1st-Year Students Given Advice

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30998, 2 March 1966, Page 13

1st-Year Students Given Advice

The art of teaching was the opposite of the art of wooing. Professor J. Vaughan, senior professor of chemistry at Canterbury University, told first-year students at the official welcome to them.

Professor Vaughan said the art of wooing had been described as the art of making oneself indispensable to one’s mistress. The art of teaching, on the other hand, was the art of making students independent of their teacher.

“In no small part you are responsible for your own education,” he told the students. As they passed through the university the calls on their initiative would increase, and when they left they should have an increased ability to distinguish between points of view and arrive at their own conclusions.

Professor Vaughan said the students would find that only a proportion of their time was required for lectures and laboratory work, and they would be expected to do something instructive with the rest of their time.

“The way you use it will determine your success in this society of essentially free individuals,” he said. He urged them to devote to their university studies the 44 hours a week that they would be

expected to give to a paid job in the city. The need to work was one of the facts of academic life that many students failed to face. Professor Vaughan said there was a proper awareness of isolation in New Zealand and of the dangers Inherent in it. There was also a inordinate tendency to comment on the country, its customs and its failings. Share Of Criticism

The university came in for its share of criticism, sometimes fair and informed criticism, sometimes not. Professor Vaughan said university staff and students had to read these public criticisms because they were concerned, but he said students should reserve their own judgment while they got everything they could from the university.

He said he considered the University of Canterbury to be a good university. “I have no doubt,” he said, “that you will be able to take your Canterbury degrees anywhere in the world and to look graduates of other universities squarely in the eye." The Vice-Chancellor (Dr. L. L. Pownall) introduced Professor Vaughan and the deans of faculties to the 1500 students crowded into the university hall and spilling over into one of the lecture theatres, linked to the hall by a loudspeaker system. Dr. Pownall said the overcrowding was a reminder that the university was no longer a small one. The hall once accommodated the entire university, and now it would not hold even the first-vear students. There would e 4850 students enrolled this year, and 7000 were expected In the mid-19705.