INTELLECTUAL LEADERSHIP

Evening Star, Issue 25173, 12 May 1944, Page 2

INTELLECTUAL LEADERSHIP

ROLE &F UNIVERSITY GRADUATE PLAGE IN CHANGING SOCIAL SYSTEM The functions of the university graduate in the modern community were discussed by Br J. N. Findiay, professor of philosophy at the. University of Otago, in his oration to gradu-. ates at the annual graduation ceremony held this afternoon in the_ Town Hall. He referred to current misconceptions of universities as " useless and expensive monuments to national pride," comparable to the parlours and l lace curtains of a former generation, and university graduates as frivolous and dangerous. It was his contention, howthat the university was what he described as an essential organ of the body politic, without which none of its functions could be properly performed. " The community," he said, " is extraordinarily misguided or short-sighted if it fails to make the fullest possible use of university graduates." Dealing with the various fields in which the university graduate might be used, Dr Findiay said that in politics and public administration the graduate was necessary and irreplaceable. It was not necessary to be a blind admirer of the policies of England to recognise that the public services there were extraordinarily efficient, and this superiority was because of the fact that the members of these services were so _ preponderantly university men. If little use we made of this type of man there might be expected a public service that was sluggish and timid in major issues and passionately meticulous in minor ones, where everyone was concerned with " passing the buck" of responsibility, and where stalemate and administrative deadlock were the order of the day. The same thing applied to the sphere of legislation, where the best brains could be used in hammering out our laws. COMPLEXITIES OF COMMERCE. Referring to the employment of academic graduates in education, Dr Findlay pointed to the limited quota for the special one-year course in Training Colleges in New Zealand, and said that brilliant students were sometimes excluded from this quota. He thought that undue stress was laid on teaching subjects in the preparation for secondary education, and emphasised that it was necessary to use the best university intelligences when one was embarking, on new and hazardous experiments in education which might, in the wrong hands, lead to a plague of ignorance quite as formidable as gorse or rabbits. The functions of university graduates in the professions and in business were also discussed by Dr Findiay, who 6aid that business had always been a scientific affair, and this was doubly so now that the whole basis of our commercial life was altering. The business man had to adjust himself to a situation of maddening com. plexity, in which controls were everywhere increasing, restrictions growing, and profits diminishing. In such complex situations, he asserted, the academic intellectual was thoroughly at home. PRESERVATION OF INTELLECTUALS.

Any leaning towards anti-intellec-tualism was described by Dr Findiay as a menace which it was the duty of university men to connlbat. The speaker agreed with Cardinal Newman that " the Lord had not chosen to save his people by dialectic," but the cardinal also held that their salvation was not possible without some use of dialectic. Dr Findiay illustrated the value of a training in notions by referring to the election catch-cry after the last war of " making Germany pay." The absurdity of this idea was reflected by the attitude of those who raised it in that they were not really willing to receive or buy the goods and services of Germany which were the only ways for that country's possible payment. These nonsensical demands became the centre of a series of grievances by which Hitler ultimately climbed to power. If the statesmen at the peace conference had only heeded the academic intellectual, Professor J. M. Keynes, people would not now be fighting and dying. Petain and von Hindenburg were cited by Dr Findiay as examples of highly patriotic men who ruined their countries because they neither thought nor Telied on thinkers. The academic intellectual - should be a jealous guardian of his own integrity, and not the mouthpiece of a " gang," but he should also be constantly doing everything in his power to prevent the world from ruining itself. ?