Lincoln College.

Press, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23413, 21 August 1941, Page 4

Lincoln College.

The Government has earned the cordial thanks of the Canterbury public anti pf. the authorities of the Canterbury Agricultural College by its decision to reinstate on the estimates the sum required to reconstruct the main college block. The representatives of Canterbury’s chief

urban and rural interests who lately appealed to the Government for reconsideration would be the last to credit themselves with having won this result. The claims of the college were urged by the facts, not by them; but they may, and should, congratulate themselves upon having moved the Government, fairly and without exaggeration, to turn to the facts again. The reconstruction of the main block is not a new project; it has been approved for some years. The work would undoubtedly have been far advanced, or even completed, to-day, but for the demands of the military building programme, to which the college authorities readily subordinated their need. But that is very great,' and the time has come to meet it: not merely because, it had been officially recognised, or because it had been deferred upon a pledge to meet it as soon as the camps were built, or because buildings fit to be condemned ought not to be inhabited. Those are considerable reasons, certainly; but the final and decisive reason is that neither the work that the college must do now, to further war-time agricultural policy, nor the work that it will soon have to do, as the problems of rehabilitation and of post-war change crowd upon it, can be done without sufficient and suitable accommodation. The college has reached the point when it must either go forward, in that respect, or fail; and the Government has faced the alternative realistically and made the wise choice.