UNIVERSITY DEGREE DAYS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9142, 25 August 1888, Page 3

UNIVERSITY DEGREE DAYS.

TO THE EDITOR. Sib, —An idea seems to prevail in Auckland (and your sub-leader of to-day will tend to confirm it), that the rowdyism of students and others at the Choral Hall yesterday is an imitation of traditional usage at Oxford and Cambridge. I leave Cambridge men to speak for themselves, and shall try. to show that the proceedings at Oxford are of a far different nature. The i£uca±nia at Oxford takes place during Commemoration week, at the end of the summer term, when the city is full of visitors; and is a meeting of the University held for the hearing of the prize compositions, for the commemoration of benefactors in a Latin speech by the Public Orator, and for the conferring of honorary degrees on distinguished men. At this ceremony the large gallery which crowns the theatre is filled with undergraduates and their lady friends, and half-a-dozen tutors are told off, who are responsible for order. The official proceedings begin at noon, but at eleven o'clock the doors are opened, and the gallery is at once filled with the junior members of the University and ladies, the floor being reserved for graduates, who go there to enjoy the fan. The hour before noon is whiled away with selections on the organ, the intervals being devoted to good-humoured criticism of the leading men in Parliament and the University (dons and athletes), and comments on the remarkable events of the year* At noon the procession enters, and then a complete change at once takes place in the behaviour of everybody. One of the professors introduces each recipient of an honorary degree to the Vice-Chancellor, dwelling on his merits in a Latin speech, and the degree is conferred with the placet of the Domini Doctors and the plaudits of the undergraduates, who are not slow to show their high appreciation of real worth—an appreciation which not infrequently takes a humorous form, especially in the case ef a well-known hero or statesman. These proceedings are conducted with the utmost decorum. At the Euc&nia of 1881, an undergraduate attempted to interrupt the vice-chancellor's introductory remarks, and was promptly put out, to the evident satisfaction of all assembled, and that foolish young man was, I understand, rusticated for a term. The Latin orations of the public orator are invariably listened to with such attention that his references to the great men and events of the year evoke enthusiastic applause, and on his retiring he receives an ovation which shows that his excellent Latin has been appreciated by all who can follow him, and patiently endured by those who cannot. The reading of the prize composition is the part of the ceremony which most of all appeals to the sympathies of the junior members of the University; and I should be very sorry for the man who ventured to make a remark during the reading of the Newdigate (English poem), or even the Greek verse. I have been at several Encaenia, and I have never yet heard anything tolerated for one moment that was ungentle manly or derogatory to the dignity of such a venerable body as the University of Oxford. Now ; looking at yesterday's rowdy hoodlumism, it is to me a thing to be astonished at, on the one hand that a number of young men should so little appreciate the benefits which the University of New Zealand places within the reach of all, as to bring its only public function into utter contempt, and on the other hand that the authorities of the College should for a moment suffer its proceedings to be disturbed by a. few students (of whom they ought certainly to make an example) and small boys, wno deserve to be well whipped. I cannot conceive it possible at any English University meeting that the remarks of the chairman should be throughout rendered inaudible by the accompaniment of an alarm clock, a flute, and tambourine, to say nothing of showers of peas, or that a leading citizen should, after twice appealing to the better feelings or his audience, be after all refused a hearing. If the students of Auckland College have in the past thought that they by such conduct have been imitating Oxford undergraduates, I hope that these few remarks will help to disabuse their minds of so erroneous a notion. —I am, &c., Auckland, August 24, 1888. -T. W. Tiass. ,