Universities Scottish, Irish, and European: Lyon Playfair (1818–98) and University Reform
This chapter assesses Lyon Playfair's views on universities. Playfair was a Scottish scientist who became an administrator, a university professor, and a politician. He has been praised as ‘one of the chief architects of the system of technical education in Great Britain as it exists to-day’. As a Member of Parliament (MP), he had to engage with practical university problems, in England and Ireland as well as Scotland, as they arose on the political agenda. But his starting-point was Scotland, and in putting Scottish problems in a wider British and European context, Playfair was part of a distinctive nineteenth-century discourse. Scottish academics and intellectuals were stimulated to think in comparative terms by the obvious contrast between Scottish and English universities; by the need to adapt university education to new social needs; by discussions which surrounded major legislation in 1858 and 1889; and by the widely shared feeling that Scotland had a national system of education closer to continental than to English traditions.