'VARSITY LEADER.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 50, 28 February 1935, Page 18

'VARSITY LEADER.

SALARIED OFFICER. MELBOURNE INNOVATION. MB. B. E. PRIESTLEY'S CAREER "With wirle experience as a university administrator, a period of thrilling adventure as an Antarctic explorer and a keen interest in sport, Mr. Raymond E. Priestley, who has arrived to be the first salaried vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne, brings a genial temperament and a liberal outlook to the most important post which the university has created in recent years (says the Melbourne "Herald"). As the virtual manager of university affairs, Mr. Priestley will have a big task, which has not yet been precisely defined'. To the making of the urbane personality which he will apply to it have gone—among many other experiences—a year in a snowbound cave in the Antarctic living on seal meat, a period of war service, in which he gained tho Military Cross, and the post-war quietude of a fellowship of Clare College, Cambridge, as secretary-general of the faculties.

A kindly man, with glasses, greying a little, Mr. Priestley speaks of his career, carefully omitting those parts most creditable to himself. He was born in 1886, and began his university life at Bristol, but his work was interrupted when first ho heard the call of the Antarctic and went off in the old Nimrod with Shackleton in 1907 as zoologist. He paid liis first visit to Melbourne on the way to join her, antl he recalls with a sigh for other days that the fare from Liverpool to Sydney was only £10.

With Scott's Expedition.

On that expedition he met two other scientists —destinod to become Sir Douglas Mawson and Sir Edgeworth Davicl. David was the chief of the scientific staff, and became his greatest friend. The Shackle ton expedition over, he went with David to Sydney to work upon the results, when, in 1910, came the news that one of Scott's geologists was not able to make the voyage. Priestley took his place on that memorable expedition, where, with the northern party, burrowed into a snowdrift, he remained a prisoner of tho snows for tho long winter, "under conditions of starvation never before experienced in the Antarctic. Living on such seal meat as it could obtain, the party remained until the spring, enduring incredible hardships; then with two out of their number of six ill, they managed to sledge over the frozen sea 250 miles back to headquarters. "We had been given up for dead,' says Mr. Priestley. In 1913, when he went to Sydney to see Sir Edgeworth David, Mr. Priestley shared with him one of tho most dramatic moments of modern exploration. It was while they were at David's home in the Blue Mountains that there came through the first wireless message ever received direct from the Antarctic from the Australasian Expedition —Ninnis and Mertz were dead, and Mawson had been left behind. War Service. Returning to Cambridge, he worked on the scientific results of the expeditions, and on the outbreak of war he joined the wireless service as adjutant of the -wireless training centre at Worcester in 1917, becoming second in cpmmand of the 46th Division Signals Company in France. The war over, he wrote the history of the signals service, and then returned to Cambridge, where he took a diploma in agriculture. In 1920 he became secretary of the board of examinations, and in the same year he was appointed first secretary-general of the board of faculties, and one of the three chief administrative officers of the University. Mr. Priestley is inclined to some strictly qualified agreement with the views of Sir Michael Sadler, the retiring master of University College, Oxford, who recently said that "the primacy of Oxford and Cambridge among the English universities is doomed." The teaching of certain practical applications of the sciences, he thinks, is bound to gravitate to universities in the large centres of population such as London.

"We have already got to the stage of realising that we cannot deal with all subjects," he said. "We have a very strong agricultural faculty at Cambridge, but we thought it better to leave forestry to other universities. We are going away from the clinical side of medicine—obviously London has the material.

"Academic Freedom." "I am certain, however, that so long as Oxford and Cambridge proceed on present lines—so long as their college system- and their freedom of action are not interfered with, they will always play an absolutely essential part in the university system."

Speaking of the tenor of political thought among Cambridge undergraduates, he said: "We have always been very anxious to allow freedom of expression of thought, and all the political parties have vigorous organisations."