LESSONS CEASE

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LXXI, Issue 13014, 4 December 1942, Page 7

LESSONS CEASE

COLLEGES IN NORWAY Nazi Regime Belied New Admission Rules All members of the faculty of Norway’s dental college in Oslo have resigned from their positions in protest against encroachments by the Nazi Department of Church and Education, states the Royal Norwegian Information Service. At the business college in Bergen no new classes are being started; this is the result of the faculty’s rejection of a Nazi attempt to overrule the school’s normal procedure in accepting students for enrolment. For classes in medicine or pharmacy are being organised at the University of Oslo.

Trouble at the dental college started in early summer when the Nazis discharged Professor Birger Bergersen, head of the institution, replacing him with Alex Buhs, a Germanborn dentist who has been in Norway since the first World War. At the same time the laws governing the college were altered in such a way that political considerations threatened to play the major role in the appointment of teachers and other staff members as fell as in the selection of new students.

At the business college in Bergen Professor Wedervang, head of the school, was discharged. For the coming school year the college had accepted 65 out of 363 applicants for enrolment. On July 30 came a message from the Nazi Department of Commerce under which the business college is classified. It listed 91 of the 363 applicants, and stated arbitrarily that these could not be accepted. Of these 91 there were 19 who had already accepted. The college faculty refused to comply with the order, and informed the department that nothing would be done until the department supplied concrete reasons for the exclusion of the 19 students.

The department replied by suspending the acting head of the school, Professor Paulsen, and by demanding the acceptance of a number of N.S. (Quisling) students, all of whom were poorly qualified. But college officials and faculty refused to yield, and told the department so in a letter dated September 3. It stated the original dicisions by the school s committee on admissions would stand. No new classes have been started at the institution. All faculties within the University of Oslo have protested against the new admission rules as wel as dismissals of teachers. In the schools of pharmacy and medicine the formation of new clases has been “postponed.” Aside from this, the Nazi authorities seem to have withdrawn or “forgotten” their demand that N.S. students be given preference at the university.