“Mercenaries Under Mortarboards”

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30536, 3 September 1964, Page 15

“Mercenaries Under Mortarboards”

[By

"Practitioner"]

I wonder how many readers made a comparison between two recent educational happenings? The first of these was the levelling of a charge of disloyalty against teachers who presented reports dealing with alleged deficiencies in one side-line of our system, the district high schools. The second, which staggered ordinary' wage-earners, was the spectacle of university teachers (who were offered salary rises totalling over £380,000, Including a lift of £5OO for some toprank professors) protesting with great vigour that these rises were insufficient. Now which of these two groups was the more deserving of condemnation—the secondary teachers who wanted improved conditions to enable them to teach their pupils more effectively, or the university people who wanted not just more money for doing the same Job as before but a lot more money? Mow often in recent years have teachers, who work at

the primary or secondary levels, been told that teaching is a vocation, that noone should take the job on just for the money? Recent outpourings from spokesmen for university teachers show that they have no faith whatever in this vocation idea. What they want is money and plenty of it, and what’s more, many of them are quite willing to leave their New Zealand university jobs and their struggling students at the drop of a hat and travel the world to get it Let some overseas university but offer a high-sounding salary (be it in roubles, pesos, cowrieshells, plug-tobacco or yen) and these devoted educators will out with their slide-rules to figure whether a shift will be worth while. Thank goodness not all lecturers and professors are so tourist-minded as to join in the chorus of “Money-up or wel’ll pack-up,” but far too many are. Is it not odd that members of Parliament, who will willingly accuse workers on or ifr

near the basic wage of “holding the country to ransom” when they firmly demand more, are never heard to accuse our university teachers of doing the same thing? Surely, for all our sakes, there must be some Government spokesman who, seeing the greed that so often underlies the multiple degrees and colourful trappings, is game enough to say: “Now, look here gentlemen: this is a small country and not a very wealthy one. Bearing in mind the needs of other levels of education, these are the highest salaries that we can afford to pay you. If you feel that they are not high enough to recompense you for the average weekly hours that you work and decide to go elsewhere to a higher bidder, go if you must There are capable local non-university men who will gladly do your job for what we are paying you now.” If some daring soul did aay that, would our country, in the long run, be so very much worse off?