VICTORIA COLLEGE.

Otago Witness, Issue 2884, 30 June 1909, Page 88

VICTORIA COLLEGE.

CAPPING CEREMONY. WELLINGTON, June 24. The Hon. C. C. Bowen (vice-chancellor of the University Senate of New Zealand) presided at the Victoria College capping ceremony this afternoon. The Concert Chamber of the Town Hall was crowded. Mr Bowen remarked that this was the centenary of the birth 'of Darwin, and the fiftieth anniversary of the publication pf " The Origin of Spacies." Mr J. W. Joynt (registrar of the college) said the number of M.A. degrees to be conferred (17) wa« a record for any .college of " the New Zealand University. ' The degree of Master of Laws would be conferred on one student. Twelve had qualified, for the B.A: degree, and the college had also won four* senior scholarships connected with the bachelors' - degree. A student had aleo won a prize for modern, languages, presented by the London representative of the University of New Zealand,- and the college had annexed the Rhodes Scholarship for 1939 through Allan MacDougall. ■ Professor Picken said that perhaps their most fundamental need was a growth of public appreciation, of the services rendered by the university to the nation. Universities were nurseries of national ideas, and the future of tKe nation depended on the maintenance in -the universities of a high moral and spiritual level. Examinations and degreas -wera beginning tc be looked on as of much mom importance than the^ really were, and were liable to be misused. Many of the professors believed that the only solution of the present problems of the university was the establishment of independent universities in each of the four centres. Such independence had been foreshadowed by the Chancellor (Sir Robert Stout) in a lecent official pronouncement. Whether this was near or far away must " depend on the r^ility of the provinces to provide for their universities adequate endowments from private benefactions. This was the national spirit that wa& wanted. Mr Thompson (vice-presindent of the Students' Association) presented Mr MacDougall, the. Rhodes scholar, with a purs© of sovereigns on behalf of the students. The proceedings throughout were characterised by the usual hilarity, . the speakers be in.g "subjected to considerable interruption of a more or less humco-ous nature.