RSM( CoRo, 12-) questions if one can break the sound barrier without losing one’ s strat
The Wykehamist
Manners, Markets and the Makyth Spirit
RSM( CoRo, 12-) questions if one can break the sound barrier without losing one’ s strat
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Legacy of Innovation It is a truth universally acknowledged— or at least it ought to be— that if one were to go poking about the cloisters of Winchester College in search of an entrepreneur, one might initially feel they had entirely drawn a blank. To the casual observer, the place reeks of antiquity, and the sort of dignified calm that suggests the 14 th century had just stepped out for a quick sandwich and might be back any moment.
But give those whiskers a thoughtful tug. If you peer through the mists of time at our founder, William of Wykeham, perhaps one will find a fellow whose undertakings offer a legacy of innovation of the highest order.
William of Wykeham was, of course, first and foremost a statesman and a man of the Church. However, one does not accumulate the sort of vast personal wealth he enjoyed without a healthy dose of entrepreneurial spirit. While, as a self-made man, he could manage transactional French and tend to business affairs in some basic Latin, he never had the benefit of a formal Church education himself, which might have afforded him further fluency. Grateful for the rudimentary start he did have, and to those who gave it to him, he chose not to hoard his fortune, but to sink it into a couple of‘ start-ups’ that would transform the educational landscape.
Wykeham’ s vision would probably be termed‘ vertical integration’ in modern vernacular. Educational benefactors had founded university colleges before, but Wykeham’ s vision went further than establishing a certain St Mary’ s College of Winchester in Oxenford, otherwise known as New College. In parallel, he established a second institution— a school— devoted to preparing scholars for his ambitiously-sized Oxford college. It too, would focus on grammar and the liberal arts, and it was established in 1382, three years after New College. He even hired the revered architect, William Wynford, to design both
Winchester College and New College around a central courtyard, or quad. This wasn’ t just aesthetic; it was a functional innovation that set the blueprint for educational institutions for the next six centuries. The template of training scholars in a unified plan of grammar school followed by university, was as successful as it was influential.
The Entrepreneurial Soul of the Scholar To understand why this matters, we must look through the monocle of great economic thinkers of the past. Irishman Richard Cantillon, in his Essay on the Nature of Trade in General( 1755), distinguished between wage earners with fixed incomes and those without. He placed entrepreneurs in the latter category, highlighting the adventurous and volatile nature of their work. Wykeham, by risking his legacy on a new educational model, was a quintessential non-fixed income adventurer.
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