UNIVERSITY REFORM

Evening Star, Issue 22559, 29 January 1937, Page 8

UNIVERSITY REFORM

The Minister most directly concerned (Hon. P. Fraser) has aspirations to remould the education system nearer to the heart’s desire. He has intimated that it is intended to use the report of the Atmore Parliamentary Committee, of which he was a member, as a starting point for reforms. The Senate of the University of New Zealand was asked, therefore, whether it was for or against the recommendations of the report affecting university education. There is no vagueness about the Senate’s reply. Of the first seven recommendations considered five are disapproved emphatically. Two further proposals, which provide that revenue from public educational endowments be investigated and the whole matter be dealt with on a national basis, were endorsed with an expression of opinion that the university colleges should be adequately endowed. No other recommendation of the committee was completely endorsed. The opinions are symptomatic of the difficulties the Minister is likely to meet when the farreaching proposals of the committee for changes in organisation are considered by other authorities. Not all of the objections will b© necessarily of the same validity. It was the weakest part of the Atmore Committee’s report which dealt with university reform. Its main proposal was that the University of New Zealand should be disestablished and two universities, one in each island, created, embracing university, agricultural and training colleges, and research institutions. It is hard to discern why this recommendation should have been agreed on except that for years there has been intermittent talk, by some representatives of those northern interests who are never satisfied with their apportionment of special schools, of the desirableness of converting present university colleges into four independent universities. The time when that will be a natural development in such a small country as New Zealand obviously is far off. The Reichel-Tate commission of 1925, which considered the position with the best advantages of expert knowledge, did

not hesitate in rejecting the plan. The Atmoro Committee suggested the two universities as a halfway proposal, for which the smallest amount of evidence was advanced before it. There are not many students, presumably, who would not prefer a degree of the University of New Zealand to one of the University of the South (or North) Island. A plan that would be at once an incentive to the expensive duplication of every special school should he ruled out by that disadvantage. A recommendation that there should be a uniform scale of staffing and salaries for all university institutions, and that all salaries of teaching staffs should be paid by the Government direct, was opposed by the Senate for the sufficient reason that it would bring the university too much under Government control. The essence of a university, outside of Germany and such countries, is autonomy in the control of its internal working. The most drastic criticism, in a few words, of our provision for the highest education was expressed by an expert who described four colleges “ overworked, over-crowded, overlectured, and over-examined; understaffed, underpaid, and underequipped.” Those are all defects that can be put right with the Government’s help, irrespective of the extreme recommendations dealing with organisation in the largest sense of the Atmore Committee’s report.