University Reform

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25085, 17 January 1947, Page 6

University Reform

A year ago, in his notable first address to the Senate of the New Zealand University, the Chancellor, Mr Justice Smith, encouraged and indeed challenged his colleagues of every status —of the senate itself, of the college councils, of the faculties, and of the student body—to apply themselves in earnest to the problems of reform and reconstruction. The encouragement was not wasted , on an apathetic or complacent Unii versity; the challenge of the reference, carefully exaggerated, to a “ tenth-rate university ”, was welcome where administrators and teachers, long conscious of deficiencies and appalled to see them threatening disaster under the pressure of a great increase in student rolls, were ready to co-operate. Yesterday the Chancellor was able to give the Senate a summary account of much progress towards the aim of his five-year plan. On many points agreement has already been reached: in particular, on the need for a much greater degree of academic freedom in the writing and changing of course prescriptions. This will itself entail corresponding liberalisation in, for example, the examination system. But there are large questions not yet answered, outstanding among them the question whether the present federal structure of the University shall be preserved—it has been detested and damned by many, perhaps most, university teachers for years—or whether the colleges shall become separate universities, each with its own limited charter. The Chancellor, while this issue is still under committee review, chose not to give his personal views on it, but said, very truly, that even if defederalisation does not follow, at least the loosening of the shackles that have {boijnd the teachers to prescriptions | too long and too fast, must greatly I assist them to do the work they I want as they want to do it The

University, however, cannot wholly emancipate and advance itself. The Chancellor’s address is. the plainest exposition the Dominion has had of the financial fact, that the colleges, even the two separately endowed colleges, are helpless without the money granted by the State. It was more than an exposition of this fact, and of the further fact that the University will not be able to fulfil its real function unless it is more generously financed by the State. It was a profoundly useful examination of the principles which must be understood and observed in the finance of university education. It does not make mucli difference, in this regard, whether such an advisory body as the Chancellor spoke of is appointed by the Government or by the Senate itself, whether it functions as an organ of the State or of the University, whether the Minister of Education is its intermediary with the Cabinet or some other Minister. Those are interesting and important questions, and there are others of the same sort; but what is of more account than the answer, this way or that, is that the principle of competence and integrity should prevail and the expedients of inter-provincial competition and compromise be abandoned. The financial provision for university education should be assessed by men able to see broadly, see far, and see in proportion. It should be generously measured out, accordingly; and the generosity should not be merely quantitative. The finance of university education should be freed from the earmarks and conditions of a too minute administrative control at the centre and, it need hardly be said, from conditions inconsistent with the University’s supreme trust, which is academic freedom itself.