“You are students at the university, and have no more business with politics than you have with rat-catching,” asserted John Ruskin, expressing, albeit somewhat forceably, a view which would have gained the hearty assent of most university officials of any period. Yet it has often proved impossible to separate education from political values and to prevent undergraduates from expressing political preferences. Nonetheless, the forms of student political activity have varied markedly: from quiet debates in a convivial, club-like ambiance to direct action and violence; from extreme Right to extreme Left. In contrast to students of other countries, Oxford undergraduates during the 19th century were predominantly Tory. This political character and its favorable contrast to the universities of the Continent was complacently noticed by the young Oxford graduate, George Curzon, in 1884. “The swaggering infidelity of the Parisian students, the atmosphere of beer and bravado that prevails among the Germans, the organized sedition of the Russians, one and all inspire us with an additional respect for a system which is so far as possible removed from any of these extremes,” he asserted. Although this glib differentiation was obviously a self-congratulatory caricature, like most caricatures, it rested on a solid basis in observed fact. What were the causes of these differences between Oxford and the continental universities and what role did Oxford itself play in the formation of undergraduates' political values during the 19th century?

It is no exaggeration to state that political economy was the most popular subject with the British public in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Ricardo lectures of 1824, delivered by J. R. McCulloch, were attended by the elite of London society, and the popularization of Ricardian political economy by Harriett Martineau in the 1830s outsold many of the popular novels of the day. Nonetheless, despite this deep public curiosity, political economy did not form part of the required knowledge at either of the two English universities, Oxford and Cambridge. Although the 1820s saw the institution of professorships at both universities, the subject was not especially popular at either place. Indeed, when George Pryme, the professor of political economy at Cambridge, wrote to William Whewell, the powerful Master of Trinity College, of his intention to resign, he worried about the future of political economy at Cambridge. “The Absence of any endowment for a Professorship,” he wrote, “has made me hesitate as to offering this Resignation; but as I have confidence of the desire of the University not to let so important a study be neglected (and this would be the only University in the Kingdom where it would be so) I have no right to suppose that the Council and the Senate would not give effect to this feeling by making an adequate provision for the continuance of the Professorial duties.” It is strange to think today that the predecessor of Alfred Marshall and John Maynard Keynes would have stayed on at his post many years after he felt he had ceased to be useful for fear that the University would abolish his post if he resigned.

During the 1920s the flight to the suburbs received wide attention in the popular press. Magazines carried articles with such titles as “The World's Greatest Migration,” “Why I Live in a Suburb,” and “The City's Diminishing Returns.” Actually suburbanization was not a new phenomenon. For example, since the 1840s the population of New York City's periphery had been growing at a faster rate than the city's core. But while the process of migration to the suburbs was not new, the civic pride and sense of independence of many suburbanites was. Armed with the progressive idea of positive government and determined to halt any further attempts by the city to expand, suburbanites, particularly of the upper-middle class, built communities that would serve as islands of exclusivity within the greater metropolis.

Most studies of political leaders have shown that certain socializing agents, in the view of those leaders, have been primarily responsible for developing their political ideas and personal values. Generally, the most important socializing agents of political leaders have included family, friends, events, books, teachers and the general university environment. Mexican political leaders are no exception to this general pattern. The purpose of this essay is to examine one of these socializing agents, the university's social environment, and its effect on those generations of leaders who guided Mexico's development from 1946 to 1970. Because the overwhelming majority of Mexico's political leaders during that period studied at the university from 1920 to 1940, this analysis will focus on that time period.