W. Bruce Leslie
Visiting Scholar, State University of New York – College at Brockport
June 15, 2003

The Anglo-American academic relationship stretches back at least to 1633 when Rev. John Eliot, a Jesus College graduate and a missionary to Massachusetts Bay Colony, wrote back to England requesting at least "one mite” “to erect a school of learning, a college among us.”  An Emmanuel College graduate, Rev. John Harvard responded to the need and soon a new college sprouted in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

After 270 years the two academic worlds are still intertwined, though the financial shoe is now on the other foot.  The Blair Government’s White Paper on Higher Education warns that Britain must compete with America’s “unsurpassed research base” which threatens to draw away researchers who “are among our best”.  It has truly been an intriguing time for an American to be in Cambridge!  Hopefully my outsider’s perspective offers fresh insights as well as occasional sticks grabbed at the wrong end.

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