Massey’s quiet success

Press, 11 January 1986, Page 18

Massey’s quiet success

Campus Beyond the Walls. By J. M. R. Gwons. Dunmore Press, 1985. 133 pp. 31Z95. (Reviewed by Eric Beardsley) About one New Zealander in every 330 was Last year an extra-mural student of Massey University, Palmerston North. One in every 33 has been an extra-mural student in the last 25 years. The figures make it clear that, proportionately, Massey's extra-mural classes constitute a far bigger enterprise than the oft-publicised Open University in Britain. Quietly and industriously, more than 10,000 men and women, 57 per cent of them between 25 and 39, have spent the year studying far from the campus while continuing their careers and ordinary family lives. Many gained career qualifications, and others enjoyed the adventure of learning and the satisfaction that comes from extending energies to meet goals that once seemed impossible. Massey’s extra-mural activity has gone largely unsung, but Dr Owens has ensured that New Zealand’s major second chance higher education institution becomes more widely known. It is, a modest book which sketches in the brief history of CUES — the Centre for Extra-Mural Studies — and which demonstrates once again that in New Zealand events rather than ideas tend to make the shape of things to come. Massey was originally . an agricultural college, like Lincoln, but Palmerston North had ambitions for it. In Wellington, Victoria University

College was deeply* suspicious. But a combination of events solved . .the problem. Palmerston North became a marginal electorate and at the appropriate moment the incumbent was Minister of Education. Parochial pressure — and an empty building — tipped the balance, even though the old University of New Zealand and its academic backwoodsmen insisted that extramural study was academically unsound, a sentiment echoed by the influential Hughes Parry report of 1960. But the success of the enterprise settled many doubts. Distance education was not necessarily the poor relation of academia. In any event, the extra-mural centre was seen as a distinct asset when Massey sought full university status. There could scarcely have been a university without an arts faculty; and the only arts students were those in far-flung places. What distinguishes Massey today is not so much the spread of its courses and the enthusiasm and skills of its teachers, but the way students rather than the administration accept the responsibility of maintaining their own support system — a network germinated by student needs, not by institutional seeds. Twenty-five years is not long in the life of an institution, but Dr Owens, an historian and one of the original staff, was an obvious and happy choice to record them. The story is nicely complemented by Dr C. E. Beeby’s foreword.