It was obvious to Historian Max Beloff, who teaches modern history at Oxford, that U.S. education was ahead on one count: more people, were getting to college than ever before. Could postwar Britain, which talked of doing the same, learn anything from U.S. experience?
Last year, Max Beloff, who has written a book on American history (Thomas Jefferson and American Democracy), made a six-month tour of U.S. campuses* to find out. There were, he admitted, a few things that pleased him, such as the exhaustive approach to Russian studies (not matched in Britain) of Columbia University's Russian Institute. Yet on the whole,...