University “Waste” Of Research Funds

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32303, 22 May 1970, Page 24

University “Waste” Of Research Funds

(New Zealand Press Association)

AUCKLAND, May 21.

A sizeable section of the universities is wasting the taxpayers’ money, according to Professor A. L. Titchener, professor of chemical and materials engineering at the University of Auckland.

Professor Titchener told a seminar of the Association of University Teachers at Auckland University today that only a minority of research fields in the universities were chosen with an eye for the national interest.

They still reflected the enthusiasm of individual university staff, and there was not much real co-ordination of effort, whether between university, industry, or Government or between one university and another, or be-

tween one department and another within a single university, he said. “The Government of the day is not providing X million dollars a year for university staff to follow their own scholastic whims,” he said. Professor Titchener said universities must take account of the national requirements for trained people. “If they default in this, they cannot, and in my view, do not deserve the massive support the State has recently accorded them,” he said. Universities were not wholly to blame, as there

could be hardly any doubt that Government departments had been antipathetic to university research in the past. A range of degree structures solidly grounded in arts and science but with clear vocational ends was overdue.

He thought that large numbers of students as well as employers would welcome such a change, and that this would combine the activities of arts and science departments with those of the professional schools. Professor Titchener said professional schools within the universities—medicine, law, architecture, engineering and dentistry—already responded to the express needs of professional groups outside the universities. As a footnote to his address, Professor Titchener remarked: “Internally, universities talk a great deal about freedom, but they do not often come out strongly for it in public—especially if it means taking an unpopular stand.

“But universities have rarely been centres of political dissent, and in New Zealand almost never. Besides, Mr Gair (the Under-Secretary of Education) is watching us. And Mr Gair has said the money can be cut off.” 1