Geologist-French Lecturer Always Liked Spanish

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28766, 11 December 1958, Page 7

Geologist-French Lecturer Always Liked Spanish

Mr J. F. D. White, who is retiring from the University of Canterbury after 41 years service, is a complex. He is a master of science in geology (and once earned three times more from this work than from his life work); he became a teacher of French by accident and has spent most of his life at it; but his abiding desire is to teach Spanish.

Mr White was borne at Tawataio, in bush country near Ekatahuna, educated at the Sydenham School and Christ’s College, and then graduated bachelor of arts and master of science at Canterbury University College. For nine years after that he was on the staff of Christ’s College taking science and, in an emergency, switched to French. His skill with the language earned instant recognition and from 1917 to 1923 he was also part-time assistant to Professor T. G. R. Blunt in the modern languages department of the university and then received a full-time appointment as lecturer in French—the first assistant in the department. Eventually he was one of the first in the university to be promoted to the status of senior lecturer. From 1925 to 1927 Mr White went abroad, studied at the Sorbonne in the University of Paris, and then went to South America. He worked for a mining company 14,000 ft up in the Andes in Peru, and quickly picked up his excellent working knowledge of Spanish. The demand for teaching in Spanish was growing in New Zealand on his return; but the university ruled against teaching. “There are still many inquiries for it yet it is not taught in New Zealand universities, although I believe it still must come,” Mr White said yesterday.' “There is a big call for Spanish from commercial interests.” Department’s Growth Mr White has seen the modern languages department grow from 40 stage I students plus “advanced” and honours students (making a total of less than 50) to about 150 this year. “Yet the staff has only just kept pace with the 40-year-old ratio. We have six instead of two for just three times the former total,” Mr White said. “With a stage I class of 80 it is inevitable that there must be a dilution of interest and sympathy between teacher and taught. Classes could most profitably be reduced to 30.” Not much else has changed. “We have the same quarters (in the clock tower block) and we had the same Brussels carpet until this year,” Mr White said, with a laugh. In his early days at the university, Mr White remembers that women students all sat in the front with the men at the back. “The change to fraternisation and

free mixing came with shorter hair cuts, lipstick, and rouge,” he said. “When I came to Canterbury College,” Mr White said, “it was largely self-supporting, it set its own preliminary examinations, which were stiffer than the Eng-lish-marked examinations . for which they were a pre-requisite. It is paradoxical that, in many ways, we then enjoyed more autonomy then than we do now. “The only drawback then was that the college was dependent almost entirely on the whim of its council,” Mr White said. “There was little central control. The safeguard against any possible abuse when we achieve full autonomy will be healthy competition for and the prestige of the staff. There will be no room for light-weights.” Mr White, who suffered a setback in health a few months ago, is now recovering well. He attended a farewell function yesterday in the department, where tributes were paid to his fine record. Today he will bid formal farewell to the officers of the university. Then he will give all his time to fishing and gardening.