BAN AS EXAMINER

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 22193, 21 August 1935, Page 14

BAN AS EXAMINER

PROFESSOR M. WALKER CRITICISM OF SENATE CHANGE IN ATTITUDE URGED The cause of Professor Maxwell Walker, of Auckland University College, who has been disqualified by the New Zealand University Senate from examining in the university entrance examination, was championed yesterday in an interview by Professor W. Anderson, who said he spoke for a number of his colleagues on the college staff. "As a member of the Academic Board and one who has followed its discussions of the entrance standard for the past 11 years," said Professor Anderson, "1 feel that the thanks of all teachers and friends of university autonomy and the purity arid impartiality of a universitv's services to the public are due to Professor Walker for bringing this matter into the open. It is particularly to his credit that he should have chosen a path which usually invites the maximum of personal annoyance and aspersions from the unthinking and uninformed. "Professor Walker's record for many years has been one of consistent advocacy of the maintenance of standards in his subject which shall be what the university gives them out to be, namely, the standards required for entrance on university studies. His practice as examiner has been to mark papers according to his conception of entrance requirements, and to leave no question that the responsibility for any relaxation of that standard must rest wholly on the shoulders of the administrative authorities of the university. Trial Without Citation "The facts revealed by Professor Walker's memorandum are disquieting in what they suggest as to the existing state of affairs in the higher direction of the university. The authorities do not appear to be alive to the dangers of interfering with the few men who arc strong enough to take a definite stand for higher academic ideals.

'"The handling of the case at its various stages by the university authorities bears a painfully close resemblance to the familiar methods by which a bureaucracy suppresses disinterested criticism and discredits its critics. The refusal of information, the unexplained marking of documents as 'confidential,' the acting upon secret reports without citation of the accused—all these have a place in the record. As a culmination we have a preposterous situation. Professor Walker asks for an impartial scrutiny bv teachers of the subject in schools and the English examiners of the scripts marked by him. In this request he is supported by a resolution of the highest authority in the university on its academic side—the Academic Board. "When the resolution is transmitted to the senate, the sole action taken upon it by that body is to remove Professor Walker from the panel without hearing him in his own defence, thus gratuitously administering a slap in the face to its advisory board. Tine Record as Teacher "If it is any part of the ideal of academic freedom that a university should base its standards and award's of academic standing on purely intellectual considerations, that a ' university should be master in its own house and that its servants should be untrammelled in the exercise of their functions, the adherents of that ideal must unite in demanding a drastic change of attitude on the part of the senate in its conduct of this case. "The following record of Professor Walker's department of modern languages should be known. It has the record of nine senior scholarships in French in the successive years 1926-34, and 11 in the last 12 years, 1923-34. It will be seen that Professor Walker's students have gained senior scholarships to the almost complete exclusion of the other three colleges. Such a record has never been known before in the university history of the Dominion. A ereater testimony to any teacher could not be desired."