DEGREES FOR WOMEN.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18387, 1 May 1923, Page 9

DEGREES FOR WOMEN.

CAMBRIDGE GIVES WAY.

•CONTROVERSY NOT OVER.

FULL MEMBERSHIP WANTED [from our own correspondent.] ■LONDON. March S. On several occasions in the last few years there has been commotion at Cambridge over the ambitions of the women students. Benighted graduates from all parts of the country have made their way to Cambridge to register their votes against the reforms which students of Girton and Newnham have desired in order to put them on a footing with Oxford and other enlightened universities. / No w it appears that the members of the University Senate have been brooding .over their past obstinacy, and, having come to the conclusion that they must sooner or later give in. to the demands of the women students, have made a virtue of necessity. It is quietly and unostentatiously announced that the chief concession the. women have been struggling' for is to be granted. Without opposition an ordinance has been passed by the Senate granting titular degrees That a woman who has passed the university examinations had no right to call herself a B.A. of Cambridge has been a serious educational drawback. Women who applied for scholastic positions frequently found that graduates of other universities were preferred because their names, with the appropriate letters after them, could be mentioned after the names of teachers in prospectuses sent to parents. Now the duly qualified woman student at Cambridge will be able to describe herself as B.A. or B.Sc. Also tho senate has conceded the right of women to, attend research courses, to take research degrees, to work for doctors' degrees, and to wear the same academic dress •as that worn by male students. Women have not been given a voice in the control of the university, and although some ardent supporters of higher education for women ore anxious to become members of the Senate, the greater number of women are satisfied with the decision, which removes the most serious of their grievances. In spite of these concessions it j,s evident from a letter to The Times to-day from the Principals of Newnham and Girton Colleges that the battle for real equality will be continued sooner, or later. These two ladies, although they acknowledge the value of the privileges now granted, maintain that it is still true that Cambridge, in the words of the Royal Commission, is " the only university in the country where neither women students nor women teachers, have the status of membership of the university, and where the teachers, however well qualified, are not eligible for posts or offices in the university, and are excluded from all share in discussion on the organisation of teaching." " The women are still outside the university," the letter continues, " and a woman with the title of a degree will not be a graduate of the university. At the end of the discussion on these ordinances in the Senate House on February 22, the Vice-Master of Trinity said that ' he felt bound at that last moment to repeat the statement . . ■■'. that on their side they could not accept either the statute or the ordinances as in any sense a settlement of the question.' "