THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 1925. UNIVERSITY REFORM.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 19119, 10 September 1925, Page 8

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 1925. UNIVERSITY REFORM.

The report of the Royal Commission on University Education will not satisfy everybody. Reports of commissions seldom do. There are signs in the report of a wish to dull the edge of antagonisms—indeed, the commissioners frankly admit a desire to minimise the operation of provincial strife, and this wish seems to have prompted the recommendation of compromises between conflicting opinions advanced in evidence on some matters. Realising the intent that their finding should be the basis of practical reform, wherever desirable and possible, the commissioners have sought to enlist the co-operation of disputants. If, after their very -painstaking and judicial effort to elicit facts and weigh evidence, their recommendations are accepted by the powers that be, there should be an assuaging of conflict.' There has been criticism from many angles, both inside and outside the university, and the commissioners have wholeheartedly joined the critics. The demand for overhaul has been justified in their eyes. •• It-will be well if the tinkering 'that has gone on in recent years be displaced by a united effort to give the main proposals of the report a fair trial. A distinct gain will accrue if its chief plea be heeded—that a university is not an institution that students attend "merely to! secure degrees which have definite occupational values." That fundamental error has been pitifully ' prevalent. Its trail is over much of the controversy that occasioned the commission. However popular, it is radically false, and the removal of a defective system which has contributed to its prevalence may do something to destroy it. e Condemning the existing system—a university that is only an examining and degree-granting body, with affiliated teaching colleges—the commissioners see no solution in abolishing the university and setting up four local universities in its stead. The - Dominion's population is too small for that. This decision will commend itself to all but those parochially ambitious and clamorous for local prestige.' The ''reformed federal system" now recommended —one university still, with four centres wherein js exercised some freedom of teaching and examining —seems practicable. Reference to the University of Wales suggests the proposal's practicability. Until 1920, that university had no teaching staff, the teaching being done by the constituent colleges under conditions and courses of study prescribed by the university, which also conducted the examinations. ,A reform instituted in that year gave to. the colleges the determination of the courses of study and the conducting of examinations in the lower-grade degrees. The university prescribes the general conditions for the initial degrees, conducts their final examinations, and retains full direction of work for the higher degrees. This system leaves a considerable measure of local autonomy and avoids a common rigid syllabus and its attendant stereotyping of teaching, while preserving the organic unity of the university. Upon the suggested Council and Academic Board —the name "Senate" might better have been retained for the former newly-constituted governing body—the detailed direction-, of a new departure akin to the Welsh system must depend mainly for its success; but the commission's recommendations are sufficiently explicit and full to facilitate the reorganisation. The proposal is not novel. It is not untried elsewhere. It accords in the main with the recommendations of a similar commission in 1879. Some folk may not bo ready or willing to adjust their viewpoint afresh after their experience of the old order. This is certainly in the project's favour—it is calculated to vitalise teaching, without encouraging a go-as-you-please license likely to degenerate into chaos. s The commissioners have indicated serious weaknesses in the present system—its treating of the parttime student as the normal undergraduate, the very unsatisfactory methods prevalent in the law course,- the slender attention given to research, the inadequacy #of co-operation with the training colleges for teachers, and the need for closer association with the secondary schools. Their detailed proposals for amendment will' be greeted with eager interest, by the public as well as by those most intimately affected. The report's disapproval of any, immediate attempt to introduce accrediting, in place of matriculation, should give salutary discouragement to those reformers who have limited their out-

look to the secondary schools... The changes suggested in the matriculation test will provide the separate school-leaving certificate long thought to be desirable, while tending to raise both the age and the standard of university entrants. This instance of compromise seems a reasonable way out of a state of affairs that has invited much criticism, on the ground of its futile attempt to make one examination serve two very different ends. With another compromise, that on special schools, less satisfaction must be expressed. The commissioners seem to have been excessively impressed with the difficulty of going back on some things that have been badly done. The acknowledgment of Auckland's reasonable claim for recognition in engineering, at least for the first and second professional examinations, is welcome. As to medicine, it is evident, reading between the lines, that had the special school not secured so firm a financial footing in Dimedin its continuance there in solitary privilege would not have been lightly taken for granted. The. suggested multiplication of bursaries, as a compensating measure of justice, is itself an implicit admission of the regional needs that are frankly acknowledged in the proposed modifications in facilities for medical study, as well as in engineering, apart from the southern colleges. To be adequate, it must be said, these bursaries will have, to be substantial. The idea of a central school of agriculture in the. North Island, planned on a scale to meet the wide and urgent, need, should be weighed well. Everything will depend upon its being more than a makeshift. It should be generously equipped in every way, ,lse it will be unacceptable as a substitute for two separate colleges of the kind in Auckland and Wellington. At all costs, this is an issue that the Dominion cannot afford to treat as merely one for cheap compromise between local loyalties.