UNIVERSITIES AND INDUSTRY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21018, 6 May 1930, Page 10

UNIVERSITIES AND INDUSTRY

POSITION IN UNITED STATES. THE NEED IN BRITAIN. CLOSER COLLABORATION (From Our Own Correspondent.) LONDON, March 21. _ A member of the staff of the Federation of British Industries has been visiting America. He maintains that Britain will meet the fiercest competition from the highly organised, highly productive forms which draw the products of the universities) undertake continuous research, and make use of propaganda. A report he has made stresses the increasingly close connection between universities and industry in America. In regard both to provision of personnel and to research facilities American industry is more intimately linked with the universities than is British industry.

Among the factors responsible are the national belief in education and the much wider provision of university facilities, the absence of any conservative background in the universities, and the way in which they reflect the industrial characteristics of the nation. . There is “ a real live demand ” for university industry, and particularly in the engineering field. The connection of education with a living industry creates a body of men ready for executive positions at a much earlier age than in England. The report mentions also the activities of the roany American associations dealing with management problems. “ The presence of these ■ associations, coupled with the undoubted fact that American industry is getting a greater proportion of trained mind than English industry, will prove a serious factor in world competition.” TRAINING WHICH ROBS INITIATIVE. Another opinion on the university trained man was expressed by Mr A. T. Wall, in a lecture to the Institute of Marine Engineers. “In spite of its unpleasantness, the fact must be faced,” he said “that employers do not particularly favour those who have had a university education, unless it be to place them in some small comer of the drawing office, where they can work out calculations that might be a little intricate. There is something about a university training which seems to take away the initiative oi many men, and indications are that a university training is not sought after so much as it was perhaps 20 to 25 years ago. “The question is raised,” Mr Wall added, “ with all due respect for past customs and present methods, as to whether the education of men for industry is not too much in the hands of educationists. Xe it not time that the industrialists themselves took a more intimate concern in this matter? Not a general concern, which is already existent,' but a detailed one, with a view to obtaining the closest collaboration between the universities and industry, f OT the production of men with the most efficient combination of technical and practical training.”