grew most rapidly during Russia’s years of turmoil between 1900 and 1914. Pogroms continued and that of Kishinev in 1903 stimulated further emigration. Disturbances within the universities led to their being closed down completely in 1905. Students responded by travelling in their largest numbers to France and Switzerland, where, on the eve of the war, they made up 51 per cent of the foreign total, and to Germany, with 42 per cent (see Table 2.2). Movement to the west from Poland was encouraged by a Polish boycott of universities in Russia proper, in place from 1905. By 1911 over 8000 students from the Russian empire were studying in western Europe, almost a third of the total in Russia’s own universities, most of them studying the sciences or medicine.22 Language was not a major barrier. The Russian upper class spoke French while, since Peter the Great, Russia had used German expertise and German expatriates so that the language was familiar and widely understood in educated families. In Bulgakov’s 1925 dystopia,

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Table 2.2  Russian students in western universities 1893–1912 Year

France No.

1893–1894 172 women 1895–1896 366 1900–1901a 1905–1906 1,208 1911–1912 2,615

Germany

% of foreign

20 51

No.

Switzerland

% of foreign

No.

% of foreign

25

 805 1,826 2,152

41

466 571 n/a 1,891

42

51

Source: 1900–1912, Karady ‘Student mobility’, 389, and Weill Étudiants russes, 86; Germany 1895–1896, Drewek; France 1893–1894, Manitakis ‘Migrations estudiantes’, 261 France 1901, Germany 1899–1900, Switzerland 1900–1901

a

Heart of a dog, Professor Preobrazhensky, who must have qualified as a doctor in the 1880s or 1890s, switches into German with his assistant to prevent their uneducated victim from understanding. Student experience in Germany was sufficiently widespread and sufficiently appreciated for there to be Heidelberg alumni associations, zemlyachestva, in Moscow, Rostov and St Petersburg and in Siberia.23 Students made up the numbers in the French provinces and in Switzerland but got a mixed welcome. Medical students in France thought they were being crowded out by the foreigners—they were made more welcome in Switzerland and allowed to sit in the front rows—and the university system gave qualifications to foreigners that were on a par with those for citizens but did not allow them to practise within France. The high proportion of Jewish students from Russia, 47 per cent of those in western Europe in 1900 and 74 per cent in 1911, did not leave antisemitism behind them.24 In 1912 medical students in Leipzig used a student journal to demand a reduction in Russian numbers and a ban on their sitting in the front rows. Medical students in Halle went on strike.25 The rhetoric used the term ‘foreign’ to mean ‘Russian’ and ‘Russian’ to mean Jewish while there were allegations of criminality and immorality. The Reichstag was told of a Russian Jewish woman student naked in bed with two fellow students while the consul general in Warsaw warned that Polish students with false claims to titles were proving attractive to German women; one press account claimed that free love was a requirement for male and female students within Russia. Governments responded with

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increased restrictions with numerus clausus, including country quotas, introduced in Prussia and Bavaria in 1913.26 The antisemitism was not universal. Some Jewish students from Russia made contact with Jewish organisations within Germany which welcomed them. Jewish philanthropic organisations in Strasbourg and Königsberg helped students from Russia while in Berlin a committee to aid foreign students celebrated its tenth anniversary in 1912. In Heidelberg, which had a reputation as the most liberal and internationalist of universities, Russian students were on good terms with their teachers. Jewish student organisations played a part in supporting students so that Leipzig had a Jewish rambling club, which did not accept converts. Freiburg had a Russian university geology society and in 1912 the Association of Jewish Russian Students in Berlin considered setting up a sailing club.27 The narrow Russian system of higher education made the country dependent on its students abroad to fill its future intelligentsia, just as its middle-class, Jewish, Polish and Finnish students depended on foreign study to meet their aspirations. A significant minority were women, facing their own restrictions in Russia. Within less than a decade many of the former students would be reconstructing their country: in one analysis, the modal student was ‘Jewish, a shopkeeper’s son, 20  years old at the time of his enrolment in … higher education, studying medicine, active in a revolutionary organisation, after his training takes up a position in the Soviet Union’s work force, lives through the purges’.28 * * * While student travel was dominated by movement from east to west and from south to north, a growing number of American students travelled east as the country came out of its civil war and steamships made the transatlantic crossing quicker and cheaper. In the 1860s there were probably over 300 American students in Germany, the most popular destination (see Table 2.3). Numbers there peaked, with over 500 matriculations in 1895–1896, but fell away to less than 300 by 1910. France, Switzerland and Britain, despite its shared language, were less popular. Unlike Germany, Oxford and Cambridge had little advanced study, and they were not interested in the education of potential teachers, a goal for many Americans. Despite the drawbacks, their prestige attracted some and, in the new century, Rhodes scholarships took new cohorts to Oxford. France was suspect for God-fearing Americans as since 1789 it had not respected religion

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Table 2.3  US students in Europe 1860–1914 Date 1860s 1870–1914 1892 1895/1896 1895/1896 1900 1910

Definition

Estimated US enrolments for decade in Germany US in medical schools in German-speaking universities US students in Germany US matriculations in Germany at their prewar peak US students in Switzerland US proportion of foreign students in Paris (9.7%) US/Canadians in Belgian, French, German and Swiss universities 1910 US and empire matriculants in Oxford (18% total) 1912/1913 US students in Germany 1913/1914 US students in France

Number 250–380 15,000 415 517 65 c170 388 188 289 65

Source: 1860, Diehl ‘Innocents abroad’, 323–4; 1870–1914, Bonner American doctors, 23; 1892, 1895/1896 Switzerland, 1912/1913, 1913/1914, Wheeler et  al. Foreign student, 23, 27, 9, 54; 1895/1896 Germany, Jarausch ‘The universities’,185, Moulinier ‘Les étudiants étrangners’, 98; 1910 continental, Karady ‘Student mobility’, 373; 1910 Oxford, Stone ‘Size and composition’, 101

while Paris presented moral hazards to young men.29 There is less discussion in the literature of the risks American women might face in Europe, though they too were travelling there; 600 to 800 of them studied medicine in German universities between 1865 and 1914.30 Americans travelled for a variety of reasons. Until the civil war there was a small stream from the southern states to Göttingen to study law in the expectation that a historical school of jurisprudence, opposed to enlightenment concepts of natural law and natural justice, might offer a justification for slavery.31 The proportion studying law declined but, after the civil war, it became fashionable for rich young men, especially from Harvard and Yale, to travel to Europe in what amounted to a later version of the grand tour.32 For the most part, however, travel was to Germany by serious students influenced by the reputation and academic strength of German universities and the superiority of German medical education. The president of Columbia University recognised a general assumption among those ‘with aspirations for making a career in a learned or scientific profession, or in any professional field, that a residence of one or more years at a German university was indispensable to anything like signal success’.33 Of course this was not all. There is no doubt that for a minority of high-minded scholars, initiation into German Wissenschaft in formal courses, as well as personal intercourse

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with famous professors, was the crucial gain. But for many others, who were there for the purpose of learning German and having a good time, the free conviviality of German student life was an equal attraction.34

Until the last years of the century American medical education was under-regulated and unreliable, leading doctors and medical students travelling to Germany to dominate the statistics. Most had qualified at home and travelled for specialist training that could be gained studying for a year or two, or on short courses. Berlin and Vienna, with an ‘abundance of clinical and experimental material, were the ideal place for advanced training. Here one could do more eye operations, deliver more babies, treat more patients, and conduct more post-mortems in a week than would be possible in a year’ at home. Other motives may have been at play: one medical textbook added a warning about ‘wine and profligate women’.35 The prewar students who had crossed the Atlantic were the first two generations to do so in such numbers, some of them across barriers of language. They did so not in response to any national policy but from personal aspiration combined with respect for European scholarship and awareness of the inadequacy of American medical education. American alumni of German universities demonstrated their nostalgia, as well as their respect for German scholarship, by setting up German clubs across America’s campuses: French and English clubs were far more rare. They feted their former teachers: some 80 doctors attended a testimonial banquet in Chicago for a visit in 1904 by a German orthopaedic surgeon, Albert Hoffa.36 More important, the successful German-educated doctors demonstrated the value of what they carried home as they led the reform of medical teaching, initially at Harvard, Michigan, Cornell and Johns Hopkins, in a movement that then spread across the country. * * * The Americans, like the Russians, travelled above all to Germany, with smaller numbers going to Britain. Students from India went there in far larger numbers. Their story is set out in more detail in Chapter 6. Dutt and his two friends were the advance guard of a group whose numbers then grew: there were reported to be 40 to 50 Indian students in 1873, 100 in 1880, 200 in 1890 and over 300 in 1900; growth was then more rapid to between 700 and 800 in 1907 and 1700 to 1800 in 1913

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when they made up the largest group of overseas students in the country.37 They came from overseas but, as subjects of the empire, were not foreigners. Nor were they, like some of their travelling predecessors and compatriots, members of the Indian aristocracy, able to move in circles open to them for their class.38 The students were different. They were mainly from the prosperous Indian upper middle class, many of them from the Bengali bhadralok, which had been able to benefit from and to challenge the institutions of the British raj. They had been educated in English, attending schools and universities set up by the East India Company and then by the raj. Needing locally recruited and educated staff, to work with and under the expatriate British, the successive imperial authorities created an educational system in their own interest. Following Macaulay’s notorious minute of 1833, which dismissed local culture and by inference the whole traditional system of education, the system had to work in English, which opened the way for the creation of an educated middle class taught in English and fluent in it. By 1857 four universities had been established and it was their graduates who then went on to complete their education in the British Isles. Many students went to study law, encouraged by a rule that only lawyers who had been called to the bar in London, Edinburgh or Dublin could appear before the higher courts. Some qualified by attending the Inns of Court but others by gaining a university degree as well as a legal qualification. Jawaharlal Nehru, who had already been at school in England, went to Cambridge and then on to the Inner Temple for a further two years before being called to the bar. But not all students were lawyers: the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, from a background far less privileged than Nehru’s, made his own way to Cambridge drawn by the wish to work with his peers, the world’s ablest pure mathematicians. Nor, despite the barriers, were all the students men: Cornelia Sorabji and Pandita Ramabai both got to England in the 1880s to be followed among others by four sisters—Nalini, Sunila, Pramila and Janaki Bonnerjee—early in the new century who went to high school in Croydon and on to Cambridge. Larger numbers, like Dutt, were intending to join the rulers by entering the Indian Civil Service which, from its origins, was in principle open to all subjects of the empire, British or Indian, though in practice more difficult for those educated in India. Entrance was by examination, held in Britain and oriented to those who had received a conventional English education which offered high marks that could be earned after ten years of Greek and Latin.

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The Indian students might have expected a warm welcome from their demonstration of respect for the educational strength of the raj. Memoirs suggest that, at a personal and even institutional level, some did so: Sorabji wrote warmly of her friendship with Benjamin Jowett, the master of Balliol College, while Nalini Bonnerjee married a Scottish army officer and the Dutt family made a home in Cambridge. At the same time they faced xenophobia and racism, encouraged by the tabloid press agitation which led to the first restrictions on immigration in the 1905 Aliens Act. In that climate, as Indian student numbers increased, the Times began writing about ‘the Indian student problem’. It explained this in a leader in 1908: When the practice of sending young Indians here to complete their studies began in a small way, the sojourners were invariably the sons of well-to-do citizens, and they came with introductions and recommendations which frequently gave them access to English society. But as the stream augmented and the quality became less uniformly satisfactory these conditions changed. The young men began to form their own social circle, and thus to cut themselves adrift in large measure from the beneficial influence of contact with English life. … More frequently they found their chief zest, outside the range of their studies, in political discussion in which emphasis was laid upon the imagined ‘wrongs’ of India.39

Government set up a committee of enquiry which documented the prejudices facing Indian students. It would have liked to reduce their flow but could not ‘interfere with the discretion of Indian parents’ and argued that ‘for many years to come the educated classes of India will find it necessary and beneficial to visit Europe and America’. The committee deplored the activities of the ‘extremists of Indian politics’ who ‘spare no pains to win adherents to their cause among the Indian students as soon as they arrive’.40 Public concern about Indian students was then increased when a deranged student assassinated the adviser to students at the India Office, Sir Curzon Wyllie. Assumptions of guilt by association led some Oxbridge colleges to close their doors to all Indians.41 A more benign consequence was the establishment of an Indian Students’ Office, the first organisation set up by government to look after the welfare of international students. Indian students travelling to Britain were heading for universities that were seen, within the British Isles and beyond, as having an imperial as well as a national function. A politician in South Africa, Henry Fremantle, pressed the Colonial Office in 1902 to hold a colonial education

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conference, explaining that he had ‘always thought that the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge ought to be without question the two points of convergence for the intellectual and social aristocracy of the whole Empire’.42 India was not represented at the conference but by 1912 had come far enough in from the academic cold to be represented at the first congress of the universities of the empire. In the same year William Temple, former Oxford don and later archbishop of Canterbury, echoed Fremantle with the establishment view that ‘it is the supreme function of the Universities to guide the thought of those who mould the destiny of the nation and the empire’.43 There were contradictions between the government and public view that university education was for the empire and its imperial subjects and the day-to-day prejudice they encountered. Students were expected by their hosts to be loyal and to accept that enrolment in British universities demonstrated a willingness to embrace at least some aspects of British culture. At the same time, for many their loyalty was to a future and independent India. The contradictions were to be played out later in the twentieth century. As Indian students, in their hundreds, demonstrated the educational importance of the imperial connection, they were joined by contemporaries from the colonies of settlement. Just as India had its universities from 1857, and there were already academies and universities in Canada, universities in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa opened between 1850 and 1874. While each responded to local demands for higher education and sought to balance sensitivity to their local environment against empire-wide academic status, their foundation in practice increased the demands on British universities: advanced study, wider curricular choice and the prestige of metropolitan degrees drew their graduates to Britain. Ernest Rutherford, who travelled to Britain in 1895, could not have laid the foundations of nuclear physics in New Zealand as readily as in Cambridge. Australian numbers then doubled from the 1860s to the 1870s—82 to 161—though then falling back to 118.44 Oxford saw an increasing number of Canadians from the 1870s while in the 1890s the growing number from Australia ‘blew into the antiquity of Oxford with the challenge of their own and their country’s youth’.45 Alongside students from the formal empire, those from the informal, most notably from Egypt, were also travelling to Britain. It had a prosperous middle class, limited local opportunities for higher education, and was the site of contention for influence by both Britain and France. Egyptian students

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travelled to both countries and did so in such numbers that, in London, Indian medical students complained that London hospitals were accepting Egyptians in preference to them.46 * * * Imperial or quasi-imperial interests took students to the United States, as to Britain. Following the American-Spanish war of 1898 the Philippines became an American colony. Teachers and students flowed in both directions: the United States sent 500 teachers there in 1901 ‘with the goal of educating Filipinos in the “American way” and establishing a new public school system for the island population’. Two years later 100 pensionados travelled on government scholarships in the opposite direction to complete their schooling and go on to university in the United States. Others followed but numbers then fell once the University of the Philippines was established and funding for scholarships cut.47 Students had long travelled north from Latin America, within the US sphere of influence under the Monroe doctrine. Cuba became an important source of students, having gained nominal independence from Spain in 1901, at the price of accepting US potential rights of military intervention. By 1904 its 236 students formed the third largest foreign cohort after Canada and Mexico. China came next as a source of students for America. By the end of the nineteenth century, without establishing a formal empire, the United States and the major European powers had staked their claims on Chinese territory. The British had already taken over Hong Kong, the French saw the acquisition of Indochina as a stepping stone, and the western powers enjoyed unequal rights or ‘concessions’ at the Chinese ports. Following the Boxers’ violent but unsuccessful protests, the Chinese government was forced to pay an indemnity to those seen as injured parties, including the US and British governments. By 1908 the United States recognised that the scale of these indemnities was so unjustifiably high, by around $11 million (2010$270m), and that the money might be returned.48 Rather than handing the money back, the US government set up a scholarship programme to take Chinese students to America who, on their return, would be expected to encourage modernisation, remain friends of America and support American trade. One of the state department staff negotiating the agreement saw the benefits clearly: They will be studying American institutions, making American friends, and coming back here to favor America for China in its foreign relations. Talk

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about a Chinese alliance! The return of that indemnity was the most profitable work Uncle Sam ever did … They will form a force in our favor so strong that no other government or trade element of Europe can compete with it.49

The first selections were made in 1909 and 47 students, selected from 100 all-male applicants, sailed to America with 143 to follow them in the next two years.50 The programme continued and by 1929 had carried 1300 students, some of them now women, to America. The Philippines, Cuba and China, with Canada and Mexico, were to continue to send university students to the United States. The Chinese were soon to be joined by others from Asia who, over the next century, were to form a steadily growing proportion of the American total. Religion reinforced empire in encouraging student movement to the United States. In the late nineteenth century missionary activity was the main factor in attracting foreign students to the United States. American missionaries abroad encouraged potential students ‘believing that American education was a vital component in the process of supplying future leaders for Christianity’.51 A group of Christian bodies were instrumental in setting up a ‘Committee on friendly relations among foreign students’ in 1911 which, a decade later, carried out a review of foreign students. It opens with the claim that ‘American life and the Christian Church have never met a more severe and searching test than they are meeting today in the presence of these foreign students in our schools’ and goes on to suggest that one of the major questions to be asked about the consequences of studying in America is ‘What contribution have they made to the Church?’. It concluded with practical suggestions for the welfare of students and a reminder from the Women’s Auxiliary of the Presbyterian Church that ‘the Boards at home do not quite understand the opportunities offered the Church through better training of the youth of the Orient’.52 Christianity as well as imperialism was a potent early driver for study in America. * * * The very different Russians, Indians and Americans, and the rest, who made up the body of international students before the First World War, shared some characteristics. Most travelled with their own money, or their families’, for their own reasons. The Filipinos and Chinese going to

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America on scholarships, the Rhodes scholars travelling from America and the British empire and small numbers on British colonial awards, were very much the exception. For the majority, if they were driven by policy, it was a family policy of seeking advancement. Blocked aspiration set against limited local opportunity was the driving force for many. It motivated alike the Indian students who needed to study law in the British Isles, the Russians who could not get to university at home, the Americans who could find specialist teaching in medicine only by crossing the Atlantic and the British colonials who wanted more advanced study than was available locally. Class, race and gender all played a part in shaping their travel. The costs, of travel, study and maintenance, meant that few if any students were from the poorest families. Most were upper middle class: it was the aspirant middle class who made up, in the jargon of the time, the ‘wrong sort of Indians’ studying in London. In much the same way, while aristocratic Russians had travelled to sit at German academic feet since the eighteenth century, the new wave of middle-class and often Jewish students, enrolled at German universities and technical high schools after 1900, had a quite different class background.53 Upper-class student trajectories were slightly different. Academic snobbery was said to drive nineteenth-century German-American students to Heidelberg, while for some elite Polish and Romanian families education in France provided social kudos.54 Race drove Russian Jews west to escape pogroms, or, among the more fortunate, to escape the quota system. (After the First World War, quotas in American medical schools sent women and Jews to travel east to Europe for their qualifications.) The formal rejection of race in British India made student travel to Britain a possibility even while informal and institutional racism kept many doors closed: by 1914 five Oxbridge colleges had none of the 1700 Indian students in Britain and two had a formal policy of excluding them.55 Gender kept women, like Jews, out of medical education in Russia and America while, until the turn of the century, few universities would admit them as more than auditors. The openness of the burghers and academics of Zurich, and the free-thinkers and academics of Paris, made them destinations for more international than local women students. Institutional policies played a bigger part in shaping student travel before 1914 than those of governments. Zurich’s autonomy allowed its radical faculty to accept women students decades before Germany or the Austro-Hungarian empire. After 1896, French universities could offer

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university diplomas to foreign students and, as fees made up 40 per cent of their independent income, had good reason to welcome them. With limited numbers of local students, they offered a means of keeping up numbers as well as displaying that status.56 In the 1890s they increasingly developed comités de patronage des étudiants étrangers. In Britain, individual colleges developed a reputation for welcoming international students. With Jowett as its master, Balliol College, Oxford, welcomed Indian students between 1870 and 1893, as well as the son of the Japanese prime minister and a Siamese prince, only to introduce a more restrictive quota system after his death. In Cambridge, Downing and St John’s College were more welcoming to Indian students than their peers and were criticised for it. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, as university attitudes shifted, affiliation schemes were developed in England, to meet the needs of students from the new universities of the empire. These gave advanced standing to their graduates, enabling them to get an English degree in two years rather than three. Oxford made affiliation possible in 1887 for universities ‘situated in any part of the British Dominions other than the United Kingdom’ and by 1900 was able to welcome students from affiliated universities in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and South Africa. Criteria were then broadened to extend the same rights to universities in the United States, Scotland and more slowly England and Ireland.57 Although for many countries it would be anachronistic to talk of a national policy towards foreign students before the First World War, national practices began to play a part, alongside those of institutions, in shaping student movement. They did so in host and, to a lesser extent, in sending countries. In host countries there was intermittent awareness that national interests could be at stake in the recruitment of foreign students and they could be the subject of international competition. In France there was a warning in 1897 that the development of universities in British colonies threatened ‘to create the most vast university organisation that has ever existed’. Some ten years later there were repeated demands in the legislature for more educational links with Latin America, which was sending few students to France, while in 1913 an exchange programme was set up with American universities in response to concerns about the 10.5 million of German background in the United States.58 In much the same spirit a 1913 article in the Edinburgh Review concluded with an imperial flourish:

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Above all things, Indians who wish to complete their education abroad should be encouraged to select the United Kingdom, rather than the Continent, or Japan or America, so that they may have every opportunity to imbibe the spirit which underlies British rule: the spirit which has brought India to a new birth, a larger, ever-expanding life.59

This kind of concern went alongside the perception of foreign students as potential agents of soft diplomacy and partners in international trade. The establishment of the Alliance française in 1883, and its support for French teaching outside France, was both an exercise in the rayonnement of French culture and a means of helping the flow of students to France. The French historian Ernest Lavisse argued in 1889 that ‘foreign elites who begin studying French in their native lands should be encouraged to finish their education in a French faculty’.60 French interests, and French cultural and historical links, helped them do so. The Napoleonic legacy drew law students to France, particularly from the Balkans and Egypt, seeking to study in a country using the Code Napoléon.61 Trade as well as influence had a part to play. In 1897 a deputy from Marseilles urged universities to recruit students from the Middle East who would retain an admiration for ‘the resources of our commerce, the ingenuity of our industry’ and, if they had studied medicine, would prescribe drugs and order equipment from France.62 Local chambers of commerce in Bordeaux and Marseilles among others supported the university development of teaching in subjects important for the colonies.63 French investments in Russia, and long-term political interests in the near east, were reflected in student numbers with significant proportions from Russia and the Ottoman empire.64 Without any formal policy, the third republic’s sense of France’s place in the world, as well as the attractions of Paris, created an environment open to students from across its borders. Various voices were to be heard in Germany. In Prussia, Friedrich Althoff, who was in charge of university policy from 1882, saw a welcome for foreign students as an ‘ethical duty’ and that ‘a closing or restricting of foreign access to German universities would reduce our influence abroad and strengthen the spiritual and physical forces of our enemies’. But the welcomes became more qualified. Some qualifications were commercial. One official voice was heard in 1898 arguing that ‘the German technological and industrial and scientific institutions will soon be forced to adopt a less liberal policy with foreigners. The tricks of trade we have been teaching them so long are now being turned against us to the great injury

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of our industry’. Similarly in 1912, it was argued that Japanese students were doing just that.65 Other qualifications were more ominous. The minister of culture argued in 1905 for admitting British students who could ‘prove useful friends of German ways’. But he went on to claim that ‘the influx of Russian Jews ought to be curtailed if possible’. Chancellor von Bülow in 1905 wanted to welcome Russians, provided they were not anarchists, but keep out male and female Polish students.66 But these were not the only views and the new minister of culture, August von Trott zu Solz, tried in 1912 to steer a middle course, tightening admission standards but rejecting any blanket ban on foreigners.67 The standing of German universities meant that no formal policies were needed to keep up their recruitment even if student experience, at least from the east, would be shaped by xenophobic and racist prejudice. During these years student movement was beginning to be influenced by the policies of sending as well as of hosting countries. The west was equated with modernisation. Just as Boris Godunov sent students to western Europe in the seventeenth century and Taghiyev from Azerbaijan to Russia in the nineteenth, Japan sent students to Britain, France, the Netherlands, Russia and the United States.68 Latin Americans had long travelled to the United States with their own funds but, by the early twentieth century, governments were beginning to lend their support with scholarships provided by the governments of Peru and Venezuela among others.69 They were the precursors of much larger groups, later in the century, travelling in the interests of long-term economic development. * * * Finally, one driving force for students was not policy but politics and their own political interests, which repeatedly troubled their host country authorities. Three empires, the German, Russian and British, were most concerned. At least in the eyes of the authorities, many of the Russian students going to Germany were at best sympathetic to the German social-­ democratic party and at worst communists, anarchists or agitators. Women could be as bad as men: in the 1860s ‘the tsarist government made what officials saw as an obvious connection between women’s desire for education and a revolutionary world view’.70 Early in the twentieth century left-­ wing Russian student contacts with German social democrats gave the two countries a shared interest in controlling or restricting them. Kaiser

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Wilhelm wrote to his cousin Tsar Nikolai warning that Russians were being trained in Germany for revolution and added an antisemitic rant that ‘Jews like Trotsky, Parvus, and Luxemburg were “leaders of the revolt”’. With sympathy between the two autocracies, the Russian secret police were able to operate in Germany and try to discourage contagion between disaffected Prussian and Russian Poles. Although émigré political activity died down after 1907, it never ceased.71 One element of nascent national policy was to constrain dangerous young aliens. Dangerous young subjects troubled the British. Hopes for their own political future influenced the Indian students and at the same time disturbed the authorities. From the official point of view, the issue was a simple one of loyalty: students were subjects of the raj, enjoying the benefits of its institutions and, especially those on scholarships, ought to show it their loyalty and respect. It was more complicated for the politically active and aware Indians who were to return home and become, sometimes in turn, civil servants of the raj, its active political opponents, and in due course the political elite and rulers of the successor countries. They, too, were to be followed later in the century by future leaders of the then colonies in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. Education for political leadership was another personal driver of student mobility. Throughout the early years of the century, politics drove some students to study abroad, influenced their lives while they did so and worried the politicians and policemen who were watching them. * * * Despite the various threats perceived by the British, Russian and German imperial authorities, it was the irredentist hopes and the loaded pistol of Gavrilo Princip in a fourth  empire, the Austro-Hungarian, that sparked the First World War. It brought to an end a period in which, over 50 years, there had been an unprecedented increase in the number of students travelling to study abroad, in which there had been the first movements of significant numbers of students in the interest of national development and in which nation-states had stepped hesitantly towards policies on international student mobility. Students were travelling not only in growing numbers but also going further, across Europe from Russia, across the oceans from India and America. University education was provided in national interests but widely seen as being international, with the presence of foreign students as one demonstration of that internationalism. As the

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summer of 1914 faded to autumn, the 33 German students at Oxford were to face, across the battlefields of Europe, the 34 from the British empire at Heidelberg.72

Notes 1. Director of LSE quoted in Dahrendorf A history, 88. 2. Suslova’s life is discussed in Creese Ladies in the laboratory IV, 1–4, and Tuve The first Russian women physicians, 12–23. 3. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition. 4. Tuve Russian women, 19. 5. Koblitz ‘Science’, 220–2. 6. Using contemporary exchange rates and then UK deflators to give constant (£2010) values throughout. 7. Quotations are from Gupta R C Dutt, 17–37; see also ODNB. 8. McClelland ‘Republics within the empire’, 174. 9. Jarausch Students, 30–2, Drewek ‘Limits’. 10. Total is in Bahnson et al. 1975 Student und Hochschule, 11. Weber Our friend, 68. 12. Costs in Russia in Westwood A history, 57–8; France in Caron ‘France’, 45; Britain in Hawke Railways, 43–7; Britain and Prussia in Wolmar Blood, iron and gold, 250. 13. Cable A hundred year history of the P&O, 74–6, 183; Hyde Cunard, 82; Searight Steaming east 80–1. 14. Weisz Emergence, 262. 15. Bonner, American doctors, 25. 16. Karady ‘Student mobility’, 372. 17. Karady ‘Les logiques’, 20–3; Karady ‘Student mobility’, 372–5. 18. Bahnson et al., Student und Hochschule, 146. Many of these students, as subjects of the dual monarchy, would not technically have been foreign. 19. Karady ‘Student mobility’, 373. 20. Charle ‘Patterns’, 67; Jarausch ‘Higher education’, 13. 21. Charle ‘Patterns’, 67. 22. Absolute figures are in Karady ‘Student mobility’, 389, and proportions in Karady ‘Migration’, 47–8. 23. Weill Étudiants russes, 151–2. 24. Karady ‘Student mobility’, 388. 25. Weill Étudiants russes, 41–50. 26. Ibid., 66–9, 82–3. 27. Ibid., 148–151, 195.

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28. Ibid., 242. 29. Thwing The American and the German university, 69–72. 30. Bonner American doctors, 29. 31. Herbst The German historical school, 7. 32. Diehl Americans and German scholarship, 57–62. 33. Herbst School, 2. 34. Jarausch ‘American students’, 209. 35. Bonner American doctors, 25–6. 36. Ibid., 58–64. 37. Lahiri Indians in Britain, 5; there was no central tally so figures are uncertain until after 1912 when the newly established Indian Students’ Department kept track of them. 38. Fisher et al. A south-Asian history, 65, 73, 92. 39. The Times, 1.9.1908. 40. Lee-Warner report 1907, 17, 50, reproduced in Report of the committee on Indian students. 41. Symonds Oxford and empire, 259. 42. Fremantle to vice-chancellor, Oxford, 8.4.1902, NA, CO 885/8/5. 43. Anderson British universities, 57. 44. Calculated from the Venn database. 45. Ernest Barker quoted in Symonds Oxford and the empire, 712–3. 46. Indian Students’ Department annual report 1913/14, 14ff. 47. Bevis and Lucas International students, 75–7. 48. 2010 value calculated using US deflators. 49. Hunt ‘American remission’, 557–8. 50. Bevis A history of higher education exchange, 90–1. 51. Schulken History, Chapter 2; Bevis and Lucas International students, 92. 52. Wheeler et al. The foreign student in America, v, xvii, 292. 53. Williams Culture in exile, 25. 54. Karady ‘Student mobility’, 378; Karady ‘Les logiques’, 21–2. 55. Indian Students’ Department Report 1912/13, 11; 1913/14, 8. 56. Karady ‘Migration’, 59; Weisz Emergence, 165. 57. Pietsch Empire of scholars, 91. 58. Weisz Emergence, 257, 265, 268. 59. Brown ‘Indian students’, 156. 60. Weisz Emergence, 255. 61. Karady ‘Migration’, 52. 62. Weisz, Emergence, 255–6. 63. Ibid., 186. 64. Ibid., 262. 65. Singer Adventures abroad, 20; Weill Étudiants russes, 60.

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66. Jarausch Students, 65–6. 67. Ibid., 67. 68. Davies, Beneath another sky, 73; Koyama Japanese students, 25. 69. Wheeler et al. Foreign student, 14. 70. Koblitz ‘Science’, 213. 71. Williams Culture, 50–1. 72. Numbers are in Weber Our friend, 68.

Bibliography Anderson, R. 2006 British universities past and present, London: Hambledon Continuum Bahnson et  al. 1975 Student und Hochschule im 19. Jahrhundert: Studien und Materialen, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Bevis, T.  B. 2014 A history of higher education exchange: China and America, New York: Routledge Bevis, T. B. and Lucas, C. J. 2007 International students in American colleges and universities: A history, New York: Palgrave Macmillan Bonarjee, N. B. 1970 Under two masters, Calcutta: Oxford University Press Bonner, T. N. 1963 American doctors and German universities: A chapter in international relations 1870–1914, Lincoln NE: University of Nebraska Press Brown, F. H. 1913 ‘Indian students in Great Britain’, Edinburgh review vol. 217 Burgess, J.  W. 1934 Reminiscences of an American scholar: The beginnings of Columbia University, New York: Columbia University Press Cable, B. 1937 A hundred year history of the P & O, London: Nicholson and Watson Caron, F. 1983 ‘France’ in O’Brien, P. (ed.) 1983 Railways and the economic development of western Europe, 1830–1914, London: Macmillan Charle, C. 2004 ‘Patterns’, in Rüegg, W. Universities in the 19th and early 20th centuries (A history of the university in Europe, vol. 3), Cambridge University Press Creese, M. R. S. 2014 Ladies in the laboratory IV: Imperial Russia’s women in science, 1800–1900, Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield Dahrendorf, R. 1995 LSE, Oxford University Press Davies, N. 2018 Beneath another sky, London: Penguin Diehl, C. 1976 ‘Innocents Abroad: American Students in German Universities, 1810–1870’, History of education quarterly, 16:3 ———. C. 1978 Americans and German scholarship 1770–1870, New Haven CT: Yale University Press Drewek, P. 2000 ‘Limits of educational internationalism’, https://prae.perspectivia.net/publikationen/bulletin-washington/2000-27-2/drewek_limits, downloaded 13.6.2019

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Everett, W. 1867 On the Cam: Lectures on the University of Cambridge in England (2nd edition), Cambridge: Sever and Francis Fisher, M. H., Lahiri, S. and Thandi, S. 2007 A South-Asian history of Britain: Four centuries of peoples from the Indian sub-continent, Oxford: Greenwood Gupta, J. N. 1911 Life and work of Romesh Chunder Dutt CIE, London: Dent Hawke, G. R. 1970 Railways and economic growth in England and Wales 1840–70, Oxford: Clarendon Herbst, J. 1965 The German historical school in American scholarship, Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press Hunt, M.  H. 1972 ‘The American remission of the boxer indemnity: A reappraisal’, Journal of Asian Studies: 31:3 Hyde, F. E. 1971 Cunard and the north Atlantic 1840–1973, London: Macmillan Jarausch, K. H. 1982 Students, society, and politics in imperial Germany: The rise of academic illiberalism, Princeton University Press ———. 1983 ‘Higher education and social change: Some comparative perspectives’ in Jarausch K. H. (ed.) The transformation of higher learning 1860–1930, University of Chicago Press ———. 1995 ‘American students in Germany, 1815–1914: The structure of German and US matriculants at Göttingen University’, in Geitz, H., Heideking, J. and Herbst, J. (ed.) 1995 German influences on education in the United States to 1917, Cambridge University Press Karady, V. 2002 ‘La migration internationale d’étudiants en Europe, 1890–1940’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, vol. 145 ———. 2003 ‘Les logiques des échanges inégaux. Constraintes et stratégies à l’oeuvre dans les migrations d’étudiants en Europe avant les années 1930’, in Peter, H.  R. and Tikhonov, N. (ed.) Universitäten als Brücken in Europa, Frankfurt: Peter Lang ———. 2004 ‘Student mobility and western universities: Patterns of unequal exchange in the European academic market, 1880–1914’ in Charle, C., Schriewer, J., Wagner P. (ed.) Transnational intellectual networks: Forms of academic knowledge and the search for cultural identities, Frankfurt: Campus Verlag Koblitz, A.  H. 1988 ‘Science, Women, and the Russian Intelligentsia: The Generation of the 1860s’, Isis, 79:2 Koyama, N. 2004 Japanese students at Cambridge University in the Meiji era, 1868–1912: Pioneers for the modernization of Japan, Fukuoka: Lulu Lahiri, S. 2000 Indians in Britain: Anglo-Indian encounters, race and identity 1880–1930, London: Cass

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Manitakis, N. 2000 ‘Les migrations estudiantes en Europe, 1890–1930’ in Leboutte, R. (ed.) 2000 Migrations et migrants dans une perspective historique: Permanences et innovations, Brussels: Peter Lang McClelland, C. E. 1988 ‘Republics within the empire: The universities’ in Dukes, J. R. and Remak, J. (ed.) 1988 Another Germany: A reconsideration of the imperial era, Boulder CO: Westview Moulinier, P. 2003 ‘Les étudiants étrangners à Paris au xixe siècle: Origines, géographiques et cursus scolaires’, in Peter, H.  R. and Tikhonov, N. 2003 Universitäten als Brücken in Europa, Frankfurt: Peter Lang Perraton, H. 2014 A history of foreign students in Britain, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Peter, H. R. and Tikhonov, N. (ed.) 2003 Universitäten als Brücken in Europa, Frankfurt: Peter Lang Pietsch, T. 2013 Empire of scholars: Universities, networks and the British academic world 1850–1939, Manchester University Press Report of the committee on Indian students (Lytton report) 1922, London: HMSO for India Office Report on the work of the Indian students’ department 1912–1913 (Cd. 7160) Report on the work of the Indian students’ department 1913–1914 (Cd. 7719) Searight, S. 1991 Steaming east: The forging of steamship and rail links between Europe and Asia, London: Bodley Head Stone, L. 1974 ‘The size and composition of the Oxford student body 1580–1909’ in Stone, L. (ed.) The university in society, vol. 1: Oxford and Cambridge from the 14th to the early 19th century, London: Princeton University Press Symonds, R. 2000 ‘Oxford and the empire’, in Brock, M.  G. and Curthoys, M. C. (ed.) Nineteenth-century Oxford, Part 2 (The history of the University of Oxford, vol. 7), Oxford: Clarendon Thwing, C. F. 1928 The American and the German University: One hundred years of history, New York: Macmillan Tuve, J.  E. 1984 The first Russian women physicians, Newtonville MA: Oriental Research Partners Weber, T. 2008 Our friend ‘The enemy’: Elite education in Britain and Germany before world war I, Stanford University Press Weill, C. 1996 Etudiants russes en Allemagne 1906–1914: Quand la Russie frappait aux portes de l’Europe, Paris: Harmattan Weisz, G. 1983 The emergence of modern universities in France, 1863–1914, Princeton University Press Werner, A. 2013 The transatlantic world of higher education: Americans at German universities, 1776–1914, New York: Berghahn Westwood, J. N. 1964 A history of Russian railways, London: Allen and Unwin

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Wheeler, W. R., King, H. H. and Davidson, A. B. (ed.) 1925 The foreign student in America, New York: Association Press Williams, R.  C. 1972 Culture in exile: Russian emgrés in Germany, 1881–1941, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press Wolmar, C. 2009 Blood iron and gold: How the railways transformed the world, London: Atlantic

CHAPTER 3

Rise and Fall: Between the Wars

The situation of Europe at the time of the Armistice was one of unexampled misery and confusion. … The extremity of these and other sufferings had produced in the public mind a pining for a world organized on a new and better plan and, as often happens when desires are strong, a belief that such a world could be brought into being. (H. A. L. Fisher 1936) By 1924 the prospects for Europe looked brighter than they had done for more than a decade. … For the young, especially, a new and more carefree age appeared to have dawned. Jazz, the Charleston, the ‘flapper:’ the imports from the USA symbolized for many contemporaries, as they have done subsequently, Europe’s own ‘roaring twenties’. … The future could at last be viewed with more hope and greater optimism. The worst was over. Or so it seemed. (Ian Kershaw 2015)1

At its first meeting in 1924 the League of Nations Committee on Inter-­ University Relations agreed that the exchange of students ‘can be organised and developed very largely by the students themselves’.2 Governments increasingly took a different view and began to shape their own policies towards international students. Meanwhile, despite the League’s assurance, two German Rhodes scholars demonstrated how, in the interwar years of poverty, recovery, depression and menacing conflict, student exchange was intertwined with international politics. Their record can be set against the changes in student numbers and against changes in practice in the major host countries. © The Author(s) 2020 H. Perraton, International Students 1860–2010, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49946-4_3

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In his will, Cecil Rhodes endowed scholarships for Germany, suspended during the war but restored in 1930, as well as those for the United States and the British empire. Among the first of a new batch of scholars were Adam von Trott zu Solz and Fritz Schumacher, both from well-to-do families, both German patriots and both with high hopes of Oxford. Trott’s father had been minister of culture in Prussia from 1909 to 1917 while, by 1917, Hermann Schumacher was professor of economics in Berlin. Schumacher and Trott arrived in Oxford in 1930 and 1931. They reacted to the place in different ways—Trott with enthusiasm and Schumacher with disappointment. Trott studied law, contemplated following an academic career in Oxford, and made warm friendships with two female contemporaries who apparently visited him on alternate holidays after his return to Germany. Schumacher, who expected Oxford to match the stimulation of a seminar with Maynard Keynes on a previous visit, found the university intellectually boring and the girls unattractive. Trott and Schumacher moved in the same circles, becoming friendly with David Astor, later editor of the Observer, and future politicians. Both saw the reparations demanded of Germany in the Treaty of Versailles as excessive and destabilising. Both were alarmed and appalled at Hitler’s advance to power but made political judgements that puzzled their English hosts. Schumacher antagonised a Rotary Club meeting by arguing that it was the ‘turn of other countries’ to ease tension in Europe ‘by playing a fair game and revising the treaties’. Trott, after returning to Germany and in the early days of the Nazi regime, caused more offence with a letter to the Manchester Guardian arguing that the rule of law was still operating, without antisemitism, in the county court in Hessen where he was working.3 After Oxford their paths diverged. Both had gone there hoping for intellectual stimulation that would lead to rewarding careers only to return to a country and a world in which politics trumped personal advancement. Despite his unyielding opposition to Hitler, Trott returned to Germany determined to work against the Nazi regime from within the system. He joined the Foreign Office at the outbreak of war and combined that job with work for the German resistance that included repeated contact with representatives of the allies in Sweden and Switzerland. Learning of this Richard Crossman and Stafford Cripps, friends from Oxford, took opposing views of his loyalties.4 These became clear when, involved with the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, Trott was arrested, tried and executed.

3  RISE AND FALL: BETWEEN THE WARS 

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Schumacher returned to Germany in 1934 anxious to see its new regime at first hand. He found that ‘the rumours and reports he had been loath to believe had not only been true but had been followed by far worse’. By 1937 he returned to Britain. With many other distinguished German antiNazis he was interned in 1940 and then released to work as a farm labourer, while maintaining his academic contacts. In December 1941 his farm manager was surprised when he asked to take a day off in order to go and have tea in London with Keynes, as was the Banbury police sergeant whose consent he needed to travel.5 As restrictions eased he resumed his academic career in Oxford and returned to Germany after 1945 with the Control Commission for a short period, but settled in Britain, gaining influence as the economic adviser to the National Coal Board and yet more influence as a heterodox economist and author of Small is beautiful. By the time Schumacher and Trott set out on their fateful rail journeys, universities in Europe and America had for a decade been recovering from the effects of the First World War and re-establishing their status as national or international intellectual centres. Many had seen a peak in enrolments around 1920 as demobilised soldiers joined school leavers. From the early 1920s numbers grew in the United States, in France and in the new states and institutions of eastern Europe, as they responded to national pride and government demands for a skilled workforce. Growth was then checked by the depression with numbers falling back in the 1930s (see Table 3.1). Enrolments grew even faster in the Soviet Union, responding to workforce and public demand, to the removal of barriers to women’s education and to government policy: full-time numbers in its institutions of higher education or vuzy rose almost five times between 1927 and 1940.6 There were different pictures in Britain, Germany and Italy. Growth in British universities was sluggish with numbers rising by only 2 per cent in the 1920s and 3 per cent in the 1930s. In Germany the disastrous state of the economy took enrolments down between 1920 and 1925. They then rose to 100,000, only to fall back to 41,000 in 1938. Italian university numbers fell in the 1920s but rose again in the 1930s.7 Foreign student enrolments made a similar pattern. War had not stopped the enrolment of foreign students so that just after its end France still had 6000 foreign students.8 By the early 1920s its foreign students exceeded prewar totals and by the 1920s it was again the world’s most popular student destination. Numbers in Europe and in the United States were influenced by the state of the world economy, with numbers falling in the depression of the 1930s (see Table  3.2). German numbers had

Table 3.1  University enrolments in selected countries 1920–1938 Thousands

Britaina France Germany universities Germany THs Italy Poland Romania Switzerland USSR vuzy full-timeb United States

1920

1925

1930

47.5 49.0 86.6 19.5 53.2 25.9 13.6 6.9 n/a 598.0

c48.0 58.5 59.6 20.3 45.2 37.5 22.4 6.7 c170.0 941.0

48.5 78.7 99.6 22.0 46.3 48.2 28.6 6.9 c500.0 1,101.0

1938 50.0 74.8 41.1 10.3 77.4 n/a 26.5 9.5 812.0 1,351.0

Source: Mitchell Historical statistics except for Britain, ACU Yearbook; Germany, Grüttner Studenten Table 16; USSR, Matthews Education, 99 Notes: aData are for 1921, 1926 and 1931; bData are for 1927, 1932 and 1940

Table 3.2  Foreign student numbers in selected countries 1920–1938

Britaina Foreign total Foreign per cent France Foreign total Foreign per cent Germany (universities)b Foreign total Foreign per cent Italyc Foreign total Foreign per cent United States Foreign total Foreign per centd

1920

1925

1930

1938

4,470 9

4,596 10

4,865 10

6,264 13

4,887 10

8,375 14

15,198 19

7,954 11

n/a

4,442 7

4,209 4

2,446 6

487