BACK TO SCOTLAND

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 10, 13 January 1932, Page 8

BACK TO SCOTLAND

Not all the roads lead to Scotland, but certainly some of them do. Professor J. Macmillan Brown, addressing, as Chancellor, the University Senate at Diinedin, paid ? tribute to the memory of the late I Professor' Shand, a Scot, and an Aberdeen Scot at that. Under the treasurership of Professor Shand, who had been "Professor of Mathematics in a Scotch Community," the New Zealand University learned to abhor a vacuum in the till. As a result of Scottish mathematics and physics, there arose "that liquid balance of £70,000, which Professor Shand and his successors had squeezed out of the fees and the siibsidy, to be a scholarship fund in times of need." A: depression-smitten Government "looked enviously" at the money, but some : special providence intervened and protected Pro fessor Shand's providence—which is truly wonderful when one remembers how many funds have beeri raided by cash-hungry Governments right down from the time when Mr. Winston Churchill in this way created his reputation as a Chancellor of the Exchequer. Evidently, all Chancellors are not alike, for the Chancellor of the New Zealand University delivers a round rebuke to borrowing and extols thrift. In the depression he sees "a new tuition in thrift" and in waravoidance—a tuition which (alas) will be destroyed by the return of prosperity (but not just yet!). There lurks a coronach in the sigh "We have no longer that capable and forethinking Aberdoniah." But we still have a Scotland,. Prpfcssotr Brown claims, to demonstrate that, in education* examinations are superior to "patronage" and to "its feeble shadow," the accrediting system.