THE UNIVERSITY GRADUATE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24236, 1 March 1940, Page 6

THE UNIVERSITY GRADUATE

The failure of university graduates to take that role of leadership in the community for which their attainments might be expected to fit them has been the subject of comment on more than one occasion, not only in application to graduates of the University of New Zealand. It is complained that, while the University in this country trains men and women adequately to take up their professional life, its graduates, regarded as a class, have not won for themselves a special place in the cultural and social life of the people. Some have undoubtedly

given great public service, as have New Zealanders with no university background. There is a proportion of university men and women in most movements which have as their aim some aspect of the public welfare; but the proportion is not great —certainly not sufficient to suggest that university graduates identify themselves above other groups with the community life. The point was well taken in Dr Holloway’s address at the opening of the academic year of the University of Otago. The democratic principle of individualism can, as Dr Holloway suggested, become a weakness if personal freedom is interpreted in entirely selfish terms. It is necessary in the healthy State that the individual, enjoying the privilege of freedom to develop his own life and interests, should recognise his responsibilities to other people. The university graduate through his conditioning at the higher academy can be assumed to have acquired, along with his capacity to make a better-than-average living, an enhanced understanding of the needs of the people and a strong sense of his civic duty. His realisation of the obligations which privilege must impose can, of course, be made in other ways than service in the public view. The doctor, labouring without regard to reward among the afflicted, the teacher who is able to inspire his charges with high ideals, may have no public acclaim, yet may serve the people supremely well. And it is not sufficient to judge the community service of university graduates, nor of the university faculty, merely in terms of the popular esteem they may win. Yet that test of the merit of the university education can be indicative. Each year there join the stream of the Dominion’s corporate life, Dr Holloway declares, five or six hundred university men and women. That only a few of them ever attain to a conspicuous part in shaping our national destinies is to be regretted, because the public has need of trained minds in the ordering of its affairs. The question thus arises, which Dr Holloway forbore to ask. whether the university or the graduates as individuals must be accounted as having failed in a responsibility. In the lack of a proper community spirit among the groups in the student body, the University of New Zealand certainly falls below even a modest ideal for institutions of this kind. And the absence from the New Zealand colleges of a sufficient emphasis upon subjects which may be broadly defined as political education is to be deplored. There is a sad need, albeit one now generally acknowledged, for courses which have a direct bearing on the work of the public service and the social problems of our young community. These deficiencies may be repaired in the course of time. The tendency of the university colleges to deteriorate into night schools certainly requires to be checked. But even when allowance is made for those aspects in which the university may be thought to be discharging a minimum rather than a maximum service to students, the final responsibility must rest with the graduates themselves. It is to them that Dr Holloway’s remarks may best be directed. They should realise now, as at no time previously, not only how sterile the life of selfish individualism can be, but upon what a precarious basis a country rests in which those qualified to lead are content to stand by while false doctrines may sweep the world and cheap prophets may dominate the mental and physical life of nations.