ENGINEERING SCHOOLS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21108, 16 February 1932, Page 8

ENGINEERING SCHOOLS.

It is now evident, from the published report of the committee reporting adversely on the request for recognition of the Auckland School of Engineering as an institution qualified to carry students to their final professional examination for the university degree, that the real objection is to "the existence of two schools of engineering in this small Dominion." The rest of the report is obviously motived by that consideration, and much of its argument is either trivial or misleading. All too curtly the undoubted hardship suffered by Auckland students is dismissed, although the committee's own statements show that by "Auckland students" is meant a larger group than those actually belonging to this city. What is said about the worldwide reputation of the Canterbury school is to be discounted by the fact that students trained solely in the Auckland school have been able to pass with distinction the examinations requisite for the highest professional status in the Institutes of Engineering enioying equally wide reputation. This fact both signalises the eminent standard of the Auckland training and exposes the anomaly of denying northern students a right to the degree of their own university unless they 1 cave their college for a year at Christchurch. The committee's indictment of "a narrow view and one which might tend to be parochial"- makes very interest-

ing reading in the light o! fact. To deny the request on the ground of allegedly heavy expenditure entailed in purchase of additional apparatus, a costly building for its accommodation and expensive augmenting of staff, is to contradict the expert testimony of a commission that made complete investigation on the spotIt will be necessary to make this adverse report a subject of close scrutiny when the question is taken up again in the University Senate, and these arguments, with others used in it, call for careful weighing then ; but there cannot now be denied that the stand taken by the committee is based on a determination to have no school of engineering recognised for university purposes save the one at Christchurch.