Academic Curb Only

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31124, 29 July 1966, Page 14

Academic Curb Only

Professor N. C. Phillips, the new ViceChancellor of Canterbury University, said yesterday he would not like to see the number of university students restricted on economic grounds.

“If a decision is made to restrict numbers,” he said, “it should be made on good academic grounds, and at the moment I don’t see that they exist. “You must bear in mind the different backgrounds of students and the practical impossibility of predicting their performance at the university.

“We are not in the American situation where the good universities can take all the best students in the knowledge that there are many other universities which can take the rest. “Nor are we in the British situation where universities are highly selective and can afford to be because they know there is a panoply of other organisations not necessarily universities but of

high standards—which can take the rest.” Professor Phillips said there was no optimum size for a university, and it was not possible to say how large the University of Canterbury would get on its site at Ham. The size of the site—more than 160 acres—was not a limiting factor because space could be used in a variety of ways. The real limiting factor was the availability of good teachers. Professor Phillips said the opening of the new science buildings by the GovernorGeneral (Sir Bernard Fergusson) would be a milestone in the development of the university and a good time to take stock.

Canterbury University was now half-way through its move from the city to the Ham site. There were now about 2800 students at the city site and 2100 at Ham. All the science and engineering students were at Ham now, and also some who were taking psychology, geography and philosophy for science degrees. More than half the full-time academic staff had left the city site and 98 per cent of the

technical staff. The administrative staff were predominantly at the city site and so were the Industrial Development Department and the Department of Extension Studies.

Professor Phillips said that of the university’s 5534 students and employees, 43.5 per cent had moved to Ham and 56.5 per cent were still at the city site. Now that such a large proportion had moved, the departments left on the central site, which had been holding breath for years, had been able to breathe out temporarily. There had been a general expansion and a reshuffle to occupy the space previously occupied by the scientists.

But the relief of pressure on the departments remaining was only temporary. The number of students still at the city site was now larger than when the whole university was there in 1958 (2800, compared with 2614). If the university had not completed its move to Ham by 1971, the number of students at the city site would have grown to something between 3200 and 3800.