The University.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19151, 7 November 1927, Page 8

The University.

Although this is a holiday week, it is to be hoped that some of our readers at least will find time to ponder on the interesting article by Professor A. J. Grant which we printed on Saturday. There is the fact to begin with that Professor Grant is a scholar with a European reputation who has been thinking about University problems for thirty years, so that when he praises or criticises us he does it out of a full and rich mind. But there is the more striking faot still that it has never happened before in the history of our University that we have had an exchange of Professors, and the actual and distinguished occupant of an English Chair filling a Chair here for a whole year, and taking a full part day by day in the University's normal life. To Professor Grant himself the experience has probably been less profitable than to us, though we are sure it has not been toiprofitable to him, t>r wholly uninteresting. Indeed it is the interest he has found in the experiment, and the modest and generous heartiness with which he has carried it out, that make his remarks now so valuable. If he' had dropped in one week and left the next we should still have been glad to know that he has been " deeply im- " pressed by the way in which Xew " Zealand, with a population of less "than a million and a half, has laid "the foundations of a great Univer"sity system," but be has been here long enough to examine and test the foundations (after looking at the product for nine years as an external examiner), and can still give it as his belief that "Canterbury College, ,; judged by the idealism of its aims, ''would rank high among University "institutions." He says, also, and it is a point on which we have long been a little worried, that, with the necessary deductions and qualifications to be made on account of our narrower and perhaps shallower range of work, our standards are high, and our students doing as good work, paper by comparable paper, as those of the Universities of England. We cannot, therefore, fail to give earnest attention to his further considered opinion that

'•' the staffs of the New Zealand University Colleges are fully competent to " conduct their own degree examinations," that the "prestige of the de"gree would suffer no damage by the "' adoption of full domestic control,'' and that " the teaching icculd profit '■' very much by it." We italicise the last clause because there would be nothing else to worry about if we could be certain that in the lecture-room itself things would turn out as Professor Grant says. Then it is very interesting to have his opinion on our problem of full- and part-time students. Although the essence of this problem is not so much numbers or standards as wastespending money and effort on indifferent material instead of the whole of our small store on the best material— Professor Grant makes a very valuable suggestion when he asks if the Honours course might not be confined to fulltime students ana the pass course left open for the others. That might or might not require a larger and more expensive staff—Professor Grant points out that very good Honours work might be done without the students being " constantly lectured to "

I but it would certainly result in better I work in both grades, and also secure Professor Grant's final point that there should be "no neglect of or contempt '•for the part-time student." But if there are to be fewer lectures for the advanced students there must be far more books, and that brings us to Professor Grant's novel and almost exciting suggestion that if " the needs of "the Dominions were known at Home "bequests of books might reasonably "be hoped for." England, he says, is almost cluttered up with books, and hardly knows how best to get rid of them.

Every scholar collects some sort of a library, and often as his years draw to their end he wonders what he should do with it, for it 19 notorious that hooks cost much to buy but make very little when sold. Bequeathed to College and University libraries in England they produce little noticeable result. Diverted to New Zealand and to Clvristalrurch they would be invaluable. Is there no means of diverting them ?

We hope there may be, but there is, in any ease, now an obligation on us to begin planning and plotting. It will be interesting to hear what the Board of Governors has to say at its next meeting.