WOMEN’S CLUB

Press, Volume LXXXV, Issue 25896, 31 August 1949, Page 2

WOMEN’S CLUB

ADDRESS BY DR. H. R. HULME

His impressions of universities, largely, but not entirely, based on his own experience, were given by Dr. H. R. Hulme, rector of Canterbury University College, when he addressed a luncheon meeting of members of the Canterbury Women’s Club yesterday. Dr. Hulme described first his own university, Cambridge, which he entered in the middle 20’s, a time he described as very pleasant and gay, when one war was over and no one was thinking of the next. Cambridge, he explained, comprised about 20 different colleges, each with from 200 to 300 students and a staff of dons and tutors. The university was the teaching and examining body. The social life was partly in college and partly in the university, but academically the university was a unit. In his time. Dr. Hulme said, there were many brilliant students at Cambridge, which was noted for its highly-trained teachers, and which also enjoyed great prestige, though there were many who entered the university to play cricket and have a good time. But that was changed since the war. So many were anxious to enter the university that a few years’ education after gaining a school certificate was now required of applicants. This policy was necessary, but the old system by which students met many different types of men had its good points, he thought. After leaving Cambridge, Dr. Hulme spent a year at Leipzig University, which was practically non-residential. The practice in Germany was for students to spend a year at one university and then move to another. Consequently the universities did not have the same atmosphere as did the older universities in Britain. When he was in Leipzig, which was a large industrial town with a population of 700,000, there was much unemployment, and he saw a procession of men carrying banners with the words “We are hungry, give us work, give us bread.” That was in 1931. The prevailing political unrest influenced the students, and was detrimental to research work, but it did keep the students down to earth, while at Cambridge many men were out of touch with reality, which encouraged research, and the university had produced the finest flowers of intellect and the finest fruits oi knowledge that had influenced the world.

Two years before the war were spent by Dr. Hulme at the “red brick” university of Liverpool, where only a small proportion of the students —from 5 to 10 per cent.—were residential. Here the tendency was for students to keep to their own faculty. In the United States, where the universities were crowded, a kind of unit system was adopted. In New Zealand the universities might be described as being between the British and the United States universities—slightly more like those of the United States. But while students in New Zealand studied three or four subjects at a time,’ the Americans took a great many more. Each system had its advantages.

Dr. Hulme commended the work of the International Students’ Service, which had grown up between the two world wars for the exchange of ideas and the promoting of friendship. During and since the last war the society was primarily engaged in providing relief for students in devastated countries. It was, he felt, a .working society, unifying students and paving the way to international peace. Before the address, piano solos were played by Mrs Merle Carter and songs were sung by Miss Dorothea Charters, with Mrs Carter as accompanist. The club’s garden circle, of which Mrs A. E. G. Lyttle is director, was responsible for the lunch and for the floral decorations, and Mrs G. H. Watts (president of the club) pres : ded, and thanked the artists. Dr. Hulme, and the garden circle.