UNIVERSITY OF OTAGO

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22204, 6 March 1934, Page 6

UNIVERSITY OF OTAGO

AUTUMN SESSION COMMENCED

DR J. N. FINDLAY’S INAUGURAL ADDRESS THE ACADEMY OF PLATO The scenes of activity that have disturbed the holiday quiet of residential colleges during the past few days were reproduced in the quadrangle yesterday *hen the autumn geaeion of the University •f. Otago was commenced with the customary general inaugural meeting in the Allen Hall. This is an occasion for a preliminary fraternising of the faculties, and it was honoured yesterday by between 600 and 700 undergraduates, a considerable proportion of whom were freshers. No de-

tails were available'yesterday of the total number of students who will attend lectures in the various faculties, as registrations were still being received throughout, the day, but it is anticipated that this year’s roll will be as large as those of the past. An additional feature of the occasion was the unveiling by Lady Sidey of a memorial tablet to Sir Thomas Sidey, the late chancellor of the University, which has been provided by the Students’ Association for' erection in the main entrance of the Students’ Union buildings. THE INAUGURAL MEETING. Dr R. J. T. Bell (chairman of the Professorial Board) presided over the inaugural meeting, and had associated with bim the chancellor (Mr W. J. Morrell), Dr” J. N. ; Findlay, M.A., the newly-ap-pointed professor of philosophy, who delivered the,oration, and members of the professorial and lecturing staff. ! ’ • ■ Dr Bell stated at the outset that the meeting had;been convened in order that they might unitedly and publicly ledge that, although they might owm allegiance to different faculties and pursuedifferent course* of study, yet-they .were •11 members of the one University, whose traditions and renown they all inherited, to whose noteworthy, .achievement# they night all add, and to whose development and progress they might all contribute. In selecting Dr Findley to deliver the inaugural address, he said, the Professorial Board had been guided by the custom m British universities under which -a professor on entering for the first time on ■i - the dniies of His chair filled the .rostrum on the opening day. It was * custom which might well be followed in New Zealand, and be would therefore introduce Dr Findlay to them and call upon him to deliver : the address. ORIGINS OF UNIVERSITY IDEALS. , Dr Findlay spoke on the ideals and functions of a university, and at the commencement emphasised the fact that it was impossible to consider such a subject without going right back to the vista from which all universities, descended—the Academy of Plato. Plato had- gwen to the world the concept; of a liberal scientific ' fellowship, which persisted throughout the Middle Ages, and wee clarified at the time of the Renaissance. Until very recent times .the value of this kind of iiwtitntion had not been oom- ; tinned. All n universities, whatever • their differences, bad ' modelled themselves on the Platonic Academy. . ■ ... , “ It is important to have a clear Idea •f the aims of'Plato when he founded the academy,” continued - the ' speaker. M lf we atiny trust his letters, Plato did jntend, in . the JSrst .instance, to be a professional philosopher •r teacher at all. His, ambitions' were purely peliticsl. It is only when the Athenian State put hi* friend Socratp to death that- he oegaa to despair Of re- . medying the abuse of government'' by political They could, he thought, only be cured by Divine intervention or h- by some happy chance. He then set to work to build .up an institution where men could be trained to rule a State, if ■ any State should prove sensible enough to MbtoititstUto their guidance, and this Institution was the academy. Plato’s aim. Was, therefore, a practical one, but the. means he employed to realise this aißl,v Ike discipline he selected to tram nisi: associates, was not what an ordinary person would consider, practical. Plato did ant believe that the beat training for practical problems lay in a minute study otthose problems; a man who did tbig would- be narrowing the ..range of. his vision. Plato’s contemporary, Isocrates, ' Kid founded an academy where pupils were trained in rhetoric; they were given J'a good grasp of current ideas and the current picture of the . world, and they were trained to express themselves in beautiful and persuasive speech. In this way they could get what they wanted • is? the various institutions of a demorr*tic state. The training6fthe»cad«ny wise quite different. Plato .believed that •ir could onlv‘• W ‘wepuinely .practical if oh* the problems life preienti. .If Tone could- withdraw •M’s mind from .them, and see them at * distance, if one could them with other similar paste* and. discover general prlaciplea in them.' To be. able to play '' about wish current.potions.without being •bio to analyst then, or discover what ■;i ws* pemanestohd yaluaWp dn them.would give one too real grip as to practietu problems. Plato believed supremely -fae? training the minds of his associates ■ Wittier than in teaching-them to be interested in disconnected facts. The Greek view of eciepee. wWch we. find both in Plato and Aristotle, is sometimes‘almost irritating in it# scorn ; of ’ facta and tbs data of the senses. Just as there is no rational interest in meife .gossip about the peculiarities of individuals, so the Greeks : refused' to'recognise - As. science, any. proposition that did not exemplify some general principle. And Plato chose for the material of his training the most rigorous and exact sciences that were available at his day, the mathematical sciences; if a man could learn to think ; intelligently about numbers and figures, not in the merely mechanical way in which, some mathematicians think about them, there is no reason why he should not be able to apply the same analysis to-everything. Different subject matters . would 1 ’admit of different degrees of accuracy, hat the scientific rigour .remained the aai*e. Plato believed in his making bis (raining herd. True academic education 5 must possess a certain vertiginous quality; 8 man must feel himself snatched wp to a dizzy height .where all familiar things assumed a strange and new appear toes. He must- grow accustomed to brighter lights than the muddled shadows of popular thought. They could see how seriously Plato treated bis scheme when they considered that he gave up the • aeademy for several yean to tram the young Dionysius of Syracuse. The ven- ; ture proved an utter failure because Dionysius was unable to’see how the study of triangles would make him a good k«»«g- Further, the academy had no official brand of doctrine- Plato strongly repudiated any imputation of positive and 'rigid theory; there wag not. and never would be. any philosophy of Plato. When Dionysius wanted him to give him a Short account of the truth Plato replied: *No mind can preserve truth in itself without active thought or transmit it mechanically to other minds.’ PLATONIC IDEAL STILL < CHERISHED. "Most of the secularises of the Platonic Academy have entered into the modern ideal of the university. A university is in the first place, an institution > where men’s, minds arc trained; it is not merely a place where information is retailed and distributed, and where people who do not wish to think may buy from people who are prepared to think a simplified statement of the results of their re- ; searches. I am not denying that such distributive agencies are valuable, and that a university in tbs dominions may • ; not find itself forced to do some of tin* work, which is done by other institutions in more populous Countries, But the task of a university ought to be something - more than tbe tale of simplified surveys. “It is particularly important that a. person should be taught to think .at a 'or university,, because in modern times tbe V- map of the world has become so eomU 'plicated that no one can conceivably master it. In the eighteenth century it was. pocnUi. for an educated person to /keep abrekit of tbs natural and moral 1 culture of • majority of civilised counties and to be wall acquainted with the y parrow and inaccurate chronicle that • PM*ed for history. In the present ceuv miry it is impossible for an educated persoil to have any clear ideas about the ygtf ‘majority of topics. We cannot ■W'mMtstsnd economics or relativity.' or % mathematical logic unless we have studied W-- ekstt casetowlly, sad the same applies to •HMh amdsrn literature. Is an age of \ -■ ■ ... v-

experts it is important to keep our own intelligence active and to think clearly about a few topics. An educated person’, who has been trained to think about certain things, may be ignorant of most things in the universe, but he, is confident, at least, that there is nothing in principle unintelligible about any of them, nothing that would not yield to a determined onslaught. If he is confronted with a new kind of material, he will proceed to break it up into various aspects and sides, be will look for relations between it and other familiar things, he will ask intelligent questions about it. However strange it is, it is bound in time to yield up its secret. .... FUNCTIONS OF A UNIVERSITY.

Since the aim of a university, was to raise people to think, he continued, it did not matter precisely what .material is chosen for treatment. Ancient history, for instance, was of little immediate practical importance, but the study of ancient history might help one to deal intelligently with modern problems. One would see the same commercial rivalries, the same imperialisms, the same conflicts of national temperament, the sartie struggles of rich and poor that characterise the present day. A man who could ask himself questions about the causes of the Peloponnesian War or tbe decline of the Russian Empire, and frame sensible answers to these questions was on the way to finding the causes of .'the Great War Or the present depression. And ancient history had the advantage that it was at cnee a very simple and a:very difficult field of investigation—simple because all the data could be laid before a student, and difficult because , those .data were fragmentary that only intelligent hypothesis could make a coherent story out of them, , ;

“A university further resemble* the Platonic. Academy in the fact that it no settled philosophy to impart,” Said Dr Findlay. “ This does not mean that a university must teach ascesticism .or inhibism, for both of these are definite dogmatic systems. A university should teach a method and not- a doctrine, should icplace the blind respect for antiquity and authority with the intelligent respect tor the product* of human thought. In school one. has necessarily to accept the results of ‘'investigation without understanding how they were arrived at. It should be a part of -university education to realise that., everything that is Written, in -books is the product of human thought, and that human thought may unmake and alter it. A university student ought to have some dea of the way in which a science is built up, and he should acquire something, of the spirit of independent research. I am not suggesting that every student should be forced to do research, as that would only result. in the flooding of the world with a lot of trivial investigations that would beof no interest to anyone. But he should understand what Research is. He should, in history, be put in touch with the. sources, so that he may see how fragmentary they are. In the study of ancient or; foreign literatures he should realise that they express. human thought* and emotions, and that they : have only been preserved because they express this better than contemporary literature.. In the case of philosophy the student should make the acquaintance of the original works of the great philosopher*; he should realise that they, too, lived in a fog of bewilderment, and were buffeted on the high sea* of doubt before the clear cut line* of their system* emerged. In the case of science, where the student is brought face to face with identic fact in observation and experiment, there is less danger of being merely derivative, but it would be a good thing if all science students studied the history of, srtence in order to understand the technique of discovery. “The kind of university I have been describing, which goes back to the Platonic Academy, has been threatened in recent times, and we living in Anglo-Saxon coun-tries-must work with all out might to preserve it. It has become cleAr'in recent times that our economic life needs some comprehensive form of and many people have believed that a similar control is desirable in the intellectual sphere. The universities have been seized upon to, impart particular - brands of propaganda: In Ruwia it is demanded that ail lecture*, should be coloured with a philosophy called dialectical materialism; a professor who wishes to give a course of lectures on aesthetics, for instance, has to do so 'strictly from a Marxian point of .view,’ whatever, that may mean. The -Governmentof Germany has ; gone even farther. History must be distorted in border to inculcates grotesque myth about the civilising work Of the early Teutons, and objectivity and impartiality, the essential requirements of science, and the most marked characteristic of the German savant in the past, are treated as criminal. Thefe are no universities, in the-Platonic sense, in Russia, and in a few years they will- cease to; exist in Germany, We shall .'have -to keep the. inspiration of -Plato alive.in the Anglo-Saxon world. I speak with feeling because I have had-*'wretched experience of a propagandist university of ' the same • sort a* the institutions' of. Germany and Russia;. All tljeto modern perversions seem to me to -spring from an abandonment of the Platonic ideal. A university is not a place that ought to breed dialectical or religious 'fanatics, or patriotic enthusiasts; it ought to open men’s eyes to fact- and values, and enable them, out of these facts and out of the living traditions that surround them, to build up their own view of the world. It Is a place where facts should be taught with confidence and theories with infinite caution. ; * •• • - "Therie is one further function of a university abopt' which I should like to say a word. A university, should .he a place where youth can create that peculiar society which is natural to them and which cannot be evolved in the oppressive company of the Old. A young man believes 'that be is a ‘mighty good chap’ of.un-. limited capacities, and that other young men are like himself. An old man believes that he is nothing much in particular and that other people are like himself: Consequently, to quote Aristotle, an old man. loves as if he will some day hate, and hates as if he will some day love. He is- incapable of forming new friendships. It is only before a man has been humbled ' by life that the deepest friendships arc possible. And it is largely because it promotes these friendships, which will always retain something of their original significance, that a university is such a valuable institution. Abstract propositions acquire a ferroanent hold upon the mind when they avs been bandied about by the tongue of friends.” UNVEILING CEREMONY.

At the conclusion of the address the Sir Thomas Sidey memorial tablet was unveiled by Lady Sidey. Mr W. Hawksworth (president of the Otago University Students’ Association) handed over the memorial to the chancel* lor*of the University for acceptance on behalf of the University Council. In making the presentation, he said that Sir Thomas Sidey had throughout his long association with the University, retained his undergraduate spirit, and his heart had always been in the University. In order to perpetuate his memory and provide a lasting memorial to his work in the interests of the University, the sthdent body had provided the tablet for erection in the Student Union Building. Mr Morrell said it was with sincere pleasure that he accepted the tablet on behalf of the University Council. The University had b*en very dear to the heart of SiPrThomas Sidey, and it was only fitting that his memory should be preserved in such a manner.