SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18766, 20 January 1923, Page 10

SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING

INDIGNATION IN AUCKLAND. SENATE’S ACTION CONDEMNED. iFhom Och Own Correspondent.) AUCKLAND, January 19. Bpth papers wax indignant regarding the University Senate refusal to recognise the Auckland Engineering School. The Herald says; “By its vote the Senate has placed itself in a hopelessly indefensible position. Here is an engineering institution equipped and staffed sufficiently to prepare its students for the standard professional examinations conducted by British institutions. Its facilities are such that the Senate already recognises their efficiency for precisely the same examinations as avo prescribed in the B.E. (civil) full course, that is in. the course for the B.Sc. in architecture. Yet in order to maintain the exclusive privilege of the School of Engineering in the South Island the Senate denies recognition to the Auckland School. To object to recognition, as the Director of Education did, 911 the ground that this Auckland institution got its equipment for the purposes of a School of Manes and a School of Architecture ‘the wrong way' to got a sphool of engineering, is to reveal a lack of common sense and even of humour. The equipment was got with the approval of his department—a very large part of it while he was in office as assistant-director, but it matters little how it was got—in the right way that he would have approved of or in the wrong way. to which his department was an openeyed party. The point is that it is, there, and it is being used to good effect in preparing students for examinations, equal to those for which the Senate refuses to allow them to sit in their own university. His predecessor in the directorate, who authorised purchase of equipment, is also n member of the Senate, and he opposed the application on financial grounds. It is idle in the face cf these facts to give as a reason for the obstruction the wav in which the equipment was got. The whole matter by virtue of the Senate's selfstultifying decision has now become one for public'protest.. The commission had evidence that parents with small means were debarred by reason of the extra expense of rending their sons to Christchurch from giving them an engineering education for which their natural aptitudes endowed them. This is a public loss, not their sons’ loss merely. ,If Canterbury Col.ege School were situated centrally in the dominion the hardship might bo more lightly endured, but as the- demand for training in engineering, both ns to the students and (he employment of professional engineers, is greatest in the north, an injustice which would he farcical were it not so serious is perpetuated by the Senate’s vote.” , , . The Star rays: “Apparently the influence of those who desire to maintain the exclusive and monopolistic privileges now possessed by Canterbury College was too much for common sense, and the Auckland

students who wish to take their degree in engineering must, still find money to prv their hoard and expenses in Christchurch for two or three years, or decide to sacrifice their ambitions and take up some other career.” .