Pause In University Reform Suggested

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31669, 3 May 1968, Page 15

Pause In University Reform Suggested

(From Our Own Reporter) WELLINGTON, May 2. The “ivory tower” image of the universities was being swept away and, as a dynamic technology showed the way to improved productivity and higher living standards, the universities were inevitably associated with the burgeoning professional* isms of societies where trained manpower might define new dimensions of self respect to a nation; but in New Zealand there was need for a pause to see the effects of recent university reforms.

Mr A. J. Danks, chairman of the New Zealand University Grants Committee, said this at the Victoria University graduation ceremony last evening.

“But even while I plead for this interval of stability, 1 hear the relentless mixed voices of reformers,” Mr Danks said. “Modify the university entrance system; divert activities into channels more relevant to the economy; block the brain drain; rationalise academic work and elose down small departments; consider your academic failures and whether they should not have been sent to other places. In one phrase, ‘Watch it'

“I am watching it along with many others," said Mr Danks. “Meanwhile the numbers of university entrants are going to march upward relentlessly. Whatever attitude we take to the universities, their functions, operations, and costs, all must be considered in the setting of growth and size. “Coping with numbers, when all has been said, remains the outstanding problem which we face," said Mr Danks. The British University Grants Committee recently wrote: “There is no doubt that it would be valuable if universities collectively made a further deliberate and determined effort to gear a larger part of their output to the economic and industrial needs of the nation for few things

could be more vital at the present time ...” This “awful directness,” perhaps making university costs more acceptable to taxpayers, could be described as “relevance.”

But, said Mr Danks, “there is likely to be some olfactory confusion because not everybody in the universities is likely to agree that all academic activities should dance to a tune piped by a community interested mainly in material progress.” Relevance also bad its inanities. What was relevant today might be a rubbish heap of outworn techniques tomorrow. “I would, myself, plead for a dynamic comprehensiveness,” said Mr Danks, “dynamic because each year’s situation is changing materially and comprehensiveness because universities should be big enough to nourish a rich and changing diversity of alms, attitudes and endeavours."

New Zealand universities in the last decade had made such massive changes that neither the universities nor the community could yet measure the results. Mr Danks listed:— Autonomy for each university to develop richness of diversity. The movement to full-time study now taken by 70 per cent of the student population and the fact that two-thirds of all entrants now had additional schooling after entrance qualification.

The introduction of equipment once considered expensive specialties but now commonplace necessities such as computers, mass spectrometers, and so on.

The remarkable development of post-graduate work. “What is chiefly needed is time to settle down a Uttlt said Mr Danks, “to consolidate, and to improve this brave new world. Important policy changes belong to the recent past and they must have time to express themselves in achievements."