OXFORD UNIVERSITY APPEAL

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 174, 20 April 1937, Page 10

OXFORD UNIVERSITY APPEAL

Funds for Research BODLEIAN LIBRARY TO BE EXTENDED Breaking eight-centuries-old traditions. for the first time in history, the great English University of Oxford has launched a public appeal for money. Recently Lord Halifax. Chancellor ot the University, announced that Oxford must either find endowments for advanced study and research on a scale in keeping with its high position among the world’s universities, or lose that position. Past students of Oxford, both here in Wellington and in every quarter of the globe, have received copies of the appeal, setting forth exactly what the needs of Oxford are. Oxford has always been the home of aesthetic culture, the humanities and the law. while the practical studies, science and medicine, have been left to Cambridge. But this is to be so no more. Lord Nuffield has given £2,000,000 to endow an institute of medical research. Because he realised that this gift would lack its full effect if kindred branches of research lagged behind, he gave another £lOO.OOO to start the appeal fund. His name will be written with those of Bodley and Ashmole among the benefactors of the University, yet even these magnificent gifts are not sufficient to solve Oxford’s difficulties. Capital is required sufficient to provide an income of at least £15,000 as an endowment for research, as well as a further £250.000 for expenditure on new buildings. The Bodleian, Britain’s national library, as well as that of the. University has outgrown its available space. When in 1602 Sir Thomas Bodley founded it, he obtained from the Stationers’ Company a concession which, extended in scope, provides for a copy of every work published in Britain to be filed there. Ini consequence, the Bodleian is “choked with the superabundance of its own possessions,” as Lord Halifax phrases it. More than a million pounds are to be spent on its expansion, half that sum having been presented by the Rockefeller Institute. There is t obe erected in Broad Street a great modern building, of which the straight, severe and simple lines will contrast strangely with the elaborate carved gargoyles and statues, towers and fountains of the City of Dreaming Spires. The Ashmolean Museum of Archaeology, if extended, would be the finest institute of its kind in the world; but with extension of the buildings and the collection must come also an endowment sufficient to enable expeditions to be sent out for field work, in which the University has always taken a lead. In addition to these needs, the University appeals for extensive endowments for laboratories for physics, chemistry, botany and geology, and, of course, the maintenance, equipment and staffing of these laboratories. No doubt all this appears a very ambitious and unattainable scheme: but it must be recalled that Oxford’s sons and daughters are very numerous, scattered throughout Hie world, in every walk of life. There is no more cosmopolitan seat of learning; Oxford is more than English, it is international. There is a native Fijian chief at Lakemba, an Indian maharajah at Indore, a Scandinavian prince in Norway, a Zulu king in Southern Rhodesia, a Labour member of Parliamet in Wellington, able to claim the distinction of being “an Oxford man.” All alike owe a debt of gratitude to the city where they spent their youth, for, whatever the world may have held for them since, all alike look back on their undergraduate days as the best days of their lives.