ACADEMIC FREEDOM

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22260, 12 May 1934, Page 17

ACADEMIC FREEDOM

THE CONSERVATIVE VIEWPOINT APPEAL FOR MODERATION (Special to Daily Times.) AUCKLAND, May 11. What he termed the conservative side of the controversy over academic freedom was stated by Professor Maxwell Walker, chairman of the Professorial Board of the Auckland University College, in an address at the annual graduation ceremony in the Town Hall to-night. “ In recent years a number of members of the teaching staffs have expressed opinions not exactly in accord with the average feeling of the community,” said Professor Walker. “This they have a perfect right to do go long as they keep within the law, but the result has been that a certain amount of irritation has been caused, and the. public has identified the opinions of a few with those of the whole teaching body. It is naturally difficult to dissociate the individual ■ from the institution to_ which he belongs.” Few could cavil at most that had been put forward by the Association of University Teachers in its statement of the case for academic freedom, he proceeded. The university professor could not be put in a class by himself at against other learned professions or outside the rights of citizenship. Still, it might have been well if the association had given the same force .to ideas of responsibility to the University, and the prevention of misunderstanding by the public as to the right of free speech. He did not say that there had been an overemphasis on rights, but there _ had been an under-emphasis on responsibility. “One would think that we were continually being told by Government officials that we must not say what we think unless what we think agrees with what they think,” remarked the professor. This is far from being the case. We hear a great deal about professors right to free utterance, but, on the other hand, there exists a slackness in our universities on the part of professors of different points of view which allows a radical and aggressive member to shout from the housetops without contrary expression from those who disagree.” “If the University was a place of free thought and expression the conservative should be heard as well as the radical, and the public should realise that both points of view existed. Otherwise tne university was misunderstood and misjudged. , , “I know that the very word conscivative is like a red rag to a bull in the eyes, of some of my more radical colleagues,” Professor Walker continued, “but I would remind them that the conservatives of to-day are radicals by comparison with the days of our ■ fathers, and I trust that they will not refuse me that freedom of speech which they claim for themselves,” He did not believe" that the extreme views which had been expressed by some university men represented the considered opinion of any large percentage of teachers or that the graduates of the New Zealand University were in any way represented by those few who demanded the resignation of men who had stood firm in the interests of decency and good taste. He did not believe that the students as a body were represented by those so-called-advanced individuals who had violated the canons of good taste and refinement and gloried in the > publicity they had achieved. There was little cause for criticism of the general. studente body. The trouble was that the moderate man as a rule was non-vocal, while the extremist shrieked aloud to illustrate his argument. Professor Walker sited the freedom existing under the British constitution and quoted the dictum of Mr John Drinkwater that, a constitutional monarchy was nearer to a sane expression of national character thkn any other conceivable form of Government. He also quoted Mr Stanley Baldwin’s words: “Ordered liberty, not disordered liberty, nor what invariably ' follows it—tyranny—but ordered liberty is one of the rarest things in the world. Let us hold on to what we have. Let us not try to be like anybody else.” Concluding, Professor Walker said that he had spoken with a due sense of responsibility and without any desire to hurt the feelings of those who differed from him. He would plead for co-opera-tion and mutual tolerance.