Collegiate System At Ham Favoured

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30715, 2 April 1965, Page 9

Collegiate System At Ham Favoured

When the University of Canterbury holds forums this winter on optimum roll numbers it is certain that some sort of collegiate system will be considered, whatever figure is preferred. This idea was put forward a year ago by Professor N. C. Phillips, after a visit to Britain, as a means of managing student communities and also as a means of encouraging interfaculty activity.

“The size of universities and of university departments is the subject of dispute in England, as elsewhere, and the issue is likely to favour the large rather than the small,” Professor Phillips said. “I think the rational arguments are about evenly balanced but, as one who dislikes mere size, I fear

that the meretricious allurement of an imposing command will supply enough emotional impetus to carry the day. If size wins it will create two main problems.” Professor Phillips said he did not know (in this event) how to keep academic policy in genuinely academic hands “without wrecking the scholarship of senior staff members on the rock of administrative business.”

The human problem of how to make “the small-scale student feel at home in the large-scale world of a university of 10,000 or so” seemed, in principle, easier to solve. Fundamentally there must, everywhere, be some variant of the “Oxbridge” solution of breaking up the student population into more manageable communities with members from all faculties. One of the most interesting variants was in plans for the new universities of Essex and Kent. There halls of residence, rather than being

segregated, were built organically into the heart of the working university with teaching and study space and dining facilities for non-resi-dents as well as residents. “Our circumstances are different but this arrangement seems to me superior to having a number of halls built in relative isolation for the sole use of residents, together with a single huge students’ union. Sooner or later we shall have to think of establishing colleges (or whatever we may choose to call Constituent communities) and we may then find ourselves unable to provide them with homes. There is great scope for ingenuity in establishing a quasi-collegiate order,” said Professor Phillips.

“Is it too late to rethink the relationship of (1) halls of residence; (2) student union facilities; (3) the creation of all-faculty communities embracing all members of the university: resident and non-resident, full-time and part-time, graduate and undergraduate? Or is this unnecessary?” he asked. Professor Phillips also discussed course construction to give broader education.

When this report was received by the University Council a year ago it was greatly interested, asked that it be studied by the Professorial Board, and promised general discussion later. This has not come about.

Since then, the Canterbury Federation , of University Women’s report on students’ living conditions has suggested “notional colleges” in which students living apart would be joined. A collegiate scheme may still be workable at the university even though the new Students’ Union building has started and Christchurch College, Rochester Hall, and Rutherford Hall have been planned as church establishments.