NEEDS OF UNIVERSITY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20162, 24 January 1929, Page 14

NEEDS OF UNIVERSITY.

MONEY FOR SCHOLARSHIPS.

STATE STRONGLY CRITICISED

CURTAILMENT OF RESOURCES

[by telegraph.—own correspondent.] DUNEDIN. Wednesday

"We shall before long be on the verge of bankruptcy and have to go hat in hand to the Government to plead for help, and it will bo able (o impose whatsoever conditions it pleases in response," said (lie chancellor. Professor J. Macmill,in Brown, at the opening of.(ho meeting of (lie New Zealand University Council (o-dav.

"Home of us," saict Professor Macmillan Brown, "who have for from a generation to half a century backed up our successive treasurers in their policy of laying past our annual surplus from our fees and subsidy to accumulate as a fund for scholarships, have had the shock of our lives in seeing tho Ministry remove our fixed annual subsidy instead of increasing it. Finding £32,000 in our balance-sheet as our bank credit they assumed we were rolling in wealth. They have socialised that slowly accumulated scholarship fund at tho very moment that wo were beginning to need it most.

"Encouraging Extravagance." "They have failed to see that the moral drawn from this action is that thrift is a fault, if not a vice, in public bodies; they must spend every year all their revenue lest some government that has need to economise should cast i(s eye upon their accumulation for future needs and 'convey it. 'l'his will be fatal to all budgeting and care for emergencies to arise. It. will develop in local bodies a habit of lavish extravagance — a habit that no government professes (o encourage.

"If (here is any one capacity that especially recommends a candidate to an electorate of a local hodv it is financial talent. Should (lie lesson taught by the treatment accorded to tho management of the university in keeping a financial eye upon the future strike home throughout the country, this qualification will be ruled out. "And this curtailment of our funds lias come at a mosl inopportune moment in the history of our university. Tho students have increased from hundreds into thousands, and tho need of more scholarships is becoming moro clamant every year, not so much entrance scholarships, but undergraduate scholarships, and most of all post-graduate scholarships and fellowships. The Need for Talent, "One of the main purposes of a university is to draw out t.'ie talent of a country and prepare it for research and the development of its resources; and we are just on the eve of an era in the history of New Zealand that will need all the talent it can produce. Small though the country is and far from the great markets and centres of civilisation; handicapped as it is, its products will have to compete with those great countries that far surpass it in financial resources, in size of population, and in cheapness of labour. If there is one thing above all others that could make up for these handicaps it is talent, especially tho talent for research.

"How to cheapen production without cheapening labour is the problem before our country; and this can be solved by nothing else than discovery and invention. We can hold our place in the markets and among the nations of the world only by lowering the cost of what we produce without lowering the standard of living; and this can be done only by research into the methods, conditions, and processes of production. Youths Who Go Abroad. "We have, like all young and pioneernig countries, thews and sinews enough to do all the manual labour that is needed, but that we have as much potentiality of talent as other countries, if not more, is proved by the number of our youths uno have gone abroad and not only made good, but risen to the highest positions in the spheres they have entered. What is wanted is some means of eliciting and cultivating this potentiality. And (Ins means lies ready to our hands in our university and ils colleges.

"The main attractions to stimulate a contest of talents in a university are scholarships and fellowships, which enable the successful to pursue, their career of study or research unhampered by visions of poverty. Without ample funds to endow these a university is impotent as 1 lie developer of the talent of a country. And in a young community like ours there lias not been time ot opportunity to accumulate such fortunes ns lead in the old country and the United Stales to generous benefactions.

Dependence on State. "We have to a large extent (0 depend on the State. But it is the State that has, at this crisis, instead of amplifying our resources for drawing out this so greatly needed means of solving our urgent problems, disastrously curtailed them. The State has thus failed lamentably, through a fit of economy, in realising what the situation demanded and what the interests of the immediate future of our country made essential. And still worse, this mutilation of our finances introduces what all advanced educationists deplore as one of the greatest disasters to the education of a country—State interference with the liberty of a university. I must say this is the first occasion in New Zealand on which we feel we have to be on the alert against such a danger, "It is apparent that there is a manifest danger of the university losing all its liberty of action and ultimately becoming absorbed by the Education Department.. Thereafter, if would be at the mpicy ol every change in politics, and few or none would care to serve 011 its governing body. That this is no imaginary fear is shown bv the general drift during the past few vears toward centralisat ion.

"Them is another tendency on (lie part ol t lie Government, flial has to be protested against as full of evil for ihe future; it is in ealeulat ing .subsidies to educational institutions to lessen them, by as much us the proceeds coining or about to come fiom legacies left to them. All those measures arc of a piece: and it is time to call a halt 01 this downward path. 'I he only position that could i ust ify this not merely niggardly but, destructive spirit wouid be the bankruptcy of the State."

FOUR SEPARATE BODIES

BEST FOR COUNTRY'S FUTURE '

(IIY TELEGRAPH. —OWN COHRESI'ONDKN I | DUNEDIN, Wednesday

"It is greatly to the advantage of the future of New Zealand that it has not one but four great teaching bodies of university standard," said the chancel lor, Professor J. Macmillan Brown, at the meeting of the University Council to-day. "I confess that when i joined the University Commission 50 years ago I was strongly in favour of a great central teaching university and 1 was reluctantly forced by the evidence in the various centres to abandon tin idea and consent to four colleges, with one degree-granting centre. I am now that it. was the best for the development of our country.