The College Record 2022

emphasis on his duties within the church than on his Oxford teaching. His successor,
Bartholomew Price (1818–1898), on the other hand, was a committed and highly
regarded teacher of mathematics, who became a prominent personality within the
University, and, towards the end of his life, Master of Pembroke.
The tenures of Cooke and Price in the Sedleian Chair straddled a period of reform
within the University. Questions were being asked about the nature of the teaching
at the English universities, and the place of scientific disciplines within this. Such
subjects had little place in college teaching, and were often regarded as irrelevant
by the traditionalists who saw the training of the clergy as the central purpose
of the universities. Such high-level scientific instruction as did exist was provided
centrally by the relevant professors, but their positions had in many cases become
financially precarious, and their lectures often suffered from lack of attendance,
owing to a mismatch between the stipulated teaching and the subjects that were
actually examined.
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Beginning in the 1850s, a series of government commissions investigated the
(scientific) teaching provision at Oxford and Cambridge, and the financial situations
of the colleges, with a view to forcing colleges to subsidize the central professoriate.
Thus, it was that the Sedleian Chair of Natural Philosophy came to be associated
permanently with Queen’s: from 1858, the College – apparently willingly – contributed
a portion of the professor’s stipend.
Until this point, the various professorships within the University had not been attached
to particular colleges: they had always been internal appointments, given to people
who already had college associations. To have moved college upon appointment
to a chair would have been unthinkable – or even infeasible, in the cases of figures
such as Hornsby who held more than one such post. But financial contributions to
stipends created natural connections. Bartholomew Price, while remaining a Fellow
of Pembroke, was elected to an Honorary Fellowship of Queen’s in 1868. And when
Augustus Love (1863–1940), Price’s successor as Sedleian Professor, arrived from
Cambridge in 1899 without any other Oxford association, it was natural for him
to become a member of Queen’s. The Sedleian Professors have been Fellows of
Queen’s ever since, complete with associated traditions: since the end of the 1950s,
it has been the convention that only the Sedleian Professor or the Patroness of the
College may operate the orrery in the Upper Library.
In 1945, as part of post-war concern over the state of physics teaching in the UK, it
was suggested that the Sedleian Chair might be realigned as a post in theoretical
physics rather than applied mathematics, but the change was never made.
One modification that was made to the Sedleian statutes around this time, however,
was the removal of the requirement for the Professor to lecture – thus, what had
begun as a post for teaching Aristotle completed its transformation into the highprofile
research position that it is today.
College Record 2022 | The Queen’s College 99